TrueGentleman

Frogs starred Oscar winner Ray Milland and featured Sam Elliott, who's been in great movies from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to The Big Lebowski.

Also, I'm going to predict that the upcoming movie adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, which stars old pros Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, and John Hurt, solid character actors Mark Strong and Toby Jones, and up-and-comers Thomas Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch, is going to be a lugubrious mess.

Some don't, and some have higher expectations for teaming, in which case the question of whether the team leader takes the time to /t first is a good indicator of the experience.

The OP's point, however, is that the introduction of F2Per with CoH Freedom is going to change community standards to such an extent that player preferences won't matter. Blind tells will be what all team leaders will wind up using by default.

Either that, or players in the /search window will be labelled F2P, Premium, and VIP (something that might promote stratification in the community). Perhaps someone on the beta could confirm if players are flagged by status in some fashion.

Wow. Talk about persona non grata. I suppose that will prevent F2Pers begging for inf. and enhancements, but it's still pretty draconian.

The fact that out of all of the CoH products, the retail box will still be sold after August 30th suggests that some bets are being hedged. Apart from that, though, the indications suggest CoH Freedom is going to happen sooner rather than later.

EDIT: n.b. September 1st is of course the first day of the last quarter in not only the calendar year, but also NC Soft's fiscal year.

Just to emphasize how many quality-of-life boosts we've received in the transportation sector, the shortest path is on Blueside via the tram -> Founder's Falls -> RWZ entrance, a path in which the Vanguard base is literally next door to public transportation. (Founder's Falls is also convenient from both Ouro and Pocket D warps.) On Redside, it's just ferry -> North Cap -> RWZ entrance (similarly nearby). Neither of those are obvious for a first-time player, however.

With costume purchases as a main revenue stream for CoH Freedom, the business managers are not going to leave the slightest margin for missing a sale, which means that the tailor function must be right in players' faces. Really, I'm surprised that we don't all get the /tailor function off the bat.

Those measures would be only a partial solution as griefers can disrupt gatherings through "physical" means, e.g. spamming powers, abusing the game's collision-detection, swarming the staging area.

Unless mentor and F2P channels are officially introduced, the help channel will be unable to continue its function since it's the only broadcast-type one available to F2P players. As things stand, help will likely become CoH's "Barrens Chat", a trend already noticeable on the more populated servers.

This is entirely typical in F2P systems, just like the have's-vs-have-not's community division, and should not be shocking.

The devs have been clear that their decision to limit freeps' communication options was to curtail spam, RMT advertising, and griefing, which they felt was an adequate tradeoff.

This isn't an issue of precedent but one of scale. A couple of griefers trying to disrupt a costume contest by spamming powers, playing super-speed pinball, or trash-talking local is one thing, but a dozen (or two or more) is quite another.

"Prepare for unforeseen consequences," as the old saying goes.

Very well, although that thread is only a couple of weeks from its one-year anniversary, I've added my input.

No other video game but CoH, whether past, present, and future may be discussed on these forums, it has been decreed.

No, we must operate under the legal fiction that no other video game but CoH exists, lest the forums collapse.

As for the trailer, meh. While it's nice to have some variety in sci-fi art direction than the usual grim 'n' gritty space marines, the trio of standard-issue protagonists - the caster chick with bunny ears, the impetuous gun-wielding scouter dude, and the heavy weapons merc-tanker - don't suggest much originality under the hood.

D&D merely absorbed Moorcock's Elric books the same way it did Tolkien's and Howard's. Incidentally, Moorcock's fantasy setting for them inspired its own long-running pen-and-paper RPG, which was named, naturally, Stormbringer.

2011, but there's an old tradition of Elric cosplay.

Perhaps instead when CoH Freedom launches, the Paragon Market will offer a "Permanent Log-in" token for the low, low price of 100 Paragon Points.

Standard operating procedure here. And on lengthier posts, I compose them on a Notepad-style app.

Whether it's a matter of allocating resources or budgetting, NCSoft/Paragon Studios has clearly put this problem on the back burner, and it's not coming off any time soon.

Quite right. You're beginning to see another perspective on this issue, and that's great.

This thread isn't dedicated to naming examples of how CoH's current design falls short, though goodness knows that even for a seven-year-old game, there are more than enough of those.

The issue at hand here is a small change being made in trainers, one that will have unintended consequences for something tentatively introduced as a QoL shortcut (and to promote the Paragon Market).

Immersion isn't simply canonical fidelity - it's about the state of play.

For example, if the virtual environment conforms less to the game's settings and more to the computer's interface, then immersion will decrease. Having extra clicks or extraneous options on a menu is classic immersion-breaking. (The Holy Grail of game design is, incidentally, an interface that nobody notices while playing.)

Or in another example, minor ambient annoyances, such as not being able to get to an NPC easily because of other players crowding around the area or being distracted by them spamming powers, break immersion.

Or indirectly discouraging exploration by concentrating options/resources in a single spot. What's the point of creating a virtual world if players have fewer reasons to travel through it?

