Shadow_Kitty

Gah. I started to draw relational database schemes in my head, including hypothetical layouts of historical expansions as the global chat was introduced later. Professional hazard, I suppose.

Not that it matters, since it would be rather technical, very hypothetical and incredibly off topic. So I'll stop now.

(CEST being Central European Summer Time).

Then some magic happens, so a player in New York would see Wednesday, 13 April 2011, 03:56 and a player in San Fransisco would see Wednesday, 13 April 2011, 00:56.

I.e. the reader would see the time and date entered, but automatically converted to their local time zone and date format (as set in their forum account settings or what you can find out from the network location), and also taking different daylight saving times into account.

If a similar feature were to be introduced to the forum, it would be a lot easier to coordinate events, teams and leagues across the world, fostering a true global community in the spirit of the upcoming Global Server Access feature!

Will there be a way of renaming a global channel? I mean, if we don't like the prospect of the channel "W" becoming "EU W", for instance?

Thing is that globals and account names are completely separate entities. I won't tell you what my account name is, but it's not Shadow_Kitty. So a player with non-colliding account name may still have a colliding global. A player with colliding account name may be well clear of global collision.

There will be a 1:1 collision rate on colliding account names, and another set of 1:1 collision rate on colliding global names. On some of the affected accounts, only account names will collide. On others, only global names will collide. On some, both global names and account names will collide. But these are two sets of collisions that only partially overlap.

From a database perspective, storing the global name in the character record borders on stupidity. It just invites trouble with redundancy and database integrity problems. In a normalized database, it should be stored on the account record.

Sounds a bit like "XP is only valid in Primary Pool. If you want anything in Secondary Pool, you have to exchange your XP to the local currency, SOP."

Games rarely improve if you introduce more currencies.

Actually, the context of the letter is about "ingame identities":

Emphasis mine. The next paragraph also speaks about global names.

I get the impression that they are talking names in general, both account names and global names, but mainly the in-game identity, i.e. the global name.

If they were talking about account names only, why confuse things about in-game identities and global names? And if that is the case, didn't they read the feedback of this thread? People are not that worried about the account name; they're worried about their globals.

No, I think they're talking mainly about global names in that paragraph and the next one. If they're not, they're welcome to come into this thread again and correct me (and while they're at it, provide some answers to the unanswered questions).

Thanks, hun. I'll keep that in mind. Love you too.

That. That will occupy the balancing and scripting team for a bit.

And a revamp of at least one Paragon City zone and one Rogue Islands zone - new missions and a new look, preferably without war walls, using all the tricks of the trade they learnt by making Praetoria (and quite a lot of the tech). That will occupy the world builders and writers, and possibly an artist or two.

The programmers will not be without work. They will have to assist balancing and scripting, but they will mostly be working with a new generated content system for villains and rogues, called Schemes. Schemes are not that different from Paper Missions, in that they are randomly generated from templates, and not that different from Tip Missions either in that they can generate Scheme Points, and also have a tinge of Invention System, in that it is you who decide what to do with the resources you have.

Schemes would be generated from your origin and salvage, in order to build something -- a spell, a machine, a chemical compound or whatnot -- to take over the world. You would get a selection of these missions, and you pick the one that looks suits you best.

Schemes could be:

• Set up a force field around Atlas Park, holding the area hostage for ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!!
• Rob a bank.
• Spread a nerve agent in King's Row, turning people into your complacent slaves.
• Cast a magic spell that drops Talos Island into the Netherworld.
• Hack NORAD and instruct their supercomputer to launch a nuke at PortalCo.
• Turn off the War Walls to get Rikti invading.
• Release Kronos Titans on King's Row.
• Break-out of superpowered villains in the Zig.

...you get the idea. The important thing is that you would instigate the Scheme, using the resources that you have available.

Schemes would generally have three parts: First, you assemble/distribute/release your nefarious invention somewhere in Paragon City. Next, you do your evil deeds, while smashing cars and barrels and post boxes as you would in a mayhem. You can do your evil deeds by activating stuff, defending places, defeating things or people, or escorting big monster while they stomp about - or in any other way.

