TonyV

The nearest In-N-Out to me (Atlanta, GA) is in Allen, Texas--820 miles away, according to Google Maps, and would take me 13 hours and 50 minutes to reach.

Thanks, but I suppose that I'll just stick with Wendy's and an occasional Five Guys burger. (I'd probably eat Five Guys every day if I could get away with it and not die in a month from my heart exploding.)

If you're ever in Atlanta and want a burger with local flavor, though, you have to go to The Vortex in Midtown. Scary? A little, but damn, it's good. Be sure to read the "Rules" section. It has such nuggets as, "If you order something that is not on the menu and we do make it for you, we will charge you whatever damn price we want to and you will thank us for it...Requested deletions will not reduce the price of any menu item, tightwad."

Gotta admit, not being a "fashionable" person, I didn't expect much from this. I was pleasantly surprised, because I thought it was exceptionally cool. It does look really polished, and I can tell you've put a lot of time and effort into it. Can wait for the next issue!

I just checked my constant ping, and it seems to be consistently up now and has been for a while.

Hey all, just a quick heads-up.

Right now, I can't access the Titan Network. While that's kind of sucky for me, I've found that it may be a lot of other people affected, too. After troubleshooting what is going on, I've figured out that there is an intermediary network provider between Comcast and Linode (where the server is hosted) that has a link down. The intermediary is nLayer, and specifically, the hop between 68.31.94.118 and 69.31.95.130 is down, with very brief (a few seconds per pop) intermittent uptimes.

Just to be clear, this is not a Titan Network outage. The server is up and running, and if you happen to be on a network that doesn't go through nLayer, several of our devs have verified that you can get to all of your stuff fine. However, with these upstream provider outages, it can get hairy; it's hard to tell exactly how widespread it may be. It may just be Comcast in the Atlanta area, or it could be a regional or even a national outage across one or more networks.

If you can't get to the Titan Network, I hate to say it, but we're kind of at the mercy of nLayer. Hopefully they'll fix the connection soon.

My question for those that are having a hard time staying alive:

What the hell difference does it make? "Dying" in this game has such an insignificant penalty that it seems kind of silly to me to get all worked up about it. I mean, for crying out loud, you're level 50 already. Is it going to make getting to level 51 that much slower? Oh yeah, that's right, you can't get to level 51. You have nothing to lose when you "die."

I understand that it can be frustrating to fail at a challenge such as this. But my gosh, man, I think it's even sadder that there are people in this game who expect to be able to succeed at what has been pitched as the toughest content in this game with one or two runs without faceplanting. Even if you faceplant over and over... So what!!? Get your butt up and do it again! After you log off tonight, that debt will all just magically fade away while you accumulate patrol experience anyway!

And I know I'm beating a dead horse, but if you don't like these trials, I'll say again, so what!!? A lot of other people seem to like them just fine. Do you think that you're the Privileged One, the person that Paragon Studios aims to please, no matter how much other people get bored and/or like things that you don't? I'm just so tired of this entitlement attitude, that the game has to not just be fun for you, but to 100% please you all the time, no exceptions, everyone else be damned.

Now, that's not to say that these new trials are perfect. You know what else wasn't perfect? Issue 1. Also, Issue 2. And you know, Issue 3 had some things that people didn't like, either. Come to think of it, let's see, Issues 4, 5, 6 (Enhancement Diversification!), 7, 8, 9 (End-game loot!), 10, 11, 12... Aw hell, every issue has had its detractors! There seem to be some here who think that unless an issue is 100% perfect, that every single player bar none loves it, they should just go back to the drawing board and start over. With all due respect, if Paragon Studios operated according to your standard of excellence, we'd still be playing the original City of Heroes game that was released in 2004, with maybe a few non-controversial (is there such a thing?) bug fixes.

So seriously, chill out. These trials are winnable. As others have pointed out, you will get your shinies unlocked. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But soon, and for the rest of your life. I will personally guarantee you that in a year, all of this sound and fury will signify nothing. It's likely that you will have forgotten all about your frustration yesterday and today. Hopefully, if you run across this thread at that time, you'll realize how silly it all comes off as.

Edit: And lest you think I'm some sort of "dev fanboy" or some kind of raid zealot, I'm really not. I like the devs, but they've irritated me a few times on occasion. You know, just like almost every other person I've run across in my day. As for end game raids, I really don't care one way or another about them. I haven't even done these "ZOMG THEIR HARD" trials yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I fully expect to "die" many times. I'll probably say something like, "Crap!" when I do, get back up, and go at it again. I probably won't even be on a winning one for a week or two, maybe longer. That's okay, it's not like I'm not going to be playing the game in a month or two and I have to get it right now.

You think you have it bad?

I'm a blaster who took Heckling as my primary. I know, I know; in hindsight, for a non-Tanker, that wasn't the best choice. It's probably compounded by my secondary, which is Woodworking. For my pools, I have Poetry, Shadow Puppetry (which actually does come in handy sometimes), and Juggling (which was made useless with the emotes released in the Magic booster). Come to think of it, my epic powerset (Quilting) really could have been better.

