Obitus

That was my first, gut reaction too -- but the more I thought about it, the less outrageous Positron's claim became. I think his statement is more a case of lead-developer dismissiveness rather than American arrogance.

Positron's tone was deliberately brusque because he was responding to a question phrased as if its faulty premise were self-evident. If you read that tone and associate it with the letter of what he's saying ("The USA is the only democracy to work for a significant period of time"), rather than with the point he was making ("why would the Cimerorans want democracy?"), then it looks vaguely like sneering nationalism, but I don't believe that was the intention.

And again, the bit about the USA, offensive as it may seem at first blush, is at least defensible based on a reasonable reading of history. He didn't say, "America rulez; everyone else droolz." He referred to the USA government's status as a stable and long-lived liberal democracy (or, if you prefer, a representative democracy). It's easy to forget in 2012 that that status is really quite rare in the grand scheme of things -- that, in fact, the USA's history under essentially the same government is longer than most any other country's. Positron underscored that point about rarity by explicitly noting that even the US isn't a direct democracy, in which citizens vote on everything. Direct democracy frankly doesn't work.

So the question wasn't only silly because it ascribed modern sensibilities to the Cimerorans; the question was silly because it implied (or you can reasonably infer from it) that a system that essentially doesn't even exist in practice should be presumed superior to monarchy, by default. Positron can be forgiven for brushing the question aside, given that he was answering a bajillion, often semi-pedantic questions about the game's lore, in his free time and after having just been laid off.

I've snipped the rest simply for the sake of brevity. Great post.

The funny thing is that CO seems to have been designed with the idea that Cryptic would avoid making the (game-balance) mistakes they made in CoH, and in many ways it does avoid those mistakes. Debuffs are much weaker, and so are controls. Defenses are extremely potent, but in order to achieve COH-tank-like survivability you have to do a fair amount of leg work that goes beyond simply selecting a given AT in CoH.

(What I mean is that the investment required, on a pure power-for-power basis, to get massive survivability on a CO free-form character isn't all that much greater, and may even be significantly smaller, than a Tanker's investment -- but as a matter of feel or player perception, the act of deliberately crafting a CO build around survivability probably seems more intricate than slotting out a Tank, even though COH's invention system is much more complex than anything available in CO, IMO.)

But in principle, and despite Cryptic's apparent efforts early on, CO offers similar levels of performance to COH at the high end. Actually, CO probably offers better performance at the high end because it's generally easier to incorporate spawn-melting AOE damage into a high-survivability CO build. The main difference, as far as I can tell, is that you have to go out of your way to herd up huge spawns of enemies in CO; there isn't an option to increase a team-size scalar, AFAIK.

Anyway, I wonder whether Cryptic didn't finally agree with you -- whether they finally decided that if they were going to compete in a market niche dominated by CoH, they'd have to give up the ghost on the traditional-MMO-encounter balance calculus.

It's a good quote

Yep. Athens planted the seed, but Ancient Rome (pre-Caesar) is probably a better example. Certainly, the Roman Republic is the more practically useful example, judging by what subsequent governments have chosen to do.

Right, and once you've narrowed the field down to the British Parliamentary system versus the United States, you're firmly in subjective territory. Nihilii seems to believe that the United States doesn't count as a good example of a democratic/republican system until (at the earliest) the Civil Rights Movement, which is a legitimate position for him to take, but it's not a factual (irrefutable) position. A society's perceived level of fairness is related to, but not directly determined by, its system of government.

(Technically, universal male suffrage predates the Civil Rights Movement by some 90 years in the United States, and women's suffrage predates the Civil Rights Act by about 45. In neither case is the United States markedly behind other governments, and depending on your point of view, the United States is ahead of many others. In practice, yes -- minorities were often prevented from voting in various states prior to the Civil Rights Act, but that was not a direct feature of the US government.) (EDIT: Arcana's example, Switzerland, apparently didn't give women the right to vote until 1971; I didn't realize they were that late.)

The British, after all, still have a nominal monarch. The monarch has almost zero practical power these days, but that wasn't the case as recently as the turn of the 20th Century. It's hard to pin down an exact moment for the transition, but one thing's for sure: the establishment of the British Parliament didn't immediately transform England/Britain into what we'd call a democracy-like system. If the matter were that simple, then the United States probably wouldn't even exist (as we know it, anyway).

For all that the United States is widely (and justifiably) regarded as the upstart young cousin of its counterparts in Europe, the United States' system of government actually has a longer history of continuous and relatively stable operation than most any other government in the world. We are the young upstart culturally, not necessarily politically.

That said, the upshot of all of this is that whether you agree with all the implied particulars of Positron's statement or not, his statement is not preposterous. He did not say that the United States is the best democracy in the world; he said that United States is the only one to work for any significant period of time. Depending on your definitions of the words, "Work," and, "Significant," his position is reasonable enough -- subject to good-faith challenge and debate, but by no means did Positron insult billions of people, alive and dead. It's one thing to say that you disagree with Positron; it's another to say that his position is so obviously false that any sixth grader in an educated country would know better.

