TonyV

I think we should have a War To End All Wars!

...And then after that, another!

Hmm...

That's an interesting Thiery you have there.

For what it's worth, it sounds like the raid leader kinda sucked too. As he's described, even without any griefers, it probably would have failed because someone wasn't "doing it right." I admire people for trying to run an event like this, but part of being a leader is keeping your cool and working with out-of-the-ordinary situations.

AE is one of my big disappointments with the game. I genuinely feel like the devs and reps haven't given it enough love. When it was created, I thought that the devs and reps would actively participate in trying to make a vibrant content creators community. I expected things like contests, publicity, decent exploit control, and so on. Instead, I feel like it's just kind of been left floating in the wind.

One thing that I was really hoping for was decent control over making farming arcs. The devs were explicitly clear when it was announced and released: Architect Entertainment is not a farming tool. Farms would be nuked, along with the MA slot they occupy so that after a creator got nuked three times, they essentially were locked out of creating AE missions. Exploits would be nuked too, and those who took advantage of them would be "punished"; that is, they would have their ill-gotten gains removed.

Instead, what we got was farmapalooza. If they nuked anything, I sure as heck didn't see it. People openly broadcasted that they were looking for AE farm teams. People openly posted threads here about great farms to run. Even advice on how to create the most productive farms. There was lip service played to trying to moderate the system, but it was useless. And then came the exploits, including some that allowed people to level up to 50 in a day or two. I heard vague rumors that some people got punished (even after Positron posted a message explicitly saying that people who ran the exploit farms WOULD have their gains taken away), but these exploits lasted for months. I'm pretty sure that eventually, they gave up on trying to modsmack people. They fixed the exploits, and a vocal part of the player base cried "OUTRAGE!!!" because of it. The whole experience was stupid. I honestly think that the devs went way too far in trying to please everyone.

And now that the AE system isn't as exploitable, people have left it. Which isn't a bad thing--I don't WANT these people using it!--but in the process, all of those idiot farm arcs are still out there and people are still creating more. Meanwhile, when was the last time we had any kind of publicity or love given to AE by the devs or reps? I might just be missing it because I don't scour the forums like some people do, but I haven't heard anyone at Paragon Studios so much as mention it in years. I don't even know if they're still giving out Devs Choice awards. They tried to do a "guest author" thing and we got, what, one or two people to make arcs?

When I asked them in person about the possibility of getting some user-generated content integrated into the canon of the game via things like contests, I was told, "There are legal issues with that." Well, I know that, but they're certainly not insurmountable! Numina was a result of a contest entry. The movie title on every theater marquee in the city was a result of a contest entry. Some of the in-game art were contest entries. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to, at worst if the ToS isn't enough, get a player to sign a form saying, "This is my original work and I give Paragon Studios/NCsoft full rights to it." So nothing in the AE will make it into the game's canon. I mean, the whole game is make believe and I'm fine with that. But having a make believe game within a make believe game?

I honestly thought--and still think--that the AE system is pure genius. I think that their implementation of it is pretty spiffy, warts and all. Unfortunately, I feel that they really dropped the ball on the follow-through and marketing of it. I think they expected it to kind of work on its own without much oversight or maintenance. I think they were naive in thinking that the farmers wouldn't do everything they could to wrest control of the system away from the storywriters and RPers.

I also think that it could work if they put some honest effort into trying to turn things around. Clear out all of the farm arcs. If you have to, hit the reset button and clear out all arcs, period, and start fresh. Enforce the "this is not a farming tool" policy. Get rid of the draconian text filter. It isn't so limited when naming characters or biographies, and that doesn't seem to cause many problems. There's a system in place for dealing with it already, the /petition system. Hold some contests. I'd love to see the MA system used for things like developing new contacts or even something as simple as developing newspaper/police radio missions. Participate in the MA community--writing arcs, playing and leaving comments for people, doling out dev choice awards, posting about them here, etc.

Also, not to put too fine a point on it, it's our fault the MA system sucks. While I think that the mods don't crack down on farming/exploit arcs like they should, it doesn't change the fact that it's the players that are creating them. It's the players that are five-starring them. It's the players that recruited the hell out of everyone when the system was released, ran the arcs just to powerlevel and collect tickets, and then whined and cried when the natural result--a new population of so-called "AE babies"--came about. I think the devs were naive, but I also think the players were too damn greedy for their own good. Looking at some of the posts here, I don't think that's changed, either. The reason not many people use AE any more is because it's been turned into a cesspool or crappy arcs, and a few people would love nothing more than to see it taken to an even lower level.

