Miuramir

Wouldn't a "mobile friendly skin for the forums" be exactly what some people are asking for here, and be better than the current option for a significant fraction of the rest? A simple background color option with no graphics wasting screen space or download bandwidth would seem to solve several problems at once.

If I were to give the writers more credit than I usually risk, this sounds like it may be *exactly* the intended reaction.

This is Prometheus, a name presumably picked quite deliberately by someone on the writing team. Someone who, depending on point of view, may have done something in the past to give far more potential power to humanity than the "organization" approved of, and is now watched very carefully.

Consider Jed Lacey (from David Drake's excellent but quite dark Lacey and His Friends); having once done something unpleasant that in his opinion needed to be done despite the law and custom of his society, the rulers of that society removed his ability to do anything like that again, and kept him under far more careful watch afterward. Much of one of the stories is his years-long elaborate deception such that when he again feels the need to act, it is seen as the result of outside influences, and "couldn't possibly" be his fault (let alone his plan). The comparison to a "rehabilitated" Prometheus, perhaps specifically to interface with these humans he knows more about than many of his organization (can we just use the word "pantheon" yet?), should be fairly clear.

The other story that came to mind immediately upon reading the collected dialog (thank you Kobolt_Thunder and Llydia) was Isaac Asimov's classic The Last Answer. Not in direct parallel this time, but the concept of a being of vast and superior power deliberately goading a promising slightly-lesser being into defying their stated will, specifically to get them to throw their determination and energy in a (secretly) desired direction with far more fervor than a more direct approach might have generated.

Putting it together, it's at least possible that Prometheus is *deliberately* taking a seemingly hardline stance with carefully-calculated antagonistic phrasing, to goad PCs into finding a better plan than the "organization" is pushing and he is officially obliged to follow. Perhaps he doesn't like the odds, perhaps he doesn't like the sacrifices along the way, perhaps both.

tl;dr:
Prometheus: "Your only chance to avert total doom is our superior plan, as the threat you face is so overwhelming that even with our superior plan your odds are not great. We are so much smarter than you all that you don't deserve to know how it might work, you must simply accept the unpleasant sacrifices for even poor odds. Neener Neener."

PCs: "We'll see about THAT."

Prometheus (aside, smiling so only the audience can see): "Excellent..."

(later)

Prometheus, to Mysterious Presence: "I have done all I can to convince the humans that The Plan is their only choice. Michael stands witness to my efforts to convince them even in the face of their childish stubbornness."

Michael: "Indeed. I cannot fathom how he stands these troublesome humans as much as he does, but his interactions with them have remained staunchly supporting The Plan, despite his earlier... indiscretions."

still tl;dr: The "organization" is Lawful Neutral with a leaning toward Good. Prometheus is Neutral Good with a leaning toward Chaotic. They fight crime with difficulty.

P.S.: If anyone from Paragon Studios (or, perhaps more likely, Samuraiko Productions wants to use any of the above, feel free.

Personally, I've seen more credible proposals for terraforming Mars than for fixing the problems with Blasters; Arcanaville may be our last, best hope. Hopefully the solution doesn't similarly require a decades-long plan to deorbit a comet on anyone

I'd quibble on "many", but I think it's pretty clear that CoH Super Packs are *less* gambling-like than CCG card foil packs. In particular, even if you do well above average at point X, you can't funnel that back into more play and have lost it by point Y; which avoids most of the "fail to quit when ahead" problem that's a significant chunk of the risk of gambling problems.

These are the same CCG foil packs that are at the registers at the grocery store between the gum and the celebrity tabloids. There doesn't seem to be a general societal problem with kids *far* younger than are officially supposed to be playing CoH plunking down their hard-earned nickels for a random selection of pocket monsters under conditions that are demonstrably more problematic than the CoH situation.

My personal opinion is that I'm not comfortable with individual accessories for a game having an equivalent price higher than a new AAA game; the Black Wolf is in the neighborhood of five times that if I've done the math correctly. I also have a strong personal preference for fixed-price deals that are clearly described in advance; my experience with random-box deals in other MMOs has not been something I enjoyed or spent much cash on in comparison to the amount I've spent on CoH's previous costume packs. As far as I was concerned, the "Collectable" part of CCG was an annoying and frustrating impediment to the smooth and enjoyable playing of the actual game; and so far that experience seems likely to be similarly poor for the Super Packs.