These aren't game-killing shortcomings, of course. Plenty of players say they hardly notice or don't care about them. That's a perfectly valid personal point of view, particularly since such things are hard to quantify. But for those players for whom this does matter, and those are players who are most likely to be attracted to RPGs in particular, this is an unnecessary irritant, a shortcut by the devs that will have unintended consequences. The more such immersion-breaking features are introduced for the sake of convenience or corner-cutting, the more likely CoH Freedom will alienate a portion of the dedicated player community, and once a feedback loop like that begins, it's hard to stop.

That this thread wouldn't even exist if the devs had simply creating extra tailor NPCs on the map or Icon stores for each zone is a discouraging indicator for CoH Freedom as it approaches launch.

Very odd indeed, especially since that note has also been removed from the CoH download, which now makes the whole "Declaration of Freedom Sale" confusing.

Is the Declaration of Freedom Sale still over on August 29th? Were the other CoH products similarly labelled due to an error that has now been corrected? Or, donning my tin-foil top hat, I wonder, has something changed behind the scenes for the CoH Freedom launch?

Incidentally, the F2P-account side of the CoH Freedom went into into open beta yesterday, so make of that what you will.

PDK's ability to play multiple science fiction tropes off one another is what sets his novels apart from his contemporaries and what makes them so hard to adapt for film. His best novels combine several disparate ones simultaneously, which he typically explored singly in his short stories. Naturally that makes adaptation of the former harder than the latter. In the case of another go-round of adapting DADoES?, there's room for another one or two since Blade Runner was, frankly, pretty light on ideas by comparison.

Then again, the producers at Alcorn Entertainment don't sound as though they're pretty light on ideas by Hollywood standards.

Except ST:TOS's SFX were, let's be honest, cheap and awful. Scott's background in design ensured that even though he wasn't using cutting-edge technology, his science fiction films looked consistently superb. Alien and Blade Runner have dated visually far, far less than contemporary sci-fi flicks. Even George Lucas, who was always about pushing the edge of technology, felt he had to go back and improve things (not always to the fans' agreement). The minor tweaks for the Blade Runner director's cut were mainly to address production issues, like the bad stuntwork in Zhora's death scene.

Especially when there are simple solutions available, e.g. place accessible tailor NPCs in zones instead?

Immersion, especially in a superhero game, is not synonymous with realism.

In a video game, the quality of immersion stems from anything that draws players into the virtual world and makes them forget they're playing a game. In this game, it's more immersive for players to go through the journey of visiting a tailor, whether in a dedicated store or an NPC, to make a cosmetic change. Repeatedly going to the same NPC for multiple functions, while more convenient, requires less engagement with the environment - the NPC is less a character than a menu portal to a customization screen.

This isn't a make-or-break issue, just one of several that this change inadvertently raises (e.g. power spamming/lagging, local overcrowding, population distribution, zone design).

And where will people go to level up when they so they won't be bugged by people changing costumes/power customizations?

Here's hoping we can get within clicking distance of Miss Liberty when Atlas Park is the venue for a costume contest.

And those are precisely the kinds of unintended consequences that aren't really obvious. Once the launch goes live and the influx of new players begins, it will doubtless seem obvious in retrospect. And of course it will be too late.

Why not simply add a tailor store and/or NPC to a central location in the various zones? Converting existing trainers just seems like corner-cutting.

Honestly, why is there any reason to imagine that the current CGI would look any better than the models from 1982? The iconic opening shot of the future Los Angeles's landscape, the advertising dirigible, and the police spinners flying past skyscrapers - all done with models - would hardly be improved by getting the "Avatar" treatment. Scott has done his best work with practical effects, so

There are plenty of elements of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that never made it into Blade Runner's adaptation but that Scott could incorporate into a new film, such as android infiltration of the police force or the sinister demagoguery of the Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends TV show. (And while "Blade Runner" is a great title, it's something that appealed to William S. Burroughs's sensibilities and has nothing to do with PKD.)

Quite so. The tradeoff of access to the costume creator - and promotion of the Paragon Store - for exploration and immersion is clearly one the devs have decided to make. That's what MTX-supported F2P does in an MMORPG.

Indeed. There's a significant technical aspect to ensure works properly. Access to the beta bug reports for the Freedom store would be invaluable in this case, but are there any real show-stopper bugs for the Freedom store? (Veteran rewards seem buggy as it is.)

The other issue. though, is financial. How much transitional time is NCSoft prepared to write off their books when CoH isn't bringing in any new income? In the current economy, doubtless not very long.

The CoH Declaration of Freedom deal is clearly a digital fire sale, so NCSoft might not give it very long to run at all.

But why does NCSoft need to make an announcement with that much lead time? The news about CoH Freedom has been circulating for a while now and arguably crested at Comic Con. In the Internet age, events can move surprisingly fast. (A certain MMORPG revolving around a particular barbarian's era, having announced its transition to the F2P model earlier this year, recently sprung their actual switch without much advance notice about implementation.)

There's best judgment on one hand, and optimism on the other. I'd be in the former category at best (I was willing to wager November prior to Comic Con), but the devs are giving off a vibe of considerable optimism.

How sleep-deprived is Positron looking in the UStream videos these days? That may be the best indicator for what's going on within the walls of Paragon Studios as the CoH Freedom launch inexorably approaches.