TonyV

The "Positron loves the idea" quote was in reference to being able to buy a fourth page of characters, not being able to gift items to other players.

I wish they would enable this functionality. I just don't see what the big deal is. Fine, limit the ability to gift purchases to existing VIP players or something, but make it happen.

Here's TonyV's Eminently Logical Thought Process™. Let's say that I'm a scummy thief and I steal someone's credit card number and buy a bunch of stuff, say, a couple of hundred bucks' worth, and gift it to people. Then Steve, the guy whose card number I stole, calls up NCsoft and tells them, "This card is stolen, I didn't authorize these purchases, you have to not bill me!"

Okay, now NCsoft today is looking at that like, "We've lost a couple of hundred bucks!" However, this is not true. For one thing, there's nothing stopping them from simply taking a lot of the stuff back. I bought Fred access to the AE system? Fred gets an e-mail saying, "We're sorry, but this purchase was made fraudulently," and *poof!* no more access to AE. Granted, Fred may get cheesed off, but it's not like he bought the access, and really, the person to be mad at is the person who stole a credit card number, not NCsoft.

For another thing, keep in mind that these purchasables are for virtual goods. NCsoft isn't really losing any money. It's not like NCsoft has material costs that they're out, because there's no physical product. They're not even out the cost of shipping. We're talking only about bits and bytes. Worst-case scenario, they're out the opportunity cost had someone bought the item legitimately, and because of the above paragraph, that only applies to consumables like inspirations.

This is sort of what I informally refer to as the "Hollywood Piracy Fallacy." The MPAA likes to bandy around numbers like, "because of pirates, we lose 68 kazillion dollars every year!" That assumes that in a perfect world, every single person who snags a torrent off of the Pirate Bay would have spent $10 to see the movie in the theater, $5 to rent it, and $40 for a Blu-ray. So yeah, if every single person in the world--even those 14-year-old kids in Chengdu, Chine who have no income--had spent $55, it might add up to 68 kazillion. In the real world, though, the amount is a lot less.

Anyway... So I absolutely, positively see zero problem with allowing people to gift Paragon Points or buy wishlist items for other people. Yes, there will be some fraud. Yes, you will end up sucking up having to give away some virtual bytes to people. But how much would you make off of people legitimately gifting things? Are you willing to forgo, for example, $100,000 in gift purchases just because you might "lose" (not literally lose, only "lose" via opportunity cost) $5,000 to fraudulent purchases? That just doesn't make good business sense, and it's absorbing a lot of opportunity cost in goodwill and new blood that allowing gifting would create.

I really do hope that the marketing and legal critters at Paragon Studios and NCsoft will seriously reconsider their reticence in allowing gifting.

I got the aura, so I personally don't care about the answer to this question. But just because I know that people will be holding you to it later, do you literally mean "no longer" as in never, you're going to make a special point of making this an all-time exclusive item? Or do you mean, "no longer" as in for now, but possibly as a purchasable add-on in the Paragon Store, part of the reward tree, or by some other means you haven't thought of yet at some indeterminate point in the future?

You know, it's an amusing post, but really, they've already released a lot of information about CoH:Freedom and Issue 21. I don't see them holding much back at this point. It will probably be in open beta pretty soon (i.e. not Soon™), and everyone will be able to find out all the gory details firsthand.

I'm not sure what extra details people are looking for, or what grand secrets they think are still being withheld.

I can't remember exactly where I saw it, but somewhere, I saw a screenshot or a post that indicated that you will still get Veteran Reward badges that are tied to Paragon Reward tokens slotted or something. I'll try to dig it up. One thing I know for sure is that there are going to be annual badges given out. Whatever it was that I read, I had the distinct impression that they're going to stop giving out the existing three-month badges after you get up to something like 90, then after that, you'll only earn annual badges. That last part is just speculation, though.

No one has said anything about expanding the total number of slots you can have on a server. As far as I think anyone knows, it will remain a hard maximum of 36.

Grrr... It's a wiki... Add it! (But for this particular thing, you don't have to; I just did.)