That said, I don't expect all parts of the game to be equally enjoyable to me, and my general opinion is that attempting to campaign or legislate against entertainment options based on any one person or group's "morality" is frequently more harmful to society in the long run than the "vice" they are complaining about.

The removal / replacement connected to the costume parts confuses the odds a bit; as best I can tell with the numbers we have from Beta and the devs, if you open one pack, you have a roughly 1 in 422 chance of getting the Wolf. But your odds of getting it eventually are better than that. If you open "a lot" of packs, specifically enough that you have already gotten all the Very Rare costume parts out of the way (and off the tables), your odds for each subsequent pack improve to about 1 in 243.

So, for discussion purposes, something around 1 in 250 for the Wolf is a convenient approximation. Philosophically, I'm not happy with random-box items that rare, but I'm aware that there are successful MMO games with dramatically rarer items.

My understanding is that the current legal definitions of gambling have a series of tests, and that one of the required criteria is that there is a chance of output of either cash, or something that is readily converted to cash.

There was a fascinating story on NPR a while back about an online casino game site that was doing very well, and had successfully avoided all the legal problems that other sites have had lately, because they had a brilliant idea: they never pay out. You get some initial chips for signing up, a certain number of chips per day added to your account, and you can pay real money any time you want for more chips. There were a variety of games you can play against various combinations of computer and live opponents... but there was no way to convert your chips back to real money, or get them out of the system. Therefore, not gambling.

CoH's situation seems similar; there is no legal, supported, or easy way to convert your randomized card draws back into real money. (This is unlike a physical CCG, where that Alpha Mox could pay your real rent for the month fairly easily.) You're paying to play a game, but it's not gambling; there's no situation in which you can end up with more real money than what you started with.

From a moral standpoint, however... anyone who has self-control issues with actual gambling and a limited budget should not play this, as it's likely to trigger some of the same excitement/risk/reward centers in your head. (On the other hand, it's far more limited than a casino or certain Korean games... chances are most folks aren't going to need to drop more than a few hundred even if they obsess over the pet and get unlucky. I've been involved with testing for other MMOs where it was not unusual for people to have to drop four figures to have a decent chance of getting the rare mount; the odds on the rarest item were at least an order of magnitude less than here, and possibly more like two.)

TL;DR: IMO it's not gambling, and significantly less dangerous than most common things that are. But if you have medical or moral issues with even small amounts of gambling, it's probably close enough to trigger related issues.

The info has been put up on the wiki under the root Super Pack entry. The Heroes and Villains entry has details on this specific set; some of which still needs to be filled in, but there seems to be more than enough there to see most of the patterns. When combined with Z's post on The Numbers we should be able to put together some better estimation tools.

Quickly, an average pack has 2.21 Common, 1 Uncommon, 1 Rare, and 0.79 Very Rare.

See, this is exactly the sort of vague thinking that would be better served by some rigorous testing. Generate enough simulated universes to give you a statistically interesting number (say, a million) that develop self-aware sentient life, and then after lunch run those universes forward a few million years with much more detailed logging to analyze exactly what systems of ethics develop. Crunch the results, and write a nice poster summarizing the results and suggesting some underlying principles; use that poster to get a grant for time on a much better hypercomputer than your desktop, that will allow you to simulate a properly infinite number of scenarios and increase the statistical rigor enough for publication in a prestigious journal.

Then wait for critic to complain that as a shortcut you biased the simulation in favor of values of the fine-structure constant that were "interesting", and ethics in societies where the permittivity of free space has a radically different relation to Plank's constant might not follow your postulates. But at least refuting them gives you steady employment for a few years as a post-doc.

(Yes, this assumes that the academic system with all its foibles survives the introduction of hypercomputing; this is probably optimistic, as a more likely result would be a system that careened out of control at a hyperbolic rate. "I'm just not convinced that publishing only a countably infinite number of peer-reviewed journal papers is sufficient for tenure in today's climate...")

A short story particularly relevant to the current discussion: "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" It has a variety of issues, but is an interesting extrapolation off into a relevant direction.