And in any case, Positron's point had very little to do with United States, per se. The question he answered assumed that the Cimerorans should have fought for democracy, not a monarchy. Whatever your position on the efficacy of Athens and other, similar Greek city states, ancient people wouldn't have regarded democracy as unambiguously superior to the alternatives. (Hell, Plato's Republic is a repudiation of democracy, and he wrote the thing in Athens.) The questioner implicitly ascribed modern sensibilities to the Cimerorans; Positron's observation about the United States is meant to underline that fallacious association.

You shouldn't expect the EULA to trump any complaints you might have, either. Based on my albeit casual reading of various local laws in the US, NCSoft wouldn't have had a strong case if they'd tried to withhold refunds for undelivered subscription time.

(The relevant clause in the EULA is neither prominently displayed prior to purchase, nor is it phrased in obviously easy-to-understand language; the clause is buried in a veritable mountain of legalese covering any number of abstruse and practically unimportant topics to the average consumer -- which might be fine for this-or-that locality, but the standard in several US localities seems to be that the refund policy must be displayed and phrased in such a way that it's basically impossible for the customer to miss or misinterpret.

It's not even clear to me that NCSoft could withhold refunds if the relevant clause in the EULA were forcibly tattooed to the customer's forehead, either -- because if you read the clause sensibly, along with the related clause 10, it's pretty obvious that NCSoft's legitimate concern is that people will demand refunds for server outages or maintenance periods. A judge would have to be insane to infer from that clause that NCSoft has the right to take subscription money for any length of time during which they've deliberately and permanently discontinued the entire service.)

But if Gangrel's info about Tabula Rasa is correct, then it looks like the concern was a tad overblown to begin with. As usual, the truth is a little less shocking than the rumor on the internet. In any case, and regardless of their reasoning, I'm glad to see NCSoft's doing the right thing for CoH's long-term subscribers.

Not that I disagree with your argument in sum; in fact, I think you're spot-on, and your point about the facial/body sliders is a pet peeve of mine stretching back to CO's launch in 2009 (?).

But to be fair, I think the Purple Gang in CO is based on this real life gang, and if I recall correctly, the Gang was pulled from the Champions IP, so their inclusion in the video-game version of the IP is at worst a forgivable mistake.

The tone of the story-telling over there is painfully campy, though, or at least that was how I felt about it for the year or so I was first active over there. Haven't gotten a chance to try the new stuff yet.

Hey, to each his own. I'd rather have a dev team that thinks big only to be frustrated by logistical constraints.

Apparently, you would rather have a dev team that only plans to do what is guaranteed to be doable, in full, from the first moment of conception. How very dull.

I use the word, "Apparently," because I'm assuming that your complaint is actually sensible -- that your complaint centers around the large scope of Paragon's plans, rather than from Paragon's inability to follow through on all of those plans. If, alternatively, you're genuinely trying to argue that logistical concerns have no place in the conversation, then you're nuts.

Do like your avatar pic, though.

Right, and that's actually part of what's so frustrating about the whole thing. Ice's main schtick (for lack of a better word) was that using any Ice power basically doubled your itemized defense, for a few seconds at a time. In other words, if your equipment gave you, say, 30% damage resistance, then as long as you used Ice powers every 12 seconds or so, you'd end up with 60%ish damage resistance. (Up to a cap, which off the top of my head was at around 74%.)

Ice also had various defensive effects tied to particular powers. Some of them were extremely powerful; some of them weren't. But the upshot of my little digression here is that the exact character of the powers you use isn't as important (from a defensive standpoint) as the arbitrary side-effects the developers decided to tie to your power set.

Someone decided that the side-effect for Ice (one of two tanking sets, at the time I played) was that double-resistance thing. The side-effect for the other tanking set, Fire, was that using powers massively increased your max HP and healing modifier. Obviously, Fire and Ice play differently -- sorta like Regen versus Invuln -- but you could easily swap the side-effects without changing much else, powers-wise (you'd have to give Ice's shields to Fire, and Fire's heals to Ice, but aesthetically/conceptually the powers wouldn't have to change much if at all).

Anyway, you could easily create a power set that has Ice's double-defense side effect without any of the extra perks. It wouldn't matter what the powers look like or even what they do; the act of using them regularly would raise your survivability drastically. And that's the main (mechanical) problem with the Iconic power pool; not only are the powers weaker, but you get none of the usual powerset-specific perks as a side-effect of using them.

Yeah, the powers' framework feels like it was designed for a wholly different sub-genre. Like maybe a Last Airbender game or something.

