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#5: Paragon Studios announces a new game after realising that having all your eggs in one basket isn't the best idea.

That's where the new engine will come in. There's got to be a few engines floating around NCsoft that could be used if licensing something off Cryptic is beyond the pale. I'd be looking at the Guild Wars engine - it allegedly scales better with older machines and its netcode is meant to be first class (since it was designed by the ex-Blizzard guys who cut their teeth on Bnet, it should be!).

I've supported the idea of CoH/V moving to a new engine in the past, but if it doesn't do it with Going Rogue it isn't going to happen at all. And all that time spent doing something in the Cryptic Engine like powers customisation means that moving to a new engine - and redoing all that work - probably isn't going to happen.

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I16: Gravity's Rainbow... Now In Actual Colour!

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I was fairly sure, according to what I've read in the forums, everything was a step backwards.

Which means if CoH started in Rhode Island, it is somewhere close to Japan by now.

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One of the strengths of this particular MMO is that you don't actually have to team.

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Especially from AE and I16 onwards.

Edit: for accuracy.

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I16: The Colours! The Colours!

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I predict the ability to set max spawns on missions is going to cause all the same problems that AE did. Inf is going to flood the market driving up prices on key enhancements, there will be complaints that lvl 50s don't know the basics of the game because they've pl'd themselves up to max level and there will be complaints that no-one can find a team because players are all soloing multiple AV-level spawns.

Hopefully being able to further customise your difficulty doesn't count for I16's new playable content.

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Zombie_Man has a list of these somewhere. Long, long ago I was contacted by someone using the handle Osprey who said they worked for Cryptic and liked the Beholder.

As for Rick Dakan, here's the interview I did with him long ago:

Part 1

Part 2

It's an interesting look back - Part 1 is more CoH focussed.

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You can't unring a bell.

Positron tried to do that post-AE launch and I can still toast marshmellows on the resulting threads.

Live and learn, I guess.

Also: who'd have thought the day would come when the forums would leap to the defence of PvP on any topic?

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Fansy being a griefing legend is only because what he did was a good while ago and didn't happen to us.

Twixt being a griefing villain is only because it happened recently and we play the same game. Plus he wrote a paper on it.

Drama is funnier when it isn't happening to you.

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Seriously, it be like, when I slap most people, they get angry.

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To be fair, it was PvP, so it's more like a group of people who all agree to slap and get slapped by each other.

Twixt just brought a paddle to the slapfight, that's all - not officially against the rules at the time, but not something his targets looked at with joy.

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Things I Have Learned From This Thread:

1) We now can officially cite that CoH/V has "rather dreary and, once successfully completed, very repetitive grind" (Myers, 2008). Don't tell me some of you haven't wanted to for a long, long time.

2) When I've read Twixt's posts, I thought he was better suited to being 18 and flipping burgers, not a college professor. But perhaps he was roleplaying there too. Conclusion: don't trust roleplayers.

3) He's using an ethnographic methodology, which a single letter from this ethics board should cover. He can hardly mingle with the crowd if he has to have everyone sign release forms. NCsoft / Paragon Studios might have an issue with him, but the best they could do now is ban the account for EULA violations.

4) Despite what people have commented here, this kind of paper is useful. It's easy for us at the heart of the matter to go "hey, that's obvious" but unless it it written up, it gets forgotten. They key point here is that Twixt was using two legitimate tactics - heroes fight villains, not talk to them; and TP Foe into Drones - that were considered socially unacceptable. He was breaking a social contract of behaviour by using officially approved techniques. It's an interesting contradiction.

That he received death threats and was ostracised for doing so is a very interesting result. Not surprising, but it is useful to see it confirmed within a MMO and an academic context.

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Sappers are interesting because they are always - always - the primary target whenever you encounter them, regardless of archetype.

Them coming in an ambush can make things a lot harder too. It is one of the few mobs in-game that require you to make a quick tactical choice to target them over other mobs. (Healers are another mob type that you target first, but generally there you can take your time. You can't with Sappers, especially solo.)

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I think that about covers everything.

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You forgot: "We hate villain players too".

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When I15 launches and isn't bug-free, we will hold Pohsyb's honeymoon responsible. Even if the bug doesn't relate to anything that Pohsyb may work on. Obviously him not being around dramatically effects Paragon Studios - BABs lost three whole weeks in Pohsyb's absence.

Mark my words.

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2) the teams doing police band / newspaper missions don't want to do the actual Safeguards / Mayhems because they are seen as being too slow in terms of XP and too easy to fail.