From an in-universe perspective, humorous options help the world feel more "real"; people need escapes from grim times, and lately Paragon has had plenty of those. Then there are some people who just ... snap under the strain.

From an out of character standpoint, having variety and humor is good for the players. While when looked at realistically some (many?) parts of Paragon are pretty grim, for many players CoH is escapism; being silly in the face of (simulated) danger is a good way to blow off frustrations in the real world. If I've had an enormously stressful and frustrating week in the real world, I'm far more likely to be interested in doing something lighthearted in CoH than anything involving difficult moral choices and shades of dark gray.

The folks I've played pen & paper superhero RPGs with over the years have certainly had a fair share of deadly serious moments, difficult moral choices, and so on; but many times the sessions we look back on most fondly are the ones where things got (or started) silly, particularly when it was mixed in. And there are interesting vibes that you can get when you cross silly and serious, whether it's a superhero who has been gifted with powers that are more strange and mysterious than actually useful trying to save the day anyway (Greatest American Hero, Legion of Substitute Heroes, Inferior Five, etc.); or whether it's the reverse case of a normally fearsome and very serious threat being reduced by being put into a silly situation they're not expecting to deal with.

Then there's the point that serious costume parts plus either inspiration or desperation in mixing and matching can lead to things much more or less than the sum of the parts. A gorilla bestial outfit can be pretty terrifying, and an aquatic pack with an old-fashioned diving helmet could be played for horror as well as straight... but when you put the diving helmet on the gorilla, describe it as a Robot Monster and name it something like Ro-Man Extension XJ-9, you've got a character who will be remembered for years to come, although probably for the wrong reasons

We've also potentially got far more costume slots than ever before; I can certainly see some of my character having less-serious outfits for certain occasions. Even grimmer characters may choose to have a silly "alternate ID" they use specifically because no one would believe it was them.

From an AE perspective, being better able to create episodes reminiscent of the 1960s camp Batman villains (remember, at the time this was "the biggest TV phenomenon of the mid-1960s", one of only two shows to have original prime time episodes twice a week), characters similar to those from "The Tick" (in any of its three major incarnations), and so on would be awesome; if people don't want to run those stories, they have no obligation to do so.

Hearing the above from one of the more important artists at Paragon both worries and puzzles me. Real fire does NOT have a "consistent look"; attempts to cram all the myriad wonder of something as diverse as "fire" into a single, flat concept would be both a grave mistake and a substantial cheapening of player's ability to have the characters *they* want. That doesn't even begin to get into the variety possible in a comic book world, where all the sorts of fire that you see in reality and from science are just the tip of the iceberg.

Just to give you a quick, off the top of my head on my lunch break, list of some radically different concepts that would all involve "fire" FX that should look *different*:

* An autumnal spirit, a fire seen in the forest, with crackling and popping flames, hardwood and dry leaves, a trail of bluish smoke in the moonlight; are they a kindly avatar, bringing forth memories of s'mores and hayrides, popping with drips of fat from hotdogs on skewers? Or are they something far more sinister, the power under a dark cauldron, spare bits of bat and the oozing tallow from a hanged man causing angry sparks? Better check their alignment...

* The first thing you notice is the jumpsuit, once light-colored with garish sponsor logos, now smudged and covered with soot. The second thing you notice is the dead, gray face, contorted into a rictus grin. In daylight you then spot the heat shimmer, twisting and curling the air around him, air over hot asphalt turned up to 11; in the dark of night more obvious is the pale, blue flames of hot-burning methanol licking out everywhere. He was once one of the fastest men alive; after the crash and horrific fire, he's got few who would choose to challenge him as the fastest dead man.

* Everyone of a certain age remembers the Kuwait oil fires; cascading, expanding, greasy bubbles of orange in a choking column of black, oily soot. The efforts to shut them down were heroic in every sense of the word; less well known are the few who, fallen to the angry, billowing flames, strode back out formed anew... not all were heroes in the normal way, but they had common cause in the secret, deadly war with the djinni, legendary creatures of "smokeless fire" and malice who saw their best chance to drive pesky humans from the desert sands.

