Samuel_Tow

Oops! I know what constantly makes me have that problem - I don't read words letter for letter so much as I read them by look and pattern. Hence, seeing "tech" and "bot" somehow produced "technobot" in my head. Would you believe me if I told you I don't think I've read a word letter-for-letter in some time?

I'm not the one using what amounts to emotional blackmail to present a case of "if you love the game, you will agree to this, and if you don't, then you're selfish." This is a business, and I am a customer. It is neither my job nor, to be quite honest, my place to try and determine what's best for the business. One would assume Paragon Studios have professionals to make those kinds of estimates. As such, the only thing that really matters is how I value the service delivered to me and how I appraise changes to it as proposed.

This is not a matter of opinion. This is a matter of customer responsibility, and trying to paint it as some kind of virtue by altruism or loyalty is a malicious argument of the highest order.

Just because you tagged it as such does not mean you used it as such. When you open with a pretty underhanded attack and follow up with "opinion" which paints how I'm despicable and you're altruistic, that becomes a misuse of "opinion," shifting it into malicious argument fodder. An opinion only counts as such when it is given as an observation and description of a position you hold. When it is used as ammo to shoot down people of a different opinion, specifically when coupled with malicious arguments, it really robs you of the moral high ground to insist that's just opinion and nothing more. A stool is not a weapon up until you smash it over someone's head, just to give you a rough example. And I've been the target of these arguments enough to know one when I see it.

Why is it that I can look at your position, shrug and say I don't agree because I get nothing out of it, but you can't do the same without assassinating my character with these pointless accusations? I don't mind you feeling however you want to feel. I DO mind you when you start feeling like it's your right to rob me of my game because you think I should suffer for your position to be fulfilled. I am by no means absolute here, but if someone's going to make such a decision, it's the development team. NOT you. As it's not my place to guess what's good for the game, so it is not your place to sacrifice my fun for your own view of what's good for the game.

OK, that thread I remember, and I did take some part in it, but I guess I left before people extrapolated subscriber numbers. As I recall, there was never a clear consensus on exactly what those numbers meant (partly why I left it - I don't enjoy speculation). PlayNC no longer post subscription numbers, and many people have inferred that to mean subscriptions are so low they're afraid to post them, but I have personally never been concerned. And I wouldn't put too much stock this, myself, as from what I remember, those were only ever relative estimates.

Suffice it to say it's not an official subscription numbers printout from the company.

Well, any gun that has knockback bullets and dual handguns is really aiming more for style than for realism, anyway I actually rather enjoy Oniblade's gunblades, because they're basically a double-barrelled, double-drummed revolver with a long blade in the middle of the barrels. From playing that game, gunplay and swordplay like this is actually pretty fun to switch between. More fun than switching between sword and guns ala Devil May Cry, at the very least.

You're welcome. At least I'm upfront about it. I pay to play a game, so I hope I'll be forgiven if I care about what I get out of it first and foremost. Last I checked, this wasn't a charity. The future of the game can be ensured in some other way that doesn't bother me.

And please don't try to hide behind the "It's better for new players!" cop-out. It's not. I was a new player once, I had to deal with the naming issues and I came out just fine. I've joined plenty of games and dealt with plenty of naming issues and that has never stopped me, outside of games that don't let me use spaces or capital letters.

If I'm upfront about having a self-serving stance, then you can either do me the courtesy of admitting the same, or at the very least getting off your high horse.

I don't, do I? Do you, per chance, have access to my optic nerve? Or do you monitor my broadband traffic? Kindly avoid making stupid assumptions like this, because I very much do see these names together from time to time, enough for it to bother me.

And, really, aren't you the one trying to cop-out with selfishness? Aren't your imaginary new player benefits just as mythical as my problem as I see it? Because if you have evidence that this will help new players, I'd like to see it. Otherwise, you're really turning yourself into a hypocrite by latching onto my own self-serving agenda while pedalling your own equally selfish one. YOU don't care about possibly ambiguity, this doesn't happen much to YOU, YOU want more names. Well I don't care about what you want any more than you appear to care about what I want.

This comes down to personal opinion. Stop trying to pass yours off as incontrovertible fact agreed upon by all, please.

