Redlynne

This very likely to be my last post in this forum, and may very well be that last post I make anywhere on the CoH forums, for the rest of time.

Every so often, I'd lurk my way back into the SoA forum and have a look at where this (little?) thread of mine stood, as far a replies and page views was concerned. Right now, this thread (as of this posting) stands at 105 replies ... which is the 6th most highly replied thread in this entire forum (5th place is at 108, but I'm not exactly vying for a move up in the ranking here). Even more impressive though is that this thread has (as of this posting) ... 13,059 views ... which makes it the third most viewed thread in the entire SoA forum overall ... the second most viewed thread in the SoA forum that never got pinned ... and THE most viewed thread (by a long way!) that could in any way be considered a "guide" for building a SoA (in this case, as a Hunts(wo)man).

For me, the most amazing thing about those now useless statistics is that what I did in this thread wasn't all that terrifically "original" since I was just building off the work of Who Came Before Me on this topic, and extrapolating it into theories I could test (and attest to) with my own personal experiences. In a lot of ways, despite being an avid Mids' Jockey, this thread both is (and was) my only attempt at ever writing a "guide" for any archetype ... despite having multiple players in-game who would turn to me for advice on the path of NO GET HITSU!! I blazed with my MA/SR Scrapper ... Redlynne ... starting in Issue 2. But the simple fact of the matter was that Arcanaville "wrote" the definitive text on Defense Protection Schemes and softcapping defense and all of that, so my contributions in that arena were hardly needed, and would have been plowing already well tilled ground.

But the Huntsman ... that was a build strategy that, it seemed to me, offered tremendous potential, and had been tragically underserved as far as advice and experience went. Plus, the available resources on the build were outdated and could use updating. Little did I suspect what my efforts would come to ...

I did it "all wrong" on my way from 1-23 of course. I replicated my early Issue 2-3 experience of focusing on Defense first and foremost, rather than concentrating on Offense (which, of course, turned out to be a mistake I corrected in hindsight). But from that inauspicious beginning, a realization began to take hold, that playing a Huntsman build was something that started off weak, but gradually built in strength ... and never really STOPPED growing more powerful (unless if you gimped yourself). When I finally reached Level 50, got every Set IO invented and slotted, I gazed upon the marvel that I had created ...

My first memory of the "there is no aggro cap" phenomenon was in Perez Park. Someone was offering to get us our Skulls and Hellions defeat badges.

I'd be hovering up in the sky, so I could see farther downrange. The "Herder" would rush off and aggro pretty much EVERYTHING outside the park along the streets on two sides of the map and train them back to the Kill Zone we had set up. I remember looking north along the eastern side of Perez along the road ... and just seeing this OCEAN of Skulls and Hellions POURING over every available surface like a tidal wave, chasing after the herder. It was as if the entire city was sinking beneath the waterline of all these Skulls and Hellions! There must have been half a thousand of them, easy, all chasing after our Herder, and they weren't breaking off to return to spawn point either (because our Herder kept re-aggroing them periodically). The whole thing, from my location in the sky, looked like a huge swarm of rats racing out of a sinking ship, or trying to outrun high tide or something.

It's one of those memories I'll never forget, because of this game.

Speaking just for myself, I'd prefer to see the headline:

I think the thing I resent the most about NCSoft's move in all of this is the fact that they're taking away Developers of a game that are, to me anyway, the people I have unconditional love and respect for. Having attended the last two Player Summits, these are PEOPLE that I *want* to think of as being my friends ... and the stunt that NCSoft pulled put *MY FRIENDS* in jeopardy (ie. unemployment in a not so wonderful economy) ... and I feel powerless to help them personally.

The Rednames we all know and love, they're *my* Team ... they're *my* League ... they're MY Heroes ... and I don't want them to be taken from me. These people have become family in a way ... and they're people I admire. So when someone undercuts their livelihood, and threatens to take away the relationships and bonds I've made with these people, and invested myself into what they've made because it's unique and beautiful ... yeah ... it's really easy to get angry.

But we're not Vigilantes ... we're Heroes. HOW we do things matters just as much as WHY we do them, because we're going to have to live with the consequences of our actions.

Go Red Team.
Go Blue Team.

We're all pulling for you back here.

What sort of soulless monster would do this to people ...?





Great Battalion arrival video!



What'dya mean that's not a preview of coming attractions?

Don't worry Michelle, I'll still date your avatar at the Unity Rally.

Looks like Tera has a small but slowly growing population getting into the game, which would put its overall population somewhere near par with that of CoH these days (now living on only 3 servers). A big difference is that for Battleground PvP and Instanced Dungeons, it looks like there's no barriers against cross-server play, meaning that in some limited senses Tera's server populations have better community interactions cross-server than we do in CoH (short of a server transfer token over here).

Mind you, the chart in the link is basically recording game unit sales, not concurrent player logins or anything like that, so the relationship is going to be a bit ... indirect ... to actual gameplay experience of the player population (just like it would be for CoH extrapolating from the same kind of dataset).