* Sure, everyone has heard of the "Man of Steel", easy to say, familiar material, whatever. But how much respect do I get as the "Man of Magnesium"? I've got a better strength to weight ratio, and when I flame on, you best be using those goggles you've got decoratively perched on your hat; my white, searing glare is going to fry your eyes well before I get over there to hit you with a fist burning at 5,600 degrees. And don't think your pathetic fire equipment is going to help; CO2? Water? I just burn hotter.

* All the good ones are taken, he thought glumly. Here I am, after a freak accident in the welding supplies shack gave me not only the power to shoot an oxyacetylene jet right from my fingers, but to call up a high-voltage electrical field around me with all sorts of uses; I've gone from just another high-steel construction worker in Faultline to one of those costumed guys we see flying past. A lifetime of wishing secretly to be better, one of the "cool guys"... here I am, capable of shooting focused blue-white cones and jets of flame that can cut steel right from my hands with no more effort than walking up a flight of stairs... and the only thing left standing between me and a star-studded superheroic career is the first line on this stupid form.... "Name:"

* Her surface roiled with granules of intense, convective light; she was a seething inferno of fusion, like a piece of the photosphere had been lifted right out of the sun and miniaturized; and maybe that's what actually happened. You get all types in Pocket D, he mused; he didn't know if she was even remotely human, but she certainly had the outline of a mammalian female... "Hey, baby, mind if I buy you a drink? That's a couple of nice prominences you got there." <WHACK> Wincing, he felt the familiar sting as his regeneration factor regrew the nerves in the side of his face; she was a hot one all right, there was an undertone of burnt bone smell in the air, probably from his jaw. He shrugged at the patron down the bar, some sort of natural with a bunch of high-tech pouches, who'd watched the exchange with a horrified expression; "I've had worse rejections."

That's the result of just a few minutes of thought on "different looking kinds of real fire that might come up as important to a super origin", and doesn't even really delve into mystical or super-science effects. As a professional effects artist, hopefully we'll get *more* variety for users to choose from, to better represent their concepts; not a bland homogenizing in a misguided attempt at "consistency".

... up on a pedestal in a glass case in a museum, and occasionally the subject of Nature Channel documentaries?

"As a new and exciting bonus for VIP Subscribers, they will now be getting one free Character Delete per month. Additional Character Deletes will be available in the Paragon Store in packs of 1x, 2x, and 5x."

I think you have the wrong concept; the simplest and easiest to use format is where the organization of the forums mirrors the existing internal logic of the game and player presentation. If someone creates a Dominator and wants to ask a question or do some research, the most obvious place to look would be a forum titled "Dominators", not trying to figure out what arbitrary category they've been shoved into that may or may not reflect their own play experiences... Damage? Control? Support? Pets?

Reducing the clarity and organization of the forums at exactly the time when we're expecting (or at least hoping) for an influx of new and returning players seems to be a very poor choice. We should be aiming for clear, distinct, obvious choices; such that a player with little experience can immediately figure out where a post should go and have a good chance of finding specific information; not giant and somewhat controversial mish-mash categories that provide little organizational structure and make it more difficult to actually find relevant information within them.

Incorrect. They don't have slots of their own, but they most definitely benefit from other enhancements; to get maximum performance out of Ninja / Beast Run, you need to run Sprint (increasing the effective End cost substantially), slot Sprint, slot Swift, and slot Hurdle. At low levels, even *after* you've done all of the above, you're still moving slower than the Rocket Board even in a straight line, and additionally have to keep steering around or jumping over things, reducing your effective cross-zone speed further in many situations.

The majority of low-level characters don't even have toggles, and typically the ones that do aren't going to be relevant during long-distance travel. The few characters that have low-level stealth or mez protection might be an exception, but you can usually just gain some altitude and not have anyone shooting at you in the first place.

Despite the above, people obviously got along without any of the themed pseudo-travel powers for years. The main questions remain whether the convenience of getting around more easily before or without a real travel power is useful to you; and if so which of the them fits your characters thematically. Personally, if I was starting over a la carte, I'd probably pick up Ninja Run and Rocket Board early to cover most concepts and situations; leaving the Jump Pack+Steam Jump and Beast Run options for later if at all.

Will there be additional servers & times announced, or is the plan really to just have a major in-game plot event on only two of the classic eleven US servers? For all the marketing hype about existing customers being VIPs, that certainly doesn't bode well.

