Void_Huntress

My very first impression of Time Manipulation was, "WHOAH. REALLY?"

My second impression of Time Manipulation was, "A spawn of +2 outcasts can't kill me when I haven't even summoned my demons."

I still would happily trade the first three powers of Pain Domination for just Temporal Mending. It would do my mercs so much more good.

As it stands, I might have to just retire my mecs/pain and play /time MMs from now on.

I was fond of "Undeserved gift from the gaming gods".

Emphasis added.

What if that DOESN'T mean 'some guy in another ncsoft office' ?

It's not meaningless, but as Seebs says, it does not indicate PURCHASES in any reasonable fashion. It indicates unlocks. These are overlapping but not equivalent.

Yesterday I had a friend make a costume purchase through the market, and proceed to get upset because a) it was still showing as locked in the costume creator, despite multiple relogs and a fair amount of time, and b) there was no indication the transaction was actually SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED once you're past the screen where you finalize it. A lack of simple records here is problematic for basic end users.

It eventually did work, but a lot of the stress would have been circumvented by actually seeing that the transaction was logged.

His parting remark was to the effect of he didn't mind the delay so much as the lack of paper trail. Without that, he can only see it as a potential black hole money pit and will not buy points.

I personally think this -- the potential to miss -- should be something players should just have to deal with in a non-twitch game. It'd be nice to find a way to minimize the potential frustration, but the genre needs dodgy characters, and if you ALWAYS take damage, it doesn't feel particularly dodgy.

I ended up taking invulnerability with the block replacer enhancement that automatically triggers in melee to approximate a character who wasn't getting hit. I find it easier to ignore tiny pings of 1 damage with occasional higher bursts than constant half damage onslaughts.

Of course, that might just be me, but I just really prefer designing characters that survive more from getting hit less. I don't aim for unhittable, but I want to get hit for the same damage less often. Not hit just as often for less damage. It's a key conceptual difference for me, and I'll even take substandard performance in general to achieve it.

I think the block concept was a decent one, and block replacement was a fascinating mechanic. I personally think if they had some more depth to character builds -- a single passive? Really? This and a 'stance' is what defines the overall behavior of most characters outside of specific attack powers? -- more could have been usefully done with that.

Please tell me you would allow actual dodging in this hypothetical hybrid, right? Right?

That was the thing that I found most upsetting about CO. I wasn't allowed to actually dodge anything ever.

Sometimes, you can do all the tests you like, but until you go to try it with relatively current live data you don't know for sure if it'll work.

In large companies production databases are often not available to the developers of the software, and sometimes even getting a duplicate of production for testing is incredibly difficult.

When you're developing based on a description of what the data is supposed to look like, it gets rough.

Yes, there is something wrong with your reading comprehension. We will get things as part of our subscription. Some of them (like time manipulation) will be automatically available to us as VIPs. Others (like beam rifle) are available to us to take using our monthly stipend, allowing us to customize what we get as part of our subscription without additional charge.

Then, if we want MORE than that, we can spend money to get more, similar to how the boosters worked in the past. And they'll be making a lot more of those things to pick from, either for stipend purchases or additional point expenditure purchases.

Except against turrets and pet-class enemies, which have a higher base to-hit (75%) than everything else in standard content (50%), as I understand it.

"Do we have spare cube wall space somewhere to post this?"

warning: Marauder has eaten tacos. Back away.

The closest I can think of on this front would be BattleTech.

I'm currently looking into the 2000 printing of the Ogre board game (and GEV, which appears to be an extension of the ruleset in another direction).

I find this question very interesting. I'm going to start poking at it, I think.

You've mentioned Ogre a few times, so I was wanting to look into researching it. Are the more recent editions still good exemplars?

Actually, they will carry over.

Dual Pistols is by FAR my favorite blast set (until Beam Rifle hits, then I'm going to have a personal crisis) despite it being 'lackluster' in performance compared to other blast sets at high end IO slotting.

It just looks so awesome.

As Chad noted, there are a lot of cases where you buy a phone, or other piece of hardware, and while it is 'yours' there's.. nowhere else to take it, either because there's nobody else who has the same tech to talk to that device, or the device itself was constructed in such a way to make that difficult or impossible.

Still, I'm going to stand by the fact that the CoX boxes themselves weren't a product, they were a set-up fee. They paid for the effort of putting together the game our subscription gets us access to, but didn't provide us anything in particular for us.


Ever heard of an ETF? They show up all throughout internet and cellphone providers. It's extremely common for you to pay some amount for the equipment, but you're locked into a contract. Part of this is because that price is subsidized by the monthly fees. If you break out of the contract ahead of schedule, they recover their costs through the ETF. This isn't directly relevant to the current conversation, except to correct a conceptual error.


For a fair number of ISPs and service types, there is no difference between "modem" and "router"; they are the same device. Other types of internet service, there is no modem at all. The actual term of 'modem' has been stretched a bit over the years, so it can get hazy even from a technical standpoint, nevermind the end user's understanding. This also isn't directly relevant to the current discussion, except to correct a moment of arrogance.


You're making falsifiable statements and people are taking up the opportunity to do so.

