Sorciere

You do realize what happens when you get a superpowered division-by-zero error?

It's bad. The overlooked Terra Volta Y2K bug paled in comparison.

Not likely.

First, it's copyright, not copywrite. Sorry, pet peeve.

Second, it'd actually be a trademark infringement, not a copyright infringement.

Third, different companies can own and use the same and similar trademarks under a number of circumstances. If you search in TESS (the USPTO's online trademark search system), you'll see plenty of duplicate trademarks. As long as the similar trademarks don't lead to customer confusion, there generally isn't a problem. You could, for example, have the same words used by different companies for a car and for a prescription drug. These products and companies don't compete with each other, and no customer is likely to accidentally buy a car when she needed a painkiller or vice versa. (There are exceptions, such as when using famous trademarks, or when you, say, use an unrelated trademark to imply endorsement -- if you created a product called the "Special Hannah Montana Salad Dressing" without securing permission, you'd likely have a swarm of Disney lawyers descend upon you.)

Incidentally, the exact trademark registered by NCSoft is "City of Heroes Going Rogue".

NCSoft has advertised for CoH in the past, usually online.

Does not matter to me, still. Currently, I'm mostly working during these hours. Even when I wasn't working (e.g., when I was on maternity leave or during a day off), it's a maximum of four hours each week. I'd simply schedule my playtime accordingly and do other things during maintenance (cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, reading a book, watching a DVD, doing stuff with my kids or my husband, etc.). I don't have to sit in front of the computer every waking hour (in fact, I generally prefer not to, given that my job already requires that).

No. It's very obviously a bandaid fix that is going to be refined once they have the time to do it.

Besides, getting mad would be an overreaction regardless.

I play on the US servers, but I currently live in Europe (the UK, to be precise), and I can't see why this would be harsh. In fact, the net effect on my play will be pretty much exactly zero.

Well, right now, if you're solo (i.e., for the Ouroboros task forces), you don't even get bosses -- they get downgraded to lieutenants, want it or not. Upgrading foes only does so much when they don't have the hit points to live long enough to use their enhanced abilities.

I can't help but think that this change was more of a quickfix and not fully thought through.

"We have always been at war with Eastasia."

You usually get these comments not because of what you're saying, but because of how you're saying it. In short, it's not being critical that gets you these responses; your posts in general have an aggressive tone and look like they're first drafts, with barely an effort made to get spelling right, let alone to communicate. People will thus (not unreasonably) assume that such posts are flamebait and react accordingly.

They are d20 mechanics insofar as they involve rolling a d20 and retain certain core elements in a mostly superficial fashion. I mean, it's D&D, except it doesn't have classes and levels? It's D&D combat except that it doesn't have hit points and damage rolls?

Well, except that the game mechanics of Mutants & Masterminds had precious little to do with those of D&D 3/3.5 except in a very superficial manner (starting, very sensibly, with scrapping the leveling system of D&D).

Okay, apparently I'm blonde. I just didn't see the scrollbar.

However, now that I'm looking at it more closely, the scrollbar is probably a poor decision from a usability perspective, as it just adds unneeded mouseclicks for a very common use case.

Well, 1680x1050 on my Macbook Pro -- I somehow doubt that this counts as a "lower" resolution. Also, it looks more as though the menu gets clipped; there's plenty of room left on the screen.

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. All of the above (script immunity, ubiquitous healing, resurrection) have been done successfully in existing roleplaying games.

That depends entirely on your personal preferences. If the escapism aspect of roleplaying is important to you, then having a small number of superheroes suits you better. But having superheroes be more common also has its advantages: You get to explore different kinds of storylines, you don't have to constantly create threats to end the world to provide challenges for the characters, and so forth. It may not be your cup of tea, but different people have different criteria for what they are looking for in a roleplaying game.

Not to mention that some players already DO roleplay in City of Heroes, so saying that "it wouldn't work" is probably too strong a statement.

Well, people are talking about it less because out of a sense of entitlement, but more because they think that if you have a fuller experience (especially when it comes to teaming, which is an important part of the game), you will be more likely to actually purchase a permanent subscription. Functioning tells and group invites are not disabled because Paragon Studios thinks that for having them you should pay the full price or that they go bankrupt because everybody will fanatically get new trial accounts and level countless characters to 14 if only they could use tell with other people; they're disabled because they were being abused by the RMT crowd. If that weren't the case, they'd be put back in in a heartbeat to make for a more attractive sales pitch -- because that's what a trial account is.

Alas, our cows didn't talk. On the other hand, maybe that was a good thing.

If you have enough horses (say, because you offer riding vacations), then other farm activities (specifically, harvesting hay and straw) can come pretty naturally. From a certain size on, buying food and straw instead of harvesting it yourself is not necessarily the best option, economically speaking.

There are intermediate solutions. For example, you could put a cooldown on group invites and tells (e.g., 5 minutes) and allow you to always respond to tells, but still forbid broadcasts. This would make using this for RMT ads ineffective, but still allow some basic communication functionality. You could also allow players to turn on an option to receive tells and group invites (off by default for non-trial accounts) so that trial account players who start together can invite each other to a team or that a vet who has helped a trial account player earlier to still receive tells from that player.

Your best option as a trial account player currently is to use the help channel as well as you can (it's the only channel that is open to trial accounts aside from the local and team channels).

Even if you absolutely want to use "=" for assignment, there is nothing that normally prevents you from using the "=" sign for equality, too. This is only a problem in C, because it allows you to use an assignment in expressions. This was probably a poor choice to begin with and has caused a lot of unintended errors (writing "if (a = b)" where you meant "if (a == b)"). Many C programming style guides therefore suggest that you write "if (constant == expression)" instead of the more natural "if (expression == constant)" to avoid getting tripped up by this error.

That's not a clever trap door, that's another design mistake. Most of the time, you want to actually test for string equality, not reference equality. But in Java (and other programming languages that made the same mistake, such as Eiffel), you have to actually write a.equals(b) or something similar.

It's a design that arguable violates the principle of least surprise. It probably had its origin in Java originally being a fairly primitive language designed for embedded systems which, at this point, had pretty much ignored the previous decade of research in programming language design.

Using ":=" for define-as-equal is also pretty common in mathematics these days, especially for blackboard usage, so as a mathematician you shouldn't really have a problem with it, either.

Well, the solution is simple: Don't use (A)D&D rules for superhero games. That's like trying to use motor oil for cooking instead of olive oil. Don't be surprised at getting inedible results.

There are plenty of fine Superhero tabletop RPGs (Champions, Mutants & Masterminds, Capes, With Great Power) or you can adapt existing rulesets that are suitable for superpowered characters (Amber Diceless, HeroQuest, Everway).

You wouldn't say that if you were a mathematician. The equals sign had served just fine as a comparison operator in mathematics for centuries (and in programming languages for a couple of decades) until Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie decided to misappropriate it as an assignment operator for the C programming language. Having made that choice, and having also introduced an error-inducing way of using assignment operators in expression (because they were essentially designing a higher-level assembly language where programmers could optimize by hand because modern-day optimizers were a bit too much for the standard hardware of the day), they then needed a separate comparison operator to properly disambiguate it.

Sadly, this choice then got proliferated to a number of other programming languages, even though it wasn't even necessary there. Of course, a large number of programming languages refused to follow suit (such as pretty much all functional languages, where assignment is either completely absent or available only as a rare exception -- such as OCaml).