Marsquake

Just curious why it has to be closed. Those who wish to migrate to a new channel can do so. Those who want to stay can choose to stay.

LBy and LBz already exist. They were created back when ppl thought LBx was gonna esplode w drama.

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pvp and cov will never mix for me. it's just not hardcore enough and how the whole game works... it's a straight to dvd movie where other games and I'm not even talking about mmorpgs, is where the real fighting players is at. I like the pve better. I wish they'd have just had completely separate servers for it so it didn't ruin the "balance" of powers in the pve game.

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Endorsed.

I wish dev teams could have summits w/ dev teams from other games (at least teh NCsoft ones). Maybe learn from each other.

A PvP server would satisfy most of the complaints voiced here. If you make a toon on such a server, you'll know what to expect.

Warburg and Bloody Bay could become hazard zones. I don't mind a challenge to get something worthwhile. But if my brute has to drag a scientist along while a stalker and corr continually take shots w/out killing me, it becomes a drag.
I finally dropped my armor and stood there, letting them kill me. Took awhile but they finally asked "So uh you don't wanna fight?" Players who try such a kill are simply Pvping. If they repeatedly do it, then they are just hyperactive nuisances.

But back to learning from other MMO dev teams. My gf and I went to another game for awhile, when we got bored w/ this one. The one w/out a subscription, since mentioning names is frowned on. I was laughing when I tried the PvP there. My gf asked why. I said "This is so much fun!"

PvP in and of itself is not bad. Just the way it's been implemented and shoehorned into this game.

Very funny. Nicely done.

Wish they had a player rep at those dev meetings.
Then again, the playerbase disagrees on so much, which point of view would he or she represent?

Btw, "working as intended" sounds like a phrase Orwell could've used in 1984.

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i really hope everyones thought about the MA just being the devs way of passing off the buck to us is completely wrong. it feels true though i have to admit.

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I can't find the quote atm (serch-fu failing), but Posi did say that the devs will no longer be writing story arcs. That does sound like passing the buck to us.

It will be all SFs/TFs from now on. And from what we've seen w the I15 ones, that's not encouraging.

You know I agree w/ you sweetie. I've been posting in I15 feedback threads about how underwhelming the new issue is. Pounding on the same target for over an hour is the opposite of fun.

Reichsman=extreme tedium+frustration

I've heard the hero side one is worse, although that's hard to imagine. I'm not inclined to do either one at this point.

Its too bad we can't discuss other games here. There's one in particular, w/out a monthly subscription, that could teach the devs a lot about storytelling. How to build suspense, create a sense of accomplishment for the players, and really scare you w/ a large-scale threat.

My boredom threshold is a lil higher than yours, or is that lower (I always get that confused). At times I play this game like the old arcade games. Pop in your quarter and play the same content over and over. Once in a while something interesting happens. But that's becoming more rare.

So I have hopes for Going Rogue, but I'm not gonna get too excited. We've been disappointed before.

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Now, if you don't mind, I'm off to make it socially acceptable to street race in crowded suburbs while smoking in public restaurants filled with children. Because all it takes is one determined person, and then a whole lot of sheeple who so want to fit into the "norm" to make it socially acceptable. Hence, when you disagree with me, but the majority of the community is on my side, because "The community decides what is and isn't socially acceptable," whether the laws support me or you, I win at all cost. Yeah, baby, The American WAY!

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I tried to undestand what you were saying, but your sentences don't parse well. The meaning gets lost in the rant... bad signal to noise ratio, I guess.

Laws are constantly being created, else why would we need legislators. Laws need to be tested and judged, sometimes reinforced or nullified. Its a living process, not an absolute one.

Most bad things happened, whether violent, exploitive, abusive, or undesirable to a community, before a rule or law was created to condemn it and prevent future such behavior if possible.

The rule of law plays catch-up w/ all the novel ways humans come up w/ to hurt each other. I imagine the first time a caveman went up to another and cracked his skull, (or the Cain and Abel story, if you prefer), the witnesses grunted to each other, "Ugh! That bad! me no want get conked on head like that. We need punish that."

This game is evolving too. The devs should anticipate and design so exploits are not possible. But they almost always fail. (Look at the green eggs and hami farming) Players will always test the boundaries of what's possible. Just cause its in the game or allowed by the rules doesn't ratify it.

Social consensus constrains behavior. Being a rebel, or breaching accepted behavior, can seem attractive. But consensus usually protects the majority.