As a closely-related question, how well balanced is the "multi-level" version of the Praetorian Invasion II for meaningful participation for lower level characters? Some of us still have the semi-disposable characters from the Freedom load test we could fire up again, but the question is whether it's reasonable to plan on being able to actually participate, or just log on for the badge.

Seconded. We started using them more heavily at work a while back and have had considerably fewer problems since. I've had a couple of generations of them at home and the peace of mind alone is worth the cost.

APC is a solid brand, and we use a lot of them on the low end for individual office desktops and the high end for server racks. Their mid-range offerings, like you'd want for a powerful gaming computer or design workstation, are a bit expensive (effectively kicks you into "server class" hardware); I've got a CyberPower unit running my home desktop I'm happy with and we've gotten in several at work as well.

Almost any UPS is better than none; however, modern highly efficient (Energy Star 5, etc.) power supplies have active circuitry Power Factor correction circuitry that can interact badly with the rough output of a traditional inverter during hand-over. I recommend getting a UPS that offers AVR (Automatic Voltage Regulation) both up and down, and for computers with new power supplies getting one that is "Active PFC compatible" and advertises "high quality" or "pure" sine wave output.

Similarly to what TJ noted above, over the decades I've had more equipment at home and at work killed via cabling *other* than the power. Good filtering on phone/modem lines, cable lines, and network lines is a must for full protection. (IMO analog / copper cable is the worst offender; back in the day I lost several VCRs even with a cheap filter on the cable. This probably depends on your area though.)

Also note that power protection equipment has a limited effective life. Many people use surge protectors well past the point at which they provide substantial protection, which depending on power quality can be as little as 6 months and is rarely more than 3 years. (Also, like a "bulletproof" vest, if a passive surge protector takes a serious hit the protection factor is basically burned out, get a new one.)

Most UPSs have a battery life of 2-4 years, and have circuitry good for around 2 battery life cycles (original & one replacement). If you live in a rural area with active weather and miles of above-ground wiring, it may be harder hit and not last as well; if you have clean power and aren't using it to full load you may get 2 replacement battery cycles out of one.

Make sure you get a UPS big enough to meet the max power draw of your system plus some safety factor; you don't want to be running the circuitry at the ragged edge of the power curve, where it is much more likely to burn out early. I recommend a 30% max load safety margin at original purchase to allow for component aging and computer upgrades. Put it someplace with decent ventilation, don't shove it under a desk and pile stuff on it.

As far as specific recommendations go, I've been quite happy with the CyberPower Adaptive Sinewave Series at home and at work lately.

Pro tip: UPSs are heavy, as they've usually got a substantial chunk of lead battery in them. Shipping is a much larger fraction of the cost than you might think, so make sure you price compare total cost with shipping. I order most of my personal UPSs from Amazon these days, because Amazon Prime free 2-day shipping is an awesome deal when you're talking about something that may weigh nearly 30 pounds.

I have one character in particular that, while a motorcycle travel power would work well, what she *particularly* wants is the ability to arrive in *exactly* the over-the-top motorcycle laydown that the Thugs bruiser summoning uses. I'd be OK even if it were an emote. Dreaming further, I would pay respectable amounts of real money for a Shield Charge-like "temp" power using that animation, or for a Mission Teleporter-like power using it.

(She's a Dual Pistols / Energy Manipulation Blaster, to represent an 80's style Hong Kong crazy guns & martial arts action movie star.)

You appear to believe that the I21 preview build shown at SDCC was close to final, and that there were not going to be substantial changes made before release; based on a careful reading of what's been released publicly, that isn't true.

You appear to believe that the purpose of what CoH has been calling Closed Beta doesn't specifically include trying out controversial and experimental things that may not turn out to work, have some sort of major flaw, require more implementation resources than will be available for the next release, and so on... in a closed environment specifically to limit wild speculation about things that may not happen or may happen very differently than originally envisioned. Based on what has been publicly released about past and current Closed Betas, this is not true.

Admittedly, this is closer to what would traditionally be called Alpha Test; but the definitions of Alpha, Beta, and Gamma testing have slipped in the industry over the last few years. There was a time when CoH was (IMO deservedly) chastised for not putting things up for beta until too late in the process to make substantial changes; the process more recently seems to have shifted to require more restrictive NDAs, but allow at least some user testing and feedback much earlier in the process. In general, I think this is a better way of operating, but it does mean that there will be people outside the company seeing things in a much less "polished" state.