That's the most likely explanation. Don't get me wrong; I understand how it happened. I just don't understand why it was allowed to happen. You'd think they'd realize that their powers framework wasn't flexible enough beforehand. All of that stuff you talked about earlier -- how to create offensive powers that fit the theme of invulnerability and whatnot -- should have been fleshed out at the conceptual stage, shouldn't it?

Yeah, I wasn't in DCUO's beta, but I'm familiar with the devs' purported reasoning for the omission. The excuse rings hollow, though; if your powers' framework doesn't allow you to emulate the most iconic character type not just in comic books generally, but particularly with respect to your own IP -- then maybe your powers' framework should have been scrapped before you started on it.

Just a thought. In fact, the excuse is almost funnier than the problem the excuse is designed to explain away: with all the time and effort that goes into designing an MMO, how do you even get past the on-paper conceptual stage with a powers' framework that doesn't allow players to emulate, at least in broad terms, Superman? Think of all the well-educated people who must've been in on the project. Someone actually sat down one day and said to himself, "Yeah, we'll make the 'Inspired by Superman' option in the character creator default to an Ice-covered yeti. That'll be great!" And someone else approved that idea!

It's a head-scratcher of epic proportions.

Right. Light characters in DCUO are deputies of Oa, not full-fledged Lanterns, or some such. Seemed like a pretty cool set, in any case.

As someone who spent a few years driving for a living, I have to give you props for admitting your shortcomings. It's a cliche that everyone thinks s/he's a great driver, but it's a cliche because there's a lot of truth in it. Unfortunately, most people (and I include myself here) are prone to a lot of really unsafe habits on the road.

More to the point of the topic: I wouldn't trust a computer to drive for me, but that's largely because I don't have faith that technology is up to the task right now. In principle? In a world where everyone's car is controlled by a competent robotic operator? Sure, why not.

The main danger of driving is that you can't control your environment. No matter how good a driver you are (or think you are), you are implicitly trusting the people around you to act in a rational and predictable manner. You can reduce your risk by increasing your following distance, reducing your speed, etc, but the only 100% safe driver is the guy sitting in a parking lot well off the road. So anyway, the question here (whether you'd allow AI to control your car) implies that the behavior of all/most (robotic) drivers will be more consistent and thus predictable. In other words, the degree of difficulty for my robotic driver will be lower in a world full of robotic drivers than the degree of difficulty is for me in a world full of human drivers.

That's a nice idea, at least in theory.

Yup. There are many things to like or not like about DCUO. Personally I tried the Brawling/Ice armor tank, and (once I made some character-build compromises) found that the conceptual shoe-horning wasn't a deal-breaker. The game's lack of depth was the deal-breaker, ultimately.

But man. Making the "inspired by Superman" build into a flying ice block? That's just hilariously bad. It'd be one thing if it were a generic superhero MMO or even a Marvel MMO, but who in his right mind would even think about designing a DC MMO without providing effects-lite or physical-invulnerability defensive powers? It should have been the very first thing on the list.

And last I checked, that gaping omission remains even now. DCUO has released at least three new power sets since it launched, AFAIK: two of them were elemental sets (Electricity, Earth), and the third was a green lantern set -- all of which are fine, but wow.

A lot of us just aren't impressed by what you do in game. Despite your frequent posturing about protecting the details of your build(s), neither your Arch/Ment nor your Fire/Ment would be difficult to reproduce, in broad strokes. The strengths of those builds are self-evident and easy to exploit; neither would be particularly difficult to play.

Don't get me wrong; your over-the-top schtick amuses me, and I don't think you're a bad guy. But you are not, in my estimation, an expert on the game's mechanics or on build strategies. For my part, I've done the Drain-Psyche-abuse thing a few times in various ways with my Fire/Ment over the years, and although it was fun, it didn't hold my interest.

No one here needs to prove anything. A lot of us got the LOLOMG-uber stuff out of our systems back when you could herd the whole of Crey's Folly into a dumpster and one-shot everything with Knockout Blow. Sure, the first guy who did it might deserve some tiny bit of credit just for the discovery, but the thousandth guy, who learned the key elements of that tactic more or less by rote? Not so much.

In any case, it seems a bit silly to squabble now. Much love to all CoH peeps, and whatnot.

As a fellow registered Fraps user, I appreciate her heads' up about the new version's performance increase. I might actually bother to upgrade it sometime this week instead of ignoring it for the next two months.

Yeah, control is just flat-out weaker in CO than it is in CoH. Ditto buff/debuff (last I checked, anyway). For that reason alone, I think the diversity of playstyle choices in CO will always seem a little pale in the comparison.

Then again, CO isn't exactly unusual in that respect. And to be fair, there are a host of good design reasons to moderate the power of control and buff/debuff effects.

FWIW, I'm enjoying the heck out of my return to CO these last couple of weeks. It'll never replace CoH, but I think it's capable of replacing a part of what drew me to CoH (character customization, build tweaking).