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Your best bet for getting the badges isn't this. It's better to just find a single person in the appropriate level range, offer to speed them through their radio missions with just the 2 of you (whether by just being higher level or just exemping down) until you get the bank mission. Don't try to find a team for it. Just try to find a person. It works especially well with controllers and defenders, who don't really solo well.

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This is probably true and the direction I was going, but I haven't been able to get even one person interested.

I'll have to give it a shot on some global channels during peak times.

... the Scott Calvin TF and all the Safeguard / Mayhem missions.

Scott Calvin is the only TF removed from the game ever and was on the drawing board to be returned - it'd be nice to get it back.

Safeguard / Mayhem missions that you've outlevelled are hard to do. I've tried to get on teams (off-peak times, around 4 am or 5am in the morning US time) to do them, but 1) most teams seem to be doing AE content and 2) the teams doing police band / newspaper missions don't want to do the actual Safeguards / Mayhems because they are seen as being too slow in terms of XP and too easy to fail. I want the Safeguard badges I've missed, but there hasn't been any opportunity for me to get them. Making them accessible through Ouroboros seems like an easy way of making them more accessible.

Any thoughts?

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If it's okay for Cryptic to recruit players off the CoH/V forums, it is okay for Paragon Studios to recruit players off the ChampO forums. Then it's okay for SOE to try to recruit players from both forums for DCUO and vice versa. And then WoW comes along and tries to recruit everyone.

End result (at the least) - forums no longer have a PM function enabled.

It's wrong because it leads to a lot of negative behaviour among competing companies.

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Couldn't you have sold permanent accounts for thrice the money, or something like that?

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If I'd bought a lifetime sub back in 2004 for $160, I'd be about $740 ahead at this point.

If I'd bought a lifetime sub back in 2004 for $160, CoH/V devs would be $740 behind at this point.

Lifetime subs are great for players and short-term for the studio, but bad over the long term for the studio. Who in turn haven't got as much money to sink into development, which in turn is bad for players.

If you want to save some dollars, buy in the monthly blocks.

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This thread is going places.

Why is Emmert on the list? He's representing Cryptic Studios which is a MMO studio with a number of high(ish) profile projects in the pipeline. ChampO this year, perhaps STO next year, plus Atari have just tapped them to do an unannounced Atari-based IP MMO. Plus the other titles they're worked on. For a while there Cryptic looked to be a major indie MMO studio; now it is a MMO studio with lots of potential.

He is Cryptic's 'face'. Of the small group who originally founded Cryptic, Michael Lewis is still the money man who outranks him, but (for entirely sensible reasons, given some reactions in this thread) generally doesn't court limelight. Other founders have since left or been forced out (Dakan being in that second category).

My understanding is that Emmert is an okay guy to socialise with but a complete pain to work for. As someone who plays games, I don't have to work with him, so I don't care. I tend to separate the art from the artist.

Also blah blah blah ED blah blah longer with ED than without it blah blah not even same studio any more blah blah can't we move on?

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This thread opens an important question in my mind: is Kermit the Frog a recovering dyne addict?

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One of the contacts, possibly David Wincott, points out that there is no recovering from a 'Dyne addiction. Once you're hooked, you're hooked for life. Also, Kermit is much more coherent than any Troll.

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But he does have a rage problem.

I thought names like:

Make Your Fate
Choosing Sides

and so on were better ideas than "Going Rogue". But it's a bit late to pull back now.

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Well, when you consider the dimension-swapping capabilities of Dyne, plus the whole new time-travel aspect of Ouroborus: Kermit is part of a new breed of Trolls who got off Dyne, went back in time (to before CoH was technically 'born') and then swapped to our universe.

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This potentially means Miss Piggy is a Nemesis plot.

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I've been around the block, and Lighthouse was worse at his job than many of the volunteer moderators that other websites have.

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GOD yes. I sent him one too many "you are an idiot who is bad at his job because" messages and he stopped reading anything I sent him after that.

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Part of me wants to pass comment here. Part of me is speechless. ;-)

I think it has been nice seeing a large number of old names return.

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There are some photos here.
http://www.wwe.com/superstars/raw/ha.../newrawphotos/
None of them are of the pic Torak used for his avatar, but that's most definately the guy in question.

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I'm afraid I have to disagree. I remember his avatar quite vividly, and I cannot say that this guy is the one in Torak's avatar at all. He has the beard, yes, though not really the hair, however his face is completely different from what I remember. I could be wrong, of course, but I'm more sure about this than I am when I state things as facts most of the time.

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For some reason I was pretty sure that avatar was from an Italian sci-fi film where the guy starts off as just a freight pilot, gets zapped with some rays and ends up turned into a Solomon Grundy-style character.

I thought it was from "The Humanoids" but Google has turned up nothing that resembles that picture.