FPbeforeandARN

Mad props to Hit Streak for stepping up to the plate and broadcasting today!

Talked to the friend of mine who picked up a trial account to test drive Tera again this morning, and they've apparently gotten to Level 15-16 with an Elin Archer. I asked about the "community feel" and the response I got back was that the RP server, Celestial Hills, feels a *LOT* like Cassiopeia in Tabula Rasa. With a trial account, you can't participate in chats and channels, but you can observe them.

Apparently someone said something to the effect of "friend says CH is gay" on what amounts to broadcast, and the general consensus of response was basically along the lines of "that's not a friend you have there" along with the somewhat to be expected "we're not a bunch of elitist min-max jerks over here, you know" and the like. There were people talking about how they were hanging around in the lower level towns and zone, just helping out newbies and the like getting started and so on. Everything's just very laid back and casual on the Celestial Hills (RP) server it seems, which means probably the closest corollary to CoH servers would be (surprise, surprise) the Virtue community. You might not have the equivalent of costume contests under Atlas Statue like you've got happening nearly all the time on Virtue ... but the *spirit* of that kind of community feeling and camraderie seems to be present on the Celestial Hills server at least.

Which means I've basically run out of reasons *NOT* to start playing Tera and seeing how it goes, myself.

Great googly moogly ... that was ... what's the word that comes after "Awesome" ...? Where's War Witch when I need her?

After having attended the Tabula Rasa War College in 2008 ... where I got to meet CuppaJo and Critters (former community managers of CoH), as well as Richard Garriott and Starr Long and many of the Tabula Rasa developers, there's one thing they said about launching a game that sticks with me after all these years, and it's this.

It is standard operating procedure for games to shed staff/developers after launching.

Although it seems counter-intuitive to us, as players, this is apparently "normal business practice" in the gaming industry ... that once a game launches, layoffs will occur ... pretty much regardless of how well the game does in the marketplace. Those of us who weren't gamers wondered openly why that should be so, and the answer came back that a lot of the people needed to get a game READY for launch aren't necessarily "needed" once the game HAS LAUNCHED. How much of a layoff/cutback occurs after launching kinda sorta depends on the mix of developers who were on payroll before the game reached launch day (which makes sense), but chopping a Dev team in half is not unheard of ... or particularly uncommon.

Heck, within A YEAR ... Cryptic Studios was down to the Fighting 15 Devs (including Positron, Manticore, Back Alley Brawler, Castle and lots of other Rednames we oldtimers would recognize) who kept CoH on life support long enough for NCSoft to scoop it up (only to turn around and knife it in the back in the middle of the night 5 years later, but that's another story).

So if you're looking at news items saying that Tera has cut a substantial portion of its developer staff after launch, and that's giving you the jitters about a new (or at least, new in the NA/EU market) game, realize that layoffs in a studio after launch are pretty much standard practice as a studio realigns from doing "Pure" Creation and QA prior to launch over to doing Maintenance and Expansion post-launch ... the latter pretty much "requiring" a different mix of skills and personnel from what was needed pre-launch.



Server consolidation ... is never a "great thing" to have to do, but it's a "if you gotta do it, might as well get it over with" kind of thing. And yeah, the article you cite is spinning it as best can ... but the simple fact of the matter is that if you're going to do a server consolidation, doing it within the first 6 months after launch is probably the best time to do it (if you're going to do it).

And consider the CoH experience as a backdrop here. Freedumb and Virtue were highly populated servers ... and everything else was pretty much Crickets-ville (by comparison). Some people liked playing on low population servers (fewer hassles from other players), but it also make team and league content that much harder to gather people up for. Heck, even on Virtue it's a challenge to get enough people together for a Cathedral of Pain run ... and you only need 21 people outside your SG and 3 people in your SG to lead the teams to do that ... and recruiting for the event could STILL take 3-5x as long as the event itself. I can hardly imagine what recruiting for League Content must be like on lower population CoH servers.

Basically Tera launched with an overcapacity of servers, because in many ways it's far better to have "too much" server capacity than "not enough" as far as these things go. That overcapacity "balkanized" the playerbase below a critical threshold needed to get communities going "properly" and an in-game economy kickstarted. So the only thing you can really do is realign the populations ... and if you're going to do that at all you might as well defrag your playerbase to the maximum extent possible, which is what it looks like they did.

The "nice" thing about the server move Tera did is that if you're new to the game AFTER the merge, you're going to be starting out in some pretty populated servers with plenty of players on them. Adding new servers after this point, to grow with an expanding player base (should it expand), would be a relatively simple operation, and the number of established players "overflowing" into the new server to create alts would ensure that there's a healthy enough population to get a new server populated and operational from a player perspective.

Yeah, it sucks they had to merge servers ... but that's already over and done, so anyone new to the game after the merge doesn't have to "go through that" and can simply start fresh among well populated servers (as opposed to mostly empty servers because there's too many of them). It's a "bite the bullet NOW so you can heal better for later" kind of thing, as far as I'm concerned.