For example, the old smoking regulations permitted smoking in restaurants because such places had non-smoking areas. In practice this was a joke. Restaurants are mostly one large area, w/ no way to isolate the air in specific areas. So the smoking/non-smoking areas were the same. Just an imaginary line between them. (A 3 or 4 foot booth divider between one area and the other still permitted air mingling, smoke travelling.) This farce was ended when no smoking at all was allowed in such places. That was community action against what was perceived as a noxious habit, yet w/in established rules at the time.

This game obviously changes over time. The community of players can and do decide what's accepted behavior. To be surprised by that is naive and very rigid thinking.

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The old tactic of confusing a player on the opposite side, allowing him to kill a member of his own faction, was technically w/in the rules, since game mechanics allowed it. But it was cowardly nonetheless. There was no risk involved since I couldn't attack back. Easy, cheap, insignificant kills.

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pop a break free, get your support class buddy to remove mez, try to break line of sight quicker. or abuse the old confuse target bug that allowed you to focus on one opponent essentially making confuse merely annoying to be hit with.

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Uh, you miss the point dude. No amount of break-free popping will let me attack a confused toon of my own faction in RV.

Specific example. A confused stalker entered villain base and killed my gf. My brute could do nothing. We had no options to remove confuse condition. Said stalker would not fight in arena. An a** and a chicken, colluding w/ his hero friends.

I believe that's been changed since then. So its just an illustration of jerk behavior in PvP, like what the Prof did. Just cause it can be done, doesn't make it ok to do so.

The joke is he was paid good money to do this. Nice gig if you can get it... Meaning persuade a gullible department chair ignorant of game culture to let you structure a course around this. Not only that but he subjected his classes to his so-called experiment. I would've felt ripped off if I took a communications course and I had to sit thru this guy's lame theories. Comments in the local paper show that some of his students felt he wasted their time.

I should've been more explicit. We the players are generating story content several times the total mission content of Coh and Cov combined. In essense, we are doing the devs work for them.

It is an explosion of content that added a lot more to do in a game that became a boring pattern after you levelled you first few 50s.

"Adding value to the IP" is the key phrase. Instead of "Wow they are increasing the value of our property," its "Ooo how can we capitalize more on their creative impulse."

The players writing quality arcs and enriching the game are rewarding the devs and publisher, not the other way around.

I'm not a fan of Pvp, but I suspect I would've hated this guy in game. The prof seems particularly clueless and sad himself, nevermind his claim that he was playing w/in the rules and game design.

The old tactic of confusing a player on the opposite side, allowing him to kill a member of his own faction, was technically w/in the rules, since game mechanics allowed it. But it was cowardly nonetheless. There was no risk involved since I couldn't attack back. Easy, cheap, insignificant kills.

That's essentially what the Prof was doing when he used TP foe to drone people. Yes, game mechanics allowed it, but there was no skill involved. The more I read of his paper, the more it seemed that he thought he was a great player and became aggrieved that others didn't recognize it.

His book could just be a typical small run university press publication. But if it catches hold, this may be another nail in the coffin of CoX Pvp.

Prof Meyers is correct in one respect. Pvp play became clannish or cliqueish. It wasn't as hardfought or freewheeling, anything goes as the cliques pretended. They agreed to their internal rules, shared by both factions, and perpetuated a rigid structure that others had to copy to be "successful."

Btw, if you wanna be entertained, dig up some videos of Whirligig matches. They were hardly ever the best, but amply demonstrate the hopscotch, leapfrog, catch me if you can, hit and run style that was so prevalent. No slugging it out toe to toe. Twixt just took that further, minimizing his risk by hiding behind drones. Then pronouces it "sad" that players got angry.

Hopefully the death threat he received in game was just someone anonymously blowing off steam.

I've said elsewhere that we the players are adding value to the CoX IP when we add story content. We are improving a product we don't own, creating or retaining incentive for subscribers to play the game. And we have to pay for the privilege of doing this?

(Imho the game was stagnant before AE was released.)

Micro-transactions suck in general, squeezing more money out of us. But in this case those hard-working creative people generating content in AE should get something in return. If a free slot is not forthcoming, at least make additional story slots earnable or a veteran reward.

In general it would be nice to see architects rewarded for their efforts instead of just having another hand shoved at 'em and being told "Gimme."

(Btw I have no personal stake in this. I gave up on the arcs I wanted to publish out of frustration from all the patches and invalidations. I might take 'em up again now that the sytem is supposed to be more stable.)