I was not able to make it to SDCC myself, but based on what I have read publicly about what was shown and some of the screenshots & photos posted, it sounds like they did not have the time to produce a special "sanitized" build just for the con, and what people got to play on the floor and were commenting on was effectively a snapshot of the beta process. Arguably, this was not the ideal way to do things, but it probably saved them a lot of effort at a busy time. My recollection was that the official material only discussed the travel pool changes, and that the changes to other pools were technically "leaks", and therefore likely to be in a less final or tested state.

Why do you assume that what you hear today is "truth", any more than what you hear at any other time? More particularly, why do you assume that there is some underlying "truth" to be heard in the first place? Based on past behavior, this seems unlikely; software development in the general case isn't about "truth", it's about compromises, and that holds even more so for gaming software.

I would think that it would be safest to assume that anything not clearly and unequivocally stated in a marketing-approved publicity release would still be subject to change right up to launch (and even those are not set in stone should serious enough problems come up). Besides, it's a MMORPG; things are subject to balance changes at any time, from months before release until years afterward.

It has already been publicly discussed that there was a nearly 2 GB patch to Beta within the last few days (you don't have to be in Beta to maintain the client, I routinely keep all 3 clients updated no matter what these days); should anyone need hard evidence that the SDCC build was nowhere near final, that should do the job

You appear to be under a misconception; one of the points to having a NDA required *closed* Beta is specifically so they can experiment with things that might not be in final form, in a setting where people are less likely to get in a tizzy about experimental stuff that might change substantially or not happen at all. The fact that they basically sponsored a leak themselves due to the way the SDCC preview worked is unfortunate, I agree; but it's best to assume that the devs themselves don't have things in a final state yet, let alone what has trickled out through all the various levels to be discussed in public.

Normally I try to avoid somone is wrong on the Internet syndrome, but given your clearly stated preference for being corrected when under the wrong impression, hopefully this helps.

Yet another person chiming in with feedback on the lack of a high-res headband with wings; I've got a character whose look was substantially improved by use of some of the Valkyrie textures and parts, but who has stuck with the old low-res headband with wings because there isn't an equivalent new piece. (Additionally, the new wings are IMO a lot blockier and less streamlined looking; the Valkyrie set in general is surprisingly bulky and awkward looking and I find myself using the textures far more than the pieces.)

This is a classic example of one reason folks object to removal of old parts; newer high-res parts don't always cover all the options, and have no guarantee that they will still give the same "look" in actual use. In particular there seems to be some sort of "thick and chunky" bias in the art department, and older parts and patterns may give better results if you're going for something sleek, even if they're lower resolution.

This is my favorite of the "upgrade with minimal changes" suggestions. Adjust the scale sliders a bit to match the original body more closely, post the code for the dev's reference and I think it's a winner.

The above is no longer true; some boxes now lock out other boxes. The specific case I'm sure of is that the original CoH edition, and the Good vs. Evil edition, *cannot* currently be applied to the same account; whichever is used first will lock out the other one. (I tried this both ways around while getting some friends set up less than a month ago.)

This crystallizes something that has been vaguely bothering me. What if the devs were to put things you can buy with Astral merits on the lower random tables, and things you can buy with Empyrean merits on the higher ones?

A Rare costs 8 Empyrean merits, a Very Rare costs 30. For example, offering a single Aura choice (currently 3 E) on the Rare table, or an "all the Auras pack" (currently 18 E) on the Very Rare table, would technically be a loss... but might be a real improvement for a significant number of people.

Part of the issue is that currently someone who gets lucky on the "random" option *also* gets the "deterministic" rewards, and can go spend them on costumes; whereas someone who has to spend their merits on components doesn't have the option to get lucky on costumes, they have to do more grinding.

This also bothers me; it seems that the time commitment versus luck balance is not where it should be. For NotW, the time difference was roughly a factor of two between the fastest possible, and any group capable of doing it at all; that was reasonable. The disparity here seems to be more like a factor of ten, and that's more than I'm happy with.