From what I understand, this is how it works.

Let's say that you have 10 total respecs available that you've earned through Veteran Rewards. On Character A, you've used 3 of them. On Character B, you've used all 10. On Character C, you've used none of them.

After the conversion, you will get a glee-mail Certificate on all of your characters for however many you have left. So the Respec vet reward will be taken out of your badge menu and put into your Certificates. Character A will have seven of these Certificates you can redeem at any time. Character B won't have any. Character C will have all 10. If you create a new Character D, he will start with 10.

I don't know how it can be much clearer; it really is a one-for-one match for the existing system. The only thing that changes is where you claim the reward--in the glee-mail system instead of on the badge menu. Everything else is identical.

This is a Good Thing™. Can you imagine what a pain the *** it would be to have to reclaim every single Veteran Reward on every single character you've ever created? Yeesh! But yeah, according to Positron's message above, if you've already claimed on a character, for example, the Nemesis Staff, you won't get to re-pick and get the Blackwand. If you haven't, you'll get a glee-mail to that character with the reward attached that you can use to make your selection.

Um...

Actually, I don't blame you, and I've seen this concern echoed before. I'm quite paranoid myself. However, there are at least three mitigating factors here.

1) Right now*, you can actually download a program such as Wireshark, run some network traces, and verify for yourself exactly what gets sent to the Titan Network servers. Right now*, all of the data is sent in clear text, so the data is there, laid bare for you to pick through as much as you want to get comfortable in knowing that we're not doing anything evil. You can also use something like TCPView to verify that the only external site that Sentinel is talking to is the Titan Network and that it is only making requests to port 80 via HTTP. You can also use Process Monitor and/or Process Explorer to validate that Sentinel is only touching City of Heroes, not watching anything else on your system. It sure as well doesn't write anything to any running processes, as we've all agreed that's a HUGE no-no.

2) We have a bunch of developers at the Titan Network, most of whom are at least passingly familiar with the language we're using for Sentinel. One authored the utility and is intimately familiar with the code base. I've personally looked over the code myself and have not seen anything close to being non-kosher. Our source repository is actually accessible to all of our Titan Network devs (around 10 people in all), and at least one or two have picked through parts of the code. Furthermore, the particular parts that are usually really interesting (and thus picked through the most) are the detection routines. If it was pulling usernames or passwords or anything like that, it would most assuredly be caught by somebody, and there's no way we could keep that kind of conspiracy theory under wraps. In fact, if someone were to find something evil that compromises something as essential as usernames/passwords, I'd want it brought up because I use the thing myself.

3) The Titan Network is totally non-profit. We don't run ads on the site, we don't sell information to third parties, and hosting costs are completely paid for courtesy of community donations and Tony's day job. I've turned down substantial (to me, at least) offers to sell the sites, especially the Paragon Wiki, which gets around 2.5 to 3 million page loads every month. When you think about it, if you take away the financial incentive for stealing people's information or bury evil things in the software, it really doesn't make much sense that we would. If we really were that unscrupulous, there are much easier and more lucrative ways we could be making money--some of which such as running Google ads or something probably wouldn't be terribly opposed to--but we don't.

If you still don't want to use it, I'm not trying to guilt you into doing so. I'm just saying, it's not like we're some shady group you don't know or that the data isn't there to look at and verify that we're on the up-and-up.

* Soon™, with a planned revamp of the sites we are working on, the plan is to switch over to SSL specifically so that third parties--your ISP, your employer, your neighbors sniffing your unsecured wi-fi--won't be able to sniff your personal info off the wire just as you currently can using Wireshark. While this means that you will no longer be able to sniff the data in the clear unless you use some relatively sophisticated SSL interception methods, the honest-to-god truth is that we're doing it so that your data is more secure, not less. I'm worried that a lot of people probably use the same username/password on the Titan Network as they use for their NCsoft and City of Heroes accounts, and I don't want our network getting compromised, in case it ever does, to be the privacy disaster that it could be if everything is sitting there in the clear. In fact, the past few weeks, I've put in a lot of hours in working on the new site encrypting things like the e-mail address you supply because I'm that paranoid and security is really important to me. If you're paranoid too, that's great, but even if you couldn't care less, at least there's a minimum threshold of paranoia baked in from the start just in case a hacker slips past and something evil were to happen.