OT, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you and everyone else here for all the hard work you've done to make CoH what it is, for all of us compulsive build-tweaking junkies. Sláinte!

Metaphorically speaking, I certainly did take a lot of pointless and avoidable detours.

Maybe I'm just feeling philosophical as I sit here -- listening to a baseball game in the twilight of the season, the rich amber hue of my iced scotch reminding me of the onset of autumn, the first vague hints of which waft on in the air billowing the curtains of the open window, the faint whisper of shifting leaves outside complementing the lulling cadence of the broadcasters' call of every play. It's almost too appropriate a scene for browsing this forum, in what may be its twilight hours.

In any case, it struck me as I read the linked article the so many of life's disappointments stem from youthful arrogance, and youthful arrogance stems, in large part, from the albeit understandable tendency to over-simplify the simple -- to rely on our abstract or intellectual knowledge of a problem or a process without really understanding it in a practicable way.

Man, I'm a windbag.

Yeah, never bothered with them because the whole thing was poorly conceived from the get-go.

Good point. Now that you mention it, I think I remember that quote.

Do you think ... Maybe the quote's author is the same 8-year-old prodigy responsible for the automated muting system?

That link is pure win. I wish someone had handed me that article (and forced me to read it again and again) back when I was 17 years old.

No argument about any of that. I don't remember the particulars with regard to CO's launch. As I recall, Roper was a pretty powerful figure over there at the time.

Still, I'd think that a massive launch-day balance pass isn't purely a mechanical decision; it's also a significant PR decision. So I can imagine the higher ups over at Cryptic at least having been consulted on the matter. I don't for a moment think that Jack was elbow-deep in the numbers; I do think it's possible that he had a looong talk with Roper and crew about just how urgently the game needed to be rebalanced.

The timing is interesting, is all. It's suggestive of a development studio that was desperate to avoid having to drop the balance hammer after players got well and truly accustomed to the game's working a certain way.

Yeah, Electric Form wouldn't do much for you unless you also mixed in a couple of electric powers. That said, the word on the street over there is that free form characters face heavy diminished returns; the additive damage bonus from offensive passives doesn't seem to add a whole hell of a lot once you've stacked your stats beyond a certain point (and even with relatively crappy stats when I first went back to CO a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that ranking up my offensive passive was almost certainly a waste of skill points). If you're in an offensive stance, you get a multiplicative bonus that puts the passive's to shame.

So if what you really want is an electric-themed character who can mix it up in melee, I don't think the damage-type discrepancy should be a deal-breaker. Pump up STR, offense, and crit and go to town with your glowy-fighty guy.

Not saying it's a great solution, just that you can make an electric-melee concept work in a pinch. Every game is bound to have conceptual limitations. CO is about six thousand light years ahead of DCUO in that respect, for what it's worth.

No, no, no. DCUO gives us the official word: A superman concept must be a fugly ice-golem looking dude!

(And, btw, although it may be true that you can't add electric damage to melee attacks, you could use electric form in melee range. That'd approximate the aesthetic of an electric-themed melee character. The only problem is that electric form is an offensive passive, so you'd be limited defensively.)

Yeah, to this day I find that decision mystifying. I mean, I understand the fear that you'll release the game with vastly overpowered players, and I understand the reasoning that big-time balance adjustments should happen sooner rather than later (all else being equal), because you don't want your playerbase to become accustomed to one thing and then hit them over the head with the other.

I get all that, but why freaking launch day? Why not earlier, in Beta? Failing that, why not let it ride a bit? Adjusting so many things in so little time is bound to lead to unintended consequences. Worse still, Champions managed to find the worst of both worlds, with respect to launch-day surprises: the game effectively pre-launched in one state, and then all of the big-time fans who had played for 2-3 days prior to the official launch, on what they thought were live servers in their natural state, were hit with a giant bat.

Could it be that Jack was so effing paranoid about repeating Enhancement Diversification that he panicked?

Whether the balance adjustments were warranted or not, the launch-day nerf fest led to a lot of criticism, and a lot of players jumping ship, IMO. Personally, I played through it, and it wasn't nearly as bad, in practice, as it probably looked from the outside -- but given that CO characters are, if anything, stronger now than they were prior to the launch-day fustercluck, the urgency that spurred Cryptic's action back then seems laughable in retrospect.

If Cryptic had simply done nothing, balance-wise, at launch, I believe that people would have forgiven a lot of the polish issues that Jack laments in the interview linked above. It was the combination of Cryptic's bizarre 11th-hour nerf fest and the lack of polish that did CO in at the outset.

Which isn't to say that it's not a worthy game, or that it isn't financially viable now; it's just that CO never properly got out of the gate. First impressions matter.

And so the classicist falls victim to hubris.