Third, someone tries to stop you. Exactly who it is depends on how many Scheme Points you have; at low points, it's just regular PPD detectives, but as the points go up, you get PPD psychics, longbow, minor heroes and even signature heroes. If you are defeated, there's the fourth part: breaking out of the Zig.

If you succeed, you get a Scheme Point, which opens more nefarious schemes. It also makes you a bigger threat to the heroes, so they send in tougher opposing forces. You also get your salvage back, in addition to all the salvage you looted during the Scheme.

If you fail, you lose the salvage. You also have to break out from the Zig, and you are no longer a threat to Paragon City, so your Scheme Points drop to zero.

In addition to Schemes, Jay the Sexy would have to work a bit doing cossie pieces: a few assymetrical cossie sets; a proper hakama; bokken for katana, sword and mace powersets; and chainsaw for swords. He would also work really hard making headcapes (i.e. same tech as Ghost Widow's hair and the veil of the Wedding set) available. This is just a freebie for Golden Girl, but an important one.

Marketing will not be jobless, because this should be marketed in a box, but only in EU. NA will have to make do with downloadable content. By this time, the server list merge should be complete, so if an NA player really would want a box, he's welcome to import it from Europe. (nyah!)

That should have most of Paragon Studios working.

Finally, Influence, Infamy and Information shall be replaced with the new monetary unit, Coffee.

Nothing different. Well, I went to the kitchen to snatch a mousie for late night snack while patching the last file after about two hours of attempts, and when I got back, the last file was finally patched.

...but up until that point, I had to repair, repair, repair, repair, and repair. I had some progress in that time: first it was the 34th last file that failed (texWorld.pigg, I think), then 31st last file (sound.pigg), and so on and so on. Each time it halted on a particular file, I had to do at least half a dozen attempts.

Occasionally I tried to exit the launcher and start it again, at which point it tried the regular patch twice (and failed twice) and then it was repair again. I doubt it made any difference except wasting time on failed patch attempts.

I tried to fire up the legacy updater, but it failed to rename the new updater to CoHUpdaterEU.prv, since it wanted to update itself.

I also tried to manually remove the .pigg that was said to be broken, but that didn't affect anything - the updater downloaded a new corrupted version that I still had to repair and repair and repair.

I also tried removing the checksum file and patch files, but as far as I could see, nothing happened.

However, I don't think that any of these did anything. I think it was just perseverance and two hours of try and try and try and try and try again.

In the log, it appears that I receive the correct number of bytes, but the hash* of the downloaded file does not match the expected hash, and the hash was different each time. So I have a suspicion that whatever I receive is corrupted in some random way. Whether it is the server, the updater or the internet in between that corrupts the file, I can't tell.

*a hash is a kind of a fingerprint of a file, and often used to tell whether a file's integrity is compromised. If something is changed, no matter how small, generates a different hash. So if a server gets a nervous breakdown from the strain and sends out a number of packets of 1024 bytes of 0s while crying for mommy, instead of the packets of 1024 bytes of cool TF art, you would receive the exact number of bytes, but the hash would differ. That way, you would know that something went wrong.

Wired, 100 Mbit.

Here's my fun little message in the log:

And a little higher up:

[snippety]

...so for some reason, the patcher downloaded the same file twice, same length, but got different hashes both times and different from what's expected.

Virus scanning is off at the moment, which I'm not comfortable with.

Repairing seems to work a bit better now than before.

As a villain, you would never notice, as the world doesn't change in Paragon City where you are not - except when in your Scheme instances, and there the world would change. Eventually, the signature heroes would be so über that you would lose anyway, but hey, that's part of the deal.

As a rogue, you might notice. But it's not really that big a problem.

I mean, take Frostfire. The number of times he has been arrested is greater than the number of stars in heaven, or slightly bigger. Still we happily pretend he escaped and that we have to beat him up again. Or that he always has been at large, and we have to beat him and send him to jail. Sometimes we do that a couple of times straight, since several people had the mission and didn't autocomplete it.