At some point, I might put some gray matter into transmitting data that's not really private, such as builds, badges, etc., via unencrypted HTTP and reserving SSL for the initial login and token generation.

Edit: Just to clarify because as I re-read my post it's kind of worded funny and possibly open to interpretation, we do not currently nor have we ever (at least, to my knowledge since joining the Titan Network) stored any passwords in clear text. We also have never nor will we ever ask for or otherwise try to acquire your game account password. If anyone ever does, including anyone claiming to be from the Titan Network or even from NCsoft or Paragon Studios itself, please notify NCsoft support immediately.

Who do you think is holding the camera?

(Oh, and FPAANS.)

Does it have to be developed by NCsoft/Paragon Studios?

We've been investigating ways to make this happen. No promises, but don't rule it out.

That's awesome, I love how you designed it based on his biography. Personally, I'd do away with the gloves, but still, a very nice job.

It depends on the specific language. That's one of the reasons why in .NET (which City of Heroes is NOT programmed in) not only defines your standard byte, int, and long, but also Int16, Int32, Int64, and even IntPtr so that "bitness" is as abstract or as specific as you need it to be for your particular use of it.

I know for a fact--because I was recently bitten by this--that in PHP, the "bitness" of your OS will determine how large an integer you can store in a variable. In PHP, all variables are signed. On a 64-bit OS, you can store numbers between -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 and 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. On a 32-bit OS, you can only store numbers between -4,294,967,296 and 4,294,967,295.

I think (though I'm sure I'll be corrected in short order if I'm wrong) that in C and C++, you need special libraries to handle 64- or 128-bit numbers on a 32-bit operating system, that they're not natively supported.

Exactly. No matter how you slice it or dice it, no matter what you call it, no matter how hilarious you think this 3+ year old joke is--it's leeching, plain and simple. Worst of all, it's going out of your way to leech, and doing so after I've specifically asked you not to. I don't like leeches on my team, and I sure don't like leeches getting rewards at everyone else's expense.

After a new cutscene, I usually give everyone a month or so leeway without making a fuss about it to get it out of their system. Then, unless you have a really good reason to ("Hey guys, I'm making a video for my supergroup site") and you let us know ahead of time what you're doing...

/kick

Which part, that kicking? It lets the person know in a very tangible way that they should be listening to their leader and not being stupid. Who knows? Maybe next time, they won't be such an idiot. And if they are, well, they can either get kicked again until they learn, or they can find someone who doesn't mind. Either way is no skin off my teeth.

Or are you talking about the standing around leeching part? Well, if the leader doesn't mind standing around leeching at the expense of others, then I figure I might as well, too. After all, why should I take my task on the trial more seriously than a leech? Like the leech, I could stand around doing nothing while collecting rewards with no risk, too; only instead of just watching my avatar dance, I could actually be doing something else productive.

Do you have a problem with that? Would it make a difference if I just called my standing around and leeching "me being silly and having fun" instead?

Okay, the tl;dr version of my post:

It's not just "being silly and having fun." It's costing people time and effort, it's goofing off while hoping that everyone else will work their butts off and pile on some debt while doing so, leeching rewards off of other people's work, and quite possibly causing 15 other people to not get a reward for the time they've put in because you think it's funny to tell the equivalent of the "chicken crossed the road" joke for the thirty zillionth time.

It's not silly. Silly is going through flex emotes at a costume contest. No harm done. Silly is an green costume with purple polka dots and a pumpkin head. No harm done. Silly is deliberately naming your character Generic 1337. No harm done. Cutscene bombing the Lambda trial when specifically asked not to is nothing but being a tool.

You are SO bad.

Wow, Golden Girl has had a bit of a mean streak lately!