In a game whose revenue fell 25% this past quarter, perhaps you should consider that pissing off the existing player base might not be in your best interest. Also, would you kindly provide a source for that subscriber number estimate? That's the first I've heard of it.

I thought the same thing, actually, but... do you think anyone would ever see that? Honest question.

It's not always the case, but it's often enough the case to where it WILL spawn same names. That's the point. I don't want to deny people the names because they're bad, I just don't want ambiguity in the naming system.

Please, try to read this in as positive a light as you can, because I won't be held responsible with how it comes out. But...

ARE YOU NUTS?!? Eight times as long as the game currently lasts? When Jack and Matt got together and designed the 40-50 game, they decided to make it last as long as the 1-40 game. And you know what that created? Endless padding, crap missions, awful narrative and A BIG WASTE OF TIME. Otherwise decent stories are stretched out and stretched out until they're no longer interesting and they are a PAIN to do. To Save a Thousand Worlds is a good idea in principle. By the third time you're investigating Dimension 1, then Dimension 2, then Dimension 3, even the most patient player will admit that this is shameless, needless, AGGRAVATING padding. Saving the Statesman from a sinister prison should make for a good story, but when the bulk of it is spent getting the "I'm sorry, but your Statesman is in another dimension" screen over and over again, then it turns into a crap story.

Granted, World Wide Red is a great story, but it's three story arcs all strung together into a single one, and Crimson has three-mission mini-arcs for ALL of his other missions. The sheer amount of work gone into just one contact is staggering, and he doesn't even give you more than a couple of levels, all told.

Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that the whole game turn into an endless series of Dr. Quaterfield followed by Unai Kemen followed by Sara Moore? THIS IS NOT FUN! They specially sped up levelling in the 40-50 range exactly BECAUSE people found it a huge, unfun, boring drag to slog through level after level after level with no visible progress and all the powers they actually wanted, with the possible promise of return at some point in the distant future when they get to 50 and can start amassing whatever the "epic loot" is at the time. Believe it or not, most people don't enjoy an endless grind.

And, really, the game HAS to end, and end in such a way that EVERYONE can see this end and get the closure it brings. I HATE HATE HATE games that waste my time and still never end. I hate games that take so long that I grow old before I see the end. I hate games that dick around hold me down because of someone else's arbitrary idea of how long I should take to level up. The very idea that MMOs should take a frikkin' long time is absurd, and is little more than a developer trick to make money. It is not, nor has it ever been, a good thing that players should want.

Just like I don't watch a series that never gives me an ending, so I would never, ever, EVER play a game that never finished. At all. And there's a very good reason why this is the only MMO I play.

Without any recharge, Snap Shot has a sustained cost of 1.178 endurance points per second and Aimed Shot has a sustained cost of 0.678. Together, they cost more than your native recharge, and that's without any recharge buffs. Both together give around 40% uptime, however, so reducing their recharge might just end up making them take over most of your time.

Mind you, Aimed Shot is quite cheap. Most powers of its calibre tend to cost 0.7-0.8. Aimed Shot is VERY expensive, though, like most fast T1 Blasts.

Except our already-existing colour-coding scheme works based off the ASCII of names, and two identical names would have the same sum of code digits. And if you alter it, then you end up yanking the system from under people. And even if you alter it, you still end up running against people with poor colour perception, poor monitor colour balance or just colours that look a lot alike. I have good colour vision and I still mix up the colours between cyan and teal, for instance. And even when I can tell between two colours right next to each other, I can't always tell which is which just by itself.

I don't know about Champions Online, but you don't see people with similar names in City of Heroes because the game forces people to deviate. The reasons everyone always complains that good names are gone is that they want Fire Man or Electro Lass, and those are OBVIOUSLY already taken. If they're taken and many, many people want them, then that results in many, many people having and using them.

Well, I wouldn't want this kind of trade, and I'm afraid I'm not very generous with arguments that encumber me so that other people can have what they want. I'm all for live and let live, but when it bugs ME, it has to do something for ME, or I'm not happy. I don't find unique names problematic, restrictive or in any way bad. As such, I see no need for a system to make non-unique names possible at ANY cost, no matter how small. Just as you don't mind the ambiguity but mind the restrictions, I don't mind the restrictions but mind ambiguity.