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yeah .. been in a few myself
would be nice if you could accually 'rate an arc 0 star'

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Double-click the 1 star. It registers as zero stars.

I would have to check the arc again, but I think Hitler is already the Fuhrer. There may be a specific date given, but I think it's supposed to occur late in the war, when Germany is losing the war after opening a second front w/Russia.

That means Nazi ideology has been active for maybe a dozen years and concentration and extermination camps in full operation, also for years.

PW has stated in several places that in this arc you, the player, Set Right What Once Went Wrong. But you don't prevent any atrocities commited by Nazi Germany. Instead you become the new Fuhrer and ensure Nazi Germany's victory.

The arc turns you into a fascist, w/ all the baggage that carries. If you enjoyed playing this arc, it must have been in a morally neutral way. If you don't see it, I can't make you see that. It's just war games to you.

Btw, go see Inglorious Basterds when it comes out.
Then we'll talk again.

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It's what every villain wants to do, but the plot is a little weird even for time travel...

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No No No. This villain certainly does not want to be made into a time-traveling fascist agent and forced to help Nazi Germany win.

There is no campiness here, like in The Producers, to mock the Nazis. There isn't even a mention that killing Hitler averts the Holocaust.

Once again, check out this trope PW.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...elExemptionAct

"Trying to kill Hitler simply doesn't work" in a time travel story. That may be because he was such a singular evil, seething with hate. Even the stories which argue that removing him will allow someone worse to step in, still put you in a Catch-22. That's exactly the position in which you put the player.

The consensus in time travel stories is that Germany was meant to lose, should always lose in some form. There is nothing to set right here.

I'm tempted to say make the morality for this arc neutral, cause all you claim to be doing is playing military strategy. If you won't accept that the implicatiosn of your arc are immoral, make it amoral.

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And I don't mean that someone else should be providing the music. That person shouldn't indeed buy a guitar. To him it's just an expensive ornament. To someone who wants to learn to play, the investment is not for the piece of wood and string, its for the pleasure gained out of the use of that instrument.

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Yes indeed. Except in this case its the players creating part of the "soundtrack" of the game. We are adding value to the IP and yet have to pay them for the privilege.

The best thing for this game would be to open it up. I'm sure the number of MAs already created exceeds several times over the entire mission count of CoH/CoV combined. That should be the marketing hook to appeal to new subscribers, not microtransactions. But MTs are an industry trend, so probably not going away anytime soon.

We're forgetting the fact that we are creating content for the game. We are doing the job the devs have long delayed, which is to add story content to the game. MA has brought new life to a long stagnant game.

(It also had the potential to bring lots more subscribers til the meltdown over farming, but that's another issue.)

You could argue that since we are doing their job for them, we should get more storage and slots for free.

I forget the title atm, but there was a novel co-authored by Clarke and Baxter (I think), where the wormholes opened to the past were extremely small, just big enough for them to function as viewers to past events.

This led to consequences such as a drop in crime rate, since law & order types could go back and see the actual crime.
PIs could investigate infidelity. Pervs could spy on naked celebrities. And so on.

The rebels in this society took to meeting in absolute darkness and communicating w/ touch language.
Interesting stuff.

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Dr. Who <> Star Trek <> Quantum Leap <> CoX Time Travel. Do not judge one based on the laws of a different story or medium.

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I was speculating on actual time travel and the most likely reason we have not seen (afawk) time travelers in the real world. I was thinking of the many-worlds theory in physics and the view of time as an arrow. What's happened will always have happened (is there a name for that verb tense ). No takebacks.

Any changes made to a timeline will be irrelevant to those who have already lived thru it. At best, they can experience it as fantasy, which is what we do when we read or watch time travel stories. The new timeline will be an alternate version of the original branch. Even if you wish to hop to another timeline, the original remains unchanged. Conservation of time+energy?

CoX time travel is far too entagled to work out consistently.
Instead of a time tree we have a tumbleweed.

A time traveler would become unglued from the time-space continuum. Whether he/she can return to the exact same point they left is doubtful.

At the end of the Back to the Future trilogy, the McFlys are changed from what they were at the beginning. Not because the original future was altered, but because Marty now lives in an alernate timeline. His efforts created a separate branch on the time tree.

Any future you go back in time from has already happened. Going back in time to change anything will not affect it in any way. All you can accomplish is to create a branchline and then continue to live in this new section of time-space.

In this sense, time travel is wish-fullfilment.