You're taking up an absurd position that either you believe yourself and are attempting to distance yourself from so that people can't call you directly on believing an absurd thing (which means on some level you know it's absurd), or you're advocating an absurd cause fully aware of how absurd it is.

And see this?
It doesn't matter how Grouchy sees it. It doesn't matter how Chad sees it. It doesn't matter how I see it. Fun fact! It also doesn't matter how YOU see it. People believe whatever they want to believe, but you know, some of us like to stick to facts where we can.


That's exactly what they're saying. You no longer have to have a subscription to play. "Play" and "all of the possible toys you might use in the sandbox" are separate things. Some toys are being kept on the shelf for the renters, or those who take the time to purchase their own.


People believe lots of things. There's only so much you can do about it.



So, you're the champion of the demonstrably wrong? The world works this way. It isn't just software, and you're railing against a non-existent injustice that will only be perceived by the selfish or the ignorant.

I think you're also failing to take into account the massive amounts of free character slots we get as VIPs. 12 slots per server, not counting bonus slots we get for being veterans, or owning Going Rogue?

That one costume slot for $10 applies to a hypothetical lot of characters. Even if you're just filling up your free slots on a couple servers.

When you bought a CoH or CoV box? You bought one thing:

You bought an ACCOUNT.

You may have bought a CoH account, you may have bought a CoV account, you may have used a box to add a feature to an account you already had..

But all you bought was an account. Everything else? Was provided through your PAID ACCESS. You know. That subscription thing.

So. Congratulations. You are getting what you claim you're asking for.

I'd like to point out a third example: Organized PnP play. A few years ago, I participated in the RPGA Living Greyhawk, and this effectively produced a D&D "MMO", where the same adventures were played by players in different locations, an ongoing (shared) storyline, and ... GMs were expected to adhere to the rules in the same way as all other GMs. There were no houserules, there were not "Well, sure, we'll go with that."

GMs were expected to go by the Rules As Written, except where the organized play notes for the campaign explicitly stated otherwise (so these were really just revisions to the core rules, for the purposes of play).

That said, it WAS still PnP, so there was flexibility in how players could approach things, within the character construction and scenario limits.

It was a fairly effective and enjoyable middle ground between MMO and traditional PnP play. I enjoyed it quite a lot until the release of 4E forced discontinuation of the campaign I was participating in.

Refuse to see things from the outside in?

... dude, I'm looking at your own statements and the contradictions YOU are making.

You're talking about people refusing to resubscribe because they can't get something without subscribing. That's what I responded to.


You are wrong here. The free portion is a loss leader. The Premium portions are a combination of additional teaser and a way to keep around folks who otherwise can't or won't subscribe, but are still willing to give SOME money. The developers want more SUBSCRIBERS. That's the goal. They'll also settle for "Here's $15 every now and then" as a happy medium between "subscribing" and "you get no money at all from me".


Lack of what? Going Rogue had one of the largest content infusions the game has seen since release. Maybe the largest, I don't know how big the early issue stuff was, since I came in years later. Either way, development ramped up sharply after the NCsoft acquisition, dramatically so. Even if you set aside the Incarnate system as a whole, we've gotten quite a bit in I19/I20 as well, and are looking to get a lot in I21.


We've already been told they're working on the new player experience. Praetoria showed us they can do quite a lot with the 'dated' engine, comparing reasonably favorably to more recent games.

I personally find CoX missions LESS repetitive than some of the competition. Opinions clearly differ.

Further, almost no newer games offer some of the things CoX has, or do it incompletely, or do it in a different gameplay context. The costume and character customization is a huge selling point to some folks, dated engine or not.


If those are your priorities, go spend money on something new.

You aren't entitled to getting everything you care about for free. If you're happy with MOST of the free stuff and there's Just One More Thing you want that costs money, then you decide to either spend that money, or to do without.

That's how reasonable people do these things.


If you don't want to resub, that's fine. That's YOUR decision to make, and the devs are enabling you to make that decision.

If you personally aren't interested in the premium purchase or VIP-only content, then... okay. Nobody really cares either way. You are one person out of quite a lot more.

What Paragon is after are the folks who try this and go, "I want more of this." and either start buying things as a Premium customer, or hopefully go all the way to VIP. (or go VIP and start buying things on top.)

The purchasable stuff is a bit of a red herring, by the way: They've been letting us buy things for a while now. They're just combining that with the indefinite trial program.

I know why I am keeping subbed, despite having relatively tight income. I know why some of my friends will probably be resubbing, either soon, or soon after I21.

I also know that I'll be able to get some other friends in the door now that the barrier to entry is "Do I meet the minimum requrements and can I spare the hard drive space?"

I'm willing to bet some of those will become premium at the minimum. We might get more VIPs out of it. We might not.

Further, I know why some of my friends are unsubscribing, both because they'll get everything they need from I21 as a premium player, and because they're moving on to something different.

That's life.

Wait wait.

People who AREN'T subscribing, because they can't get something without subscribing, are refusing to re-subscribe?

If they could get it without paying, would they then subscribe even though they would then not need to subscribe to get it?

How can you not see the irrationality here?