OK, can I be in a Fruity Loops Consortium, then? I'm sure you guys won't mind me if I start calling Super Groups that.

Yeah, it's called personal preference. I'm sure you've heard of it.

Their tails are actually pretty good in terms of technology, but their implementation is... Odd. Granted, I don't know of many bipeds with long tails, but their tails are always up and perpendicular to the body, which just looks REALLY weird. Even from a purely physical standpoint. Here's a an experiment for anyone interested: Hold you arm forward straight out of your body. Now try to hold it there, for, say, a couple of hours. Let me know when it starts to hurt That's what bugs me about this - naturally, body parts either hang down or lock up, and very rarely just stick out without support. A cat's tail, for instance, is either down and curve, or up and straight, and very rarely straight back for long periods of time. So to have that thing stick out perpendicular to the body all the time is just INCREDIBLY awkward.

That, and Champions Online's graphics just make me cringe every time. Whenever I see a screenshot, I'm reminded of Final Fantasy 7, or possibly Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf. I keep wanting to ask "Where are the textures!" and "Are the details stuffed way down low?" Because the whole thing looks like way back in the day when my Tomb Raider 2 game would run out of memory and stop rendering textures. You could still see where everything was thanks shading, but everything was a flat white colour.

So, yeah, I'd expect more from our tails than I've seen in Champions Online, for the simple reason that our graphic designers have good taste and serious skill Graphic engines do not a good game make. Talented graphic designers do, and our just happen to be top-notch.

That actually gets into a topic that's rather interesting from a psychological and storytelling point of view. I want to call it verisimilitude, but it's more than that. I've seen a lot of fictional stories, some more crazy than others, but by the by, the best of them are grounded in concepts that we can readily recognise either from our everyday life, or from contemporary-settings stories. Take Aliens, for instance. It's about as unreal as it gets, yet the conventional-looking technology, the more recognisable "marines" in their drills and their antics, and the higher emphasis on action as opposed to psychedelic nightmares gives the movie the kind of believable grounding that makes it both fantastic and relatable at the same time. It's a lot like a war movie in execution, but wrapped around some relatively serious fiction, which hides the real and makes it interesting.

Antropomorphic characters are a lot like this. Anthro artists have a LOT of leeway about what they tweak on the characters, as anime artists have well demonstrated, provided they keep certain key points that still make us see these characters as persons, even if not necessarily human people. I couldn't begin to describe what it is that one must keep, though if I had to guess, face and relative body shape are important, as well as a human-like personality. It strikes a certain balance between something being an obvious stand-in for something real we can perceive on a subconscious level, but with a presentation as something unreal, which interests us on a higher-brain logical level. Well, interests those of us who like the unusual, at the very least.

Going too mundane, such as slapping down fantastic characters in high school AU and sidelining their uniqueness to the point where they may as well be palette swaps of every webcomic ever is detrimental for a fantastic story, as it just bogs down the fantastic into the mundane and ruins the illusion. Going too unusual, however, has the same effect. Creating characters who are so alien that they lack a face, cannot comprehend human emotions, have an unrecognisable body are basically one step removed from something you'd find scurrying about behind your toilet seat just alienates people and tosses the thing right smack-dab in the middle of the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley itself is an interesting concept. Most people believe it happens when a character looks very human but isn't, yet most people miss the point as to WHY that is. We can trust humans to act like a human should, and we distrust machines, but we understand what they're capable of and simply follow safety precautions to avoid getting hurt by them. A machine that has the capabilities and inclinations of a human, but which cannot be trusted to value life, privacy, respect and emotion is frightening, because it is dangerous, yet cannot simply be shut down when not in use. It's a question of conscience and relatability that keeps characters feeling real, and it's a staple of horror movies to play with this. Dangerous machines that can spontaneously turn on of their own malevolence while you have your hand stuck between the gears doing maintenance, or people who look like humans and talk like humans but you know there's an unthinking insect mind inside which only pretends and could try to devour you as soon as you turn your back.