Needless to say, I'm not doing so well on these Incarnate trials with my powersets as they are. Even so, it really makes me want to try to figure out interesting ways to get the job done, not so much to come here and post snarky messages. *shrugs...* Guess I'm weird that way.

As you all know, we've been updating our utilities and web sites at the Titan Network lately. Especially with a few new developers coming on board, it's freed us up to finish a new site we've had in the works for about a year now.

Introducing Titan Singles!

The idea is simple, and especially relevant with all of the discussion recently around solo players and the new teaming system. We got to thinking, what if in the game of life, our community members have been playing solo, but deep inside they've really been wanting a teammate to help out with aggro? Whether you're looking for a permanent leveling pact or just a one-night pick-up group, now you have a place to LFT!

Come find your sidekick (or henchman, or mistress, or even an entire supergroup!) today. Be sure to check out the "speed run" section, where you can get an instant hook-up, or our "stealth" option if you prefer just to browse all stalker-like. Be sure to check out our furry-friendly section!

The site is at single.cohtitan.com, drop by today!

Point of interest: This thread shows up as, "Join the City of Heroes team" in the abbreviated text on the front page. It kind of comes off as a solicitation for job applicants.

We have some new recruits that we're talking to (yay!), but we're also still looking for one particular skill set that would come in very handy.

We need one or two good web page designers. These would be people who may not necessarily be back-end coding gurus, but who can set up decent prototype layouts. We need people who are very familiar with HTML standards and CSS, who can do things like design spiffy-looking tables and divs, fluid columns, position elements, and so on. It's also really important to be able to operate within the confines of standards; code would have to be able to run cleanly through the W3C (X)HTML Validator and W3C CSS Validator.

We do try to avoid code designed by WYSIWYG tools. It's not that we hate such tools. For getting an initial design they're fine, but personally, I've found that they tend to mangle things up with redundant code, glitchy CSS, and so on more than they help design things. We do target the sites to be compatible with IE 8+ and Firefox 3.5+. You don't have to worry about compatibilities with ancient browsers. We use the HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype on our sites, though at some point in the not-too-distant future, we'll probably migrate to the HTML 5 doctype.

If that fits your description and you're interested, give us a holler, we could sure use your help!

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For what it's worth, I think that the method they've described is less than ideal. Personally, I think that they should state some goals and design a system to implement it. Right now, their goal is explicitly stated as, "minimum number of users impacted." I'd like to see something more like:

• Current subscribers get priority over people whose accounts have lapsed.
• The above point is tempered by people whose accounts have not been lapsed very long, possibly due to a mistake or a short break.
• People who have been playing (i.e. paying) get priority over people who haven't been playing as long.
• Least number of people impacted.

I think that something like this would work a lot better:

• If there is a conflict between an active EU and an active NA account, whoever has the most paid active time under their belt gets priority.
• For purposes of determining priority, people whose accounts have become inactive within the previous four weeks will be considered active, but the time your account has been inactive will not count as paid active time as described above. If your account is inactive due to a billing glitch or you are taking a short break, likely to return, you will not be adversely affected.
• If there is a conflict between an active account and an inactive account, the active account will have priority. It doesn't matter whether the active account is an NA account or a EU account, or vice versa.
• If there is a conflict between two inactive accounts, the inactive account with the most paid active time under their belt gets priority.
• If there is a tie (e.g. if both accounts are trial accounts with zero paid active time), both global names are released. Whoever logs on first and gets the global name back retains it.

Such a system really shouldn't be that hard to implement with a few database queries, and I think that people would be a lot happier. I completely understand that frustration of my European brethren at the possibility of someone having created a long-expired trial account with their global name, and someone who has been a loyal customer for years loses out to someone who has never paid NCsoft a dime. I would be angry too.

Please, though, keep in mind that as some have mentioned above, getting all angry and indignant about it is not the way to get them to change their mind. Send some PMs to the community reps, post some messages politely explaining how you feel and requesting them to think it through further, and there is a decent chance that they will change their mind and do something else. They have before for such issues.

And just so I won't be accused of answering the question posed in the title of this thread, my answer is this:

The question is completely irrelevant. Sometimes being taken out of your "comfort zone" is fun. Sometimes it's not. Someone above mentioned this, and it was very insightful, that fun and "comfort zone" aren't directly related.

I'm one of those old fogies that remembers way back when Pac-Man came out. No one had ever seen anything like it before. It was totally new, and practically everyone who played it was out of their "comfort zone." Those machines also made Namco billions of dollars.

As an avid reader of tech headlines, a few days ago, the news that an adult-targeted party game called "We Dare" for the Wii has been pulled. Obviously, that was out of people's comfort zones, and as a result, it may never even be released.

Should games take us out of our comfort zone? I don't know, should games have pizza in them? What difference does it make? The question has no bearing on whether a game will be more fun or less fun.