And that's just the start. How many times have we saved the world from Lord Recluse's nefarious plans? And still, next night, he do the exact same plan again?! How many times did we smash Ms Liberty's pretty head in, and send Statesman and his pals into a rage fit because Libery was a good person and now she's dead? How many times have we liberated Reichsmann from his long incarceration? And so on, and so on.

If you can ignore that Recluse or Statesman or Reichsmann really didn't change the world, you can ignore that your scheme didn't do it either.

Schemes won't be different from those, except for one critical point: it's not Recluse's. Not Statesman's. Not Reichsmann's. It's yours.

...actually, there's one more critical point: Schemes don't exist. That's actually the biggest drawback.

I really wonder how this can be.

The only way to get a collision is to have one NA player with the global @MyGlobal and one EU player with the global @MyGlobal. Only then will there be a collision about the global @MyGlobal. And that means that there will be exactly the same number of affected players in EU as there is in NA.

If there are 5781 affected NA players, there have to be 5781 affected EU players. If there were not, and there were only 578 affected EU players, then there would be 5781-578=5203 non-colliding collisions. And that is contradictory.

So what's going on here?

Is the producer's letter perhaps talking about pre-pending names in general (like wiping all EU accounts' globals as opposed to all NA accounts' globals)? Since this won't happen, why even write it? And why would that require extensive data-mining to figure out?

Or are there really thousands of collisions, but in all those thousands of collisions, nine out of ten EU players has quit and left their account inactive? I find that hard to believe as well. The EU servers are not that depopulated.

Devs, speak to us! How many EU players and NA players have colliding names? How many of those are active EU players and how many of those are active NA players?

This part in particular made me laugh:

Pity they didn't post that tomorrow. It would have made an excellent April's Fools.

Possibly. But I don't see any real benefit for it. It's cool, but the NA players are at least five time zones away and we already have our respective communities, so teaming is not that big a problem. The biggest hitch is that it is a possibility, not a certainty. So I'm still not particularly thrilled.

Wee.

I haven't filled up Defiant yet, and barely touched Union. That means that... in about... 2017 or so, I should have filled up my EU slots and be forced to visit an American server.

Mmm. The price for getting rid of it is a forced name change of the arbitrarily divided people from this side of the room.

(And before you go "it's only a name", please go back some 20 pages or so where the "it's only a name" argument was argued against before.)

You're always welcome to Defiant!

If you make the conscious decision to Drop The EU Global Channels and Let The Community Recreate Them, because it's Too Much Fuzz to Migrate Them, then you have a Plan.

Sadly, a free activation weekend only help those that have an NA global to change.

Those, like me, that have no NA global to change and a pretty obvious name, risk losing the global to an active player who have had the account more than I had mine, an active player who have had the account less I had mine, an inactive player, a NA trial account owned by someone else, or a griefer who thinks that those whiney Euros should just open wide and swallow.

Not if they, as Bloodspeaker said, would make the prefixes permanent:

Emphasis mine.

There has been a sense among EU players of being treated as less valuable customers for quite a while now. For instance, Going Rogue was only released digitally in Europe. If we wanted a box, we would have to import one from the US with an activation code that didn't work. Silly, perhaps, but there are these collectors, you know. But more importantly, there were not that many new EU players since there wasn't a box on the shelf at the stores.

All UK support, that was available at sensible hours, was killed off when NCsoft was restructured and the UK office all but closed down. Now we have to rely on overseas phone at higher rates and at silly o'clock, or about one mail cycle per day.

EU marketing is non-existent. EU shelf presence is non-existent. And so on and so on.

...yes, I think there's some form of consensus, perhaps not that "they owe us", but that we're definitely getting less for our money.

Will this be better with the server list merge? No, I don't think so, not much anyway. We will get access to more servers, that's true. There will be more official events in which we can participate.

But I really don't see how EU shelf presence or marketing will increase. On the contrary, I get a sense that marketing activities will be focused on NA now that they technically don't have to bother about Europe anymore. And we will still have to call at silly o'clock for phone support.