Overreact much?

Man, you pansies are lucky. If I ran a game company, the first few times we had an unscheduled outage, I would personally visit all of my subscribers and kick them in the teeth. After I did that a few times, when we had an unscheduled outage and they didn't get anything, they would all be like, "Woot! This ROCKS!!!"

Here's my take on it.

I expect the game to be down sometimes. I expect that once every week or two, they might be pushing something out, so I probably won't be able to access it for a little while. I expect that once in a blue moon, something may go horribly wrong and it's down for a few hours, perhaps even during peak hours, perhaps even while I really want to get something done. I know that every once in a great, great while, downtime might cause me a lot of personal inconvenience, such as servers crashing a mission or two before the end of a task force.

It's just the nature of the beast. Do I like it? Of course not. But do I understand it? Yes, I absolutely do. That's why they put the clause in the Terms of Service that account for it, so that everyone is on the same page up front that your $15 per month (or whatever you spend, whether it's more or its less) does not guarantee you 100% uptime, or even 100% uptime with some scheduled maintenance now and then. When you fork over money or accept the ToS and log in, you're acknowledging (whether you know it or not) that you understand this, too.

Having said that, I would find it hard to believe that if there were a really extended downtime, like on the order of magnitude of days (which happened to Sony last year, remember), they wouldn't try to find some way to compensate players through time or other giveaways. They're not obligated to, but that's just good customer service. Fortunately, they haven't run across such an outage situation and hopefully they won't.

I find complaint threads after an unscheduled downtime mostly disingenuous. They almost always come off as, "Give us something for nothing because of an event you had little to no control over and, realistically speaking, I should expect sometimes!" I really do feel like people try to milk everything they can out of the devs and the company. To some degree, I don't blame them, I want stuff, too. But when they start to get rude and nasty about it, that really pisses me off because they are the ones being unreasonable, not the devs or the company.

He could have memories of being raised by Hero 1 implanted into his noggin', only to find out in some dramatic story arc that it's all fake. That's always a good comic book staple.

Z's right. From what I've heard, Verizon's FiOS wins, hands down. I also respect them for pouring such a massive investment--billions--into their infrastructure with so many companies were looking for ways to gouge their customers and avoid spending any money in the process. Now, all of the telcos and cable companies are struggling under the burden of very old equipment that cannot adequately handle the bandwidth being forced upon them; meanwhile, Verizon is set for the foreseeable future, at least until ultra high speed wireless connectivity is almost universally available. (Which, incidentally, is another area in which Verizon has a clear lead.)

But, it seems like FiOS is out of the question for you. I feel your pain. Being in Atlanta, apparently Verizon has basically said they'll never deploy FiOS here.

So as a second choice, if you have Comcast, I've always been happy with them here in Atlanta. I've always gotten very good speeds from them, I've never run into any bandwidth caps or anything even though I watch a fair amount of video, and in the four or five years I've had it, it's only gone out on me maybe two or three times, and not for very long when it did. My only big complaint with them is their billing department, which screwed up my auto-pay setup at least twice, causing me to get cut off because they thought I wasn't paying my bill.

Can't really speak regarding other cable companies, I've never had anyone else but Comcast. I will say, however, that every time I have done business with AT&T for anything--cable, land line, cell phone, DSL, long-distance service--they have managed to screw me over and provide subpar service. I am currently (thankfully!) completely AT&T-free, thanks to viable options finally coming down the pipeline, and over the years, I've only used them when there was literally no other option open to me. Your mileage may vary, but I'm telling you that there are very few companies that I absolutely loathe, and AT&T is one of them. Avoid them like the plague.

I watched about 15 minutes of Napoleon Dynamite before turning it off because I couldn't take any more. And I don't mean that in a good way. I love stupid movies. One of my all-time favorites is Airplane!. (The exclamation point is part of its title, like the game show Jeopardy!.) Count UHF up there, too. I even moderately liked movies like Clerks. But Napoleon Dynamite was so boring and unfunny I just couldn't stand it. I have a friend who thinks it's hilarious. He thinks I don't "get it." I do get it, it's just as funny to me as an old knock knock joke. (It's not.)

<QR>

I know that some people here are going to look at this as some kind of fatal blow to the French and/or German communities. I just have to point out that most non-English speakers I see in the game are not French or German, they're Brazilian and they speak Portuguese. Apparently, there is a moderately thriving Brazilian contingent of players in the game. Thanks to Google translate, I've even teamed up with some of them on occasion.