As far as this relates to anthropomorphic characters, a GOOD one feels as much like a human being that you can feel comfortable regarding it as one DESPITE its looks, yet is enough unlike a human visually that it's interesting in and of itself. Far too many people fail to understand this, both artists and public, leading to anthropomorphic art that's... Disturbing and to observers who refuse to acknowledge the bulk of the good for fear of a fraction of the bad.

Like I said - muscle-bound body-builders in shag carpets

Isn't that kind of missing the point, though? For me, it comes down to a dislike for the mundane and usual, and a preference for fantastic scenes and settings involving weird and wondrous creatures that aren't what you'd see in the everyday world, but retain enough humanity for us to be able to work with on an instinctive basis. Faces, body shapes, personalities and psychology, all of those things are needed to maintain a believable and understandable fictional world. In fact, some of the best antropomorphic works tend to take inhuman characters but treat them like humans anyway.

It's when they start getting off-track into weird crap like laying eggs, shedding skins or basically conforming to the more bizarre of animal biology that it starts to get disturbing. Even for me.

I can't tell a female from a male Wookie, but I can recognise Chewbacca HIMSELF, and I can tell that's him with photoshopped bikini on. This isn't a question of appeal or artsy preference, it's a question of picking your battles, and I honestly don't think that's a good example.

For the record, I've seen artwork of female Wookies, as well, or Wookies that were said to be female. Like all the Mass Effect 2 Tali erotic pictures, it has the same problem - people are trying to work with canon that doesn't lend itself to this sort of thing. Lucas didn't design Wookies to resemble humans enough for us to ascribe human-like physique and draw sexy ladies. All wookies, male and female, are basically tall body-builders wrapped in a shag carpet, so trying to make human-like females of them is a lost cause. Either you break canon so bad it no longer resembles, or you end up with a grotesque caricature that people aim and fire at "furry fans."

To this effect, I agree with you - that is not good. But it's kind of obviously not good even to said furry fans, so it's more of a straw man, really. It's funny to look at, but it isn't actually accurate satire.

That, too, is a straw man. I don't want to assume what the Technobot's ultimate goal is, but mine isn't one of political correctness, but rather one of tolerance. You find these things absurd and/or ridiculous, but then YOU don't get to decide what is and what isn't. I don't find them ridiculous, myself, and I find artists drawing in this field to be, by and large, quite very capable. It's a case of personal preference within the context of diverse preferences and tolerance between them. I happen to find rap, death metal, women's fashion and silver and golden age comic books to be absurd and ridiculous, but I don't really hold it against people who like these things. I might make fun of comic books occasionally, but I try to laugh WITH the comic book fans, not AT the comic book fans. For instance, if I want to make fun of comic book absurdity, I might bring up Amazons Attack and watch people's eyes roll out of their heads, but I'd avoid pointing to, say, Green Lantern, laughing and yelling "He has a stupid name! What a ridiculous character!" Yes, he has a stupid name, but he is a very popular and, from what I can tell, very well-written character. Even if it's not my cup of tea, people still like him. And well they should.

This is an interesting social phenomenon. At one point, offending people became "dangerous," so political correctness was born, using blanket statement straw men to condemn offending material. Years later, people are using political correctness itself as a blanket statement straw man to excuse trying to offend people. Even if political correctness is bad (and it is), the polar opposite is no better.

All MMOs that aren't WoW lose numbers when a new MMO is launched. And between Aion, Champions Online and now Star Trek Online, a downturn is to be expected.

What happens when you see two people with the same name, then? Without global appended, how do you tell them apart? How do you tell their chat apart? A non-unique, global-appended naming system fails for the same reason all of those fail - they need to be unambiguous in all situations but visible in no situation at all, which is an oxymoron.

Right, no Legacy pistol. I did wonder about that. I honestly hadn't looked, so I assumed they always did that, but if you're right and it really is new, then COOL! I love little details like this

Just gives me more reason to love our development team. Can't wait to see what NEW pistols BABs has in stock for us.

Automatics slide back as they fire. I don't think this is new, as we're still using the old models. Maybe they're just animated like this?