You missed one.
Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act

Also, to set Right What Once Went Wrong presupposes that Nazi Germany should have won WW2. If you're prepared to argue this then you are no longer playing w/ military tactical/strategic games. Like it or not, even though you think morality can be divorced from this subject, ANY Nazi winning WW2 and taking over the world, whether it's Hitler or you as the player after a power coup, is wrong. There is nothing to set right here.

I would recommend watching Mel brooks' The Producers to see how a very earnest Nazi playwright gets his "Springtime for Hitler" completely turned into a joke. That author seems as unaware that nothing positive emerge from glorifying Nazis.

If you had said in your arc that assasinating Hitler restores sanity to Germany, and then proceed to fight on purely military grounds, the arc might avoid a morality check. But you make the player the new Fuhrer, w/out denouncing the Nazi Party or its extermination policies.

As you reminded me, the devs are far more guilty of this w/ Axis America already in the game. And as I said in your blog, it looks like we'll see more of the same in the coming I15 TFs w/ the return of Reichsman, the Nazi Statesman/Superman.

Yes your arguments make sense. My apologies, I had forgotten about Axis America. I mostly stopped playing hero side a couple years ago. So the devs commited the original sin. And they're about to commit it again with the return of Reichsman (Nazi Statesman) in the new I15 TFs. I haven't played them on test yet but I trust Venture when he says they are horrendous. (Although he may have different reasons than I would.)

By comparison your arc is a minor transgression, a mere misdemeanor.

I suspect all this will add to my enjoyment of Tarantino's new WW2 movie, Inglorious Basterds (sic). Seeing Pitt's crew carving up Nazis will be gratifying.

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Personally, I believe that story arcs should let the player win (assuming all missions are successfully completed); I hate when I do everything right in a heroic story arc, but the bad guy gets away because he's scripted to escape, no matter what you do. So likewise in a villainous story arc, I figure the bad guy (being the protagonist) should win; crushing democracy and conquering the World and all that. I definitely didn't want the story arc to end with "And then you conquered the world. But heroes eventually overthrow you / Mender Silos sends people back to fix the timeline and undo all you've done / whatever"; that would feel like cheating the player.

But this guy seemed upset enough by this that I unbent on this long enough to add one line of dialog hinting that one of the heroes was unaccounted for and may have escaped; this would be a fig leaf allowing players who don't really want to conquer the world to think that the good guys still have a chance, while not being so obvious that it spoils the victory of the player who really did want to conquer the world.

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Conquering the world is not the problem. Every big bad, Doctor Doom, Magneto, Darkseid, and so on..., has dreams of world domination. It's that the Nazis win. It's not a simple villainous plot that unfolds. The player takes over the Nazi party and completes Hitler's wet dream. Your victory hinges on the Nazi war machine. Are all the heroes gone cause they were sent to extermination camps? You're not just giving the player a chance to win a mission. You co-opt and corrupt at a much deeper level.

You seem generally intelligent from what I've read, but in this case you seem unable to grasp the moral implications of your story. It's not surprising that a Triumph of the Will style video review sounds appealing to you.

It's not possible to sanitize Nazis enough to have them win even in a silly fantasy game. Or has enough time passed in 3 generations that people have forgotten the horror they perpetrated?

Try this analogy. Would you be ok with a story that sends you back in time to help the Confederacy win and perpetuate slavery? I would hope not.

The Sympathetic POV can be justified by setting the Villain Protagonist against something even worse.
(quoted from Villain Protagonist page)

Partly I think we can blame how choices in these games are presented to the player. You all know the standard joke here, but I'm rolling with it anyway. To wit: Essentially, you are given a situation to which you may respond with an array of dialog choices. These invariably range from A) Inhumanly saint-like, to B) Casual indifference, to C) I will murder everything you ever loved via [censored].
—Brian Clevinger (8-Bit Theater), on the subject of morality in games.
(quoted from Karma Meter page)

Yes this is fantasy, but you have enough real world historical detail incorporated in your arc that it should make you quesy completing Hitler's vision as a player. At least uneasy or somewhat disturbed. This is not simply a case of the player being cheated out of a win.

I primarily play villains and enjoy it. In your arc my villain gets co-pted into commiting an ultimate evil w/ no remedy whatsoever. The arc is morally compromised. There is no karmic choice whatsoever. Your reference to seeing it play as a sort of Triumph of the Will (in another thread) should speak volumes to you.

At this point all I can do is shine a flashlight in the dark.
So far its impenetrable.

Very well said.