If Brazilian players speaking Portuguese, which has never been supported, can find a way to play and hang out with friends and start and join supergroups and even have Portuguese-language fan sites, why would anyone thing that French and German players are just going to pick up and leave en masse? (Sorry, no pun intended.)

Sure, they'll lose some subscriptions. Hopefully not too many. And while I think it's a shame that Paragon Studios and/or NCsoft have to make such decisions regarding resource allocation, I hope that people can see the silver lining to this--that the time and effort that is currently being spent writing and translating everything twice will be much better spent focusing on stuff for the vast majority of English-speaking players. Yeah, I don't like that we'll be getting more attention at the expense of other players, but given that it's going to happen, at least that's something.

The Titan Network would undergo a significant upgrade.

I'm not being facetious. I would literally hire our existing crew to work on it full time, as well as a few more developers. (I suppose DeProgrammer would have to finish basic training first, and we'd have to see what exactly his commitment is to the Air Force before getting him, but I digress into details...) I'd move to California and convince Paragon Studios to form a partnership. Once we had a kick-a** site running--the kind I envision the Titan Network to eventually become if we had virtually unlimited resources--I would also form up a merchandising partnership.

Then I would go to other gaming studios and do the same thing with the intention of eventually providing the same kind of community-driven web sites for others. If everything works out the way I'd like it to, gaming studios would be flocking to us to provide all of these auxiliary services such as community social networking, merchandising, and everything else around a game that's not really directly related to the game. Think of a cross between GuildPortal, ThinkGeek, and Facebook, but without ads or community members having to pay fees--it would be funded by the studios and/or publishers. (Okay, maybe cross-company ads, such as small block ads for Guild Wars or Aion appearing on the CoH Network, and possibly some free community-provided ads for things like fan sites such as The Cape Radio or Real World Hero.)

Hopefully this would be a viable business plan and allow me to actually grow my winnings.

Oh, and I'd buy a top-of-the-line Tesla Model S. Vroom.

I figured I have to drive across Golden Gate Bridge and maybe the Bay Bridge. If the stadia of the 49ers and Raiders have stores, I might drive out to them and get some souvenirs. I probably won't drive down the coast, but who knows? I might look to see if there's some triangular route to Palo Alto so that I can drive down the coast a little bit, the cut over to Palo Alto. Or maybe I'll go up to Muir Woods or something, I don't know. I would like to pop back out the Apple store at One Infinite Loop. When I was out there a year ago, I either forgot or lost a couple of souvenirs that I had bought some people from there, and I'm feeling really bad about that.

So today I booked my flight and hotels for the Player Summit next month. It's funny; a year ago today, I had never set foot in California. As of next month, I will have been there three times.

Because I have yet to really do the touristy stuff in San Francisco that I've wanted to in the past two trips, this time I booked my flight for Tuesday, and unlike my past trips, I'm actually going to be staying in San Francisco, not just making day trips there. Friday, I'll check out of the hotel in San Francisco, rent a car and do some touristy driving stuff, then drive down to Palo Alto to check into Dinah's Garden. I'll stay there through Sunday night, and then on Monday, I'll head back up to San Francisco to catch the plane back home to Atlanta.

So the point of all of this is that I'm going to be in San Francisco from Tuesday night through midday on Friday. Anyone local want to do anything? If not, I'll figure out entertaining things to do; I'm pretty good at finding ways to occupy myself and it's not like San Francisco is a dull and boring place to be. But if someone wants to, I dunno, catch a movie or knows of a cool place to go or geeky thing to do, give me a holler. The current working plan is to just get everywhere before Friday on foot or by Muni since my hotel is just a few blocks from Fisherman's Wharf. If you want to do something too far outside that range, I might prevail upon your willingness to schlep me around.

And of course, if anyone else is going to be making a vacation out of the trip, definitely let me know. The area from San Francisco to San Jose has a LOT of really cool and interesting things to see and do. I'll be by myself (sorry Taxibot fans, Belle's not coming with me this trip ), so I certainly wouldn't mind a tourist buddy! I've got to warn you though, I'm making it my personal mission to visit Alcatraz this time, come hell or high water. (Hopefully neither.)

So how about everyone else? Even if you don't want to/can't hang out with me, is anyone planning on making more of a vacation out of the trip other than just doing the Player Summit and related activities Friday night and Saturday?