Von Krieger

Zwill played through a First Ward arc with a few players, including author Mercedes Lackey.

Talk of Seed of Hamidon invasions. Last night on Freedom Abyss 2 cleared out their Hamidon so quickly Zwill went "What? ALREADY?!" on the impromptu livestream.

Dr. Aeon arrives in a a non-painted flipped Flipped Trilby.

The doodles from the Ustream marathon are still on the whiteboard.



TANGENT: Bacon never says no.

Yesterday they introduced the first Signature Story Arc: Who Will Die? Part I.

I played through the villainside edition last night and rather enjoyed it.

TANGENT: Arbiter Whiteboard's thing.



They are not for sale and for Paragon Studios' ultimate Frisbee games. They were made by Disc Craft.

TANGENT: Aeon and Zwill arguing about passing.

Positron offers to talk about SSA's in chat because these two won't.

Chat has not pegged Dr. Aeon as the athletic type, which he protests.

Chris Gregory did the lava for the SSA maps, which is completely new.

Androsh (SP?) did the obelisk.

Zwill: "I almost died a few times. I had to grab one of my paragon reward inspirations and the flying spaghetti monster random number generator in the sky granted me the right one."

The SSA contact is a Task Force contact, so you need to enable 'Other Contact.'

TheNet says he's actual a trainer contact.

Black Scorpion is working on a way to make the whole process more efficient.

Chat is making puns based on Theoden, the name of the heroside SSA contact in Skyway.

The duo commends Michelle/Samuraiko on her attempt to be sneaky and find the identity of the mystery person by using Demorecord.

TANGENT: Dr. House

TANGENT: Netflix

TANGENT: Mints, Aeon hates Cinnamon and is un-American.

The guy who looks like Penn Gilette is apparently a secret. Zwill knows his name.

Redside apparently has a hint as to who we fight in the next arc.

Vigilantes and Rogues can play both of them, so you can get the Threads or the Reward Merits twice.

Zwill loves it when a mission door opens and someone falls out dead.

"If you were a Premium member without access to Merits/Reward Merits/etc, what sort of reward will the SSA give?"

TANGENT: Dr. Aeon's many nicknames.

Black Scorpion has set it up so you get SO's.

"Is power siphoning going to be a theme throughout the SSA?"

Aeon: "Possibly."

Aeon uses his clown laugh to frighten Positron.

Future SSA's will go up in level as we go along.

Zwill has to remind the chat not to ask questions about powers and release dates on new sets.

Aeon says if there were voice overs it would be him, and he says "This is Synapse" in a Dudley Do-Right style voice.



Each arc while have a comic cover style intro picture.

Dr. Aeon says we will get Manticore's Mansion in AE eventually.

Zwill: "I can imagine the RP sessions that will go on in there."

Aeon: "I don't WANT to imagine the RP sessions that will go on in there. *goofy voice* Go in the secret door!"

Once the arcs are released, they are released forever. They are repeatable just like a task force. You will always get at least 2 reward merits for running each.

TANGENT: Spanish telenovellas.

Chat wants a rave map in the AE, Aeon says there are two that he knows of.

Posi says that Paragon Dance Party is not useable as a mission map as there are no spawns set up for it.

Zwill thinks the suggestion of when the SSA is done being able to run all seven in a row from one contact as a long task force.

" Is the First Ward "done", or will there be future content involving First Ward? Arcs/TFs/Trials/etc."

Aeon: "That's a Protean question."

Zeon cannot reveal if there is a badge for the signature story arcs.

The once per week SSA reward is per character, not account.

Positron arrives to tell of SSA rewards.



"The way the rewards work, the first time you play any of the SSA's you get the reward table independent of anything. Then after that it is once per week regardless of whichever arc you run. So it's one per week from the whole SSA. You can get the 1, 2, 3, and 4 reward the first time you run each of them. After the first time run whichever one you like best, because it will only be once per week."

Aeon says that as the levels go up the SSA's will be longer.

Zwill and Aeon giggle at the possibility of making the final map of SSA an arena map with the lava.

The SSA arcs will be Who Will Die for the next 6-7 months. They will not be starting another one while this one goes on.

TANGENT: Star Wars

Aeon cannot comment on if there will be missions taking place during the fall of Galaxy City.

The pair uses the Comic Book Nerd voice.

Aeon does not work on the copyright filter problems with AE, that's the publication team who have been busy with I21.

If you join with the CoT on the redside arc you get a boss-level ally in the last mission, if you work against them they attack you during the last mission.

TANGENT: Zwill sings Rocketman, much to Aeon's horror.

---

Also a note I will be debuting tonight in about 2.5 hours on www.KJSR.net with my very first show as a streaming DJ: the War Room! So tune in if you like gothic/epic/symphonic/industrial/non-growly, snarly, gravelly metal.

My hands just about fell off when I saw mention of the 12 hour downtime tomorrow. Though thankfully the cast will take place about 6 hours through the maintainance period.

Still...

Ow.

I gave Part II it's own thread because it's just so damned big.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=271507

Ow. Ow. Ow. This ended up being nearly 12 hours and 12,000 words worth of writing. Put in perspective that is somewhere between 10-20% of your typical novel.

---

After 6 hours and 6,500 words we're back with Part 2.

Servers are going to be down past the 1:00 estimate, there's no ETA at the moment but Zwill have to go to a meeting. Zwill will have a guest host.

Lunch was finger sandwiches and potato salad.



Arbiter Bacon is here. So is Arbiter Whiteboard.

NightJester has drawn a creepy picture of Zwill.



They will be making more redside SF's in the future, more content for EVERYONE.

We have 200 named people in chat and 400 guests.

We have a mysterious 4th moderator, an actual Ustream mod by the name of Rockbuddy.

Tunnel Rat, her husband Leo, and Colin "Needs a Red Name" Brown all want to come on. TR will likely be taking over for Zwill.

Tunnel Rat arrives, and in rat fashion is admiring the sandwiches in Zwill's trashcan.



Colin also arrives!



Beastyle requests sparkly vampires.

They do have tech in place to make Granite Armor customizable, but as a result it won't look as it currently does.

Tunnel Rat has seen Galaxy Quest. She like the man-eating baby aliens.

CB calls them Rikti Monkies.

Path Aura/Regular Aura combo, they are looking into making it happen.

TR has seen Spaceballs.

Whip animations Colin did a whole set of and they threw half of them out and made new ones.

Colin did the animations for Rocket Board, Leo did the modeling. TR calls her husband Honey Badger because he doesn't like the name.

TR talks about her background, she went to art school and studied animation.

CB: "Waste of money."

TR: "Just go to a state program."

She sent applications to a billion places and Paragon responded.

Colin did a little bit of 2D, but he does all 3D now and donated his lightboard to the college.

"Chance to get fire blast from a wand?"

CB: "Do you want a Wand Blast Harry Potter powerset, or alternate animations?"

"Less weapons, less things in their hands make things easier. Which is why all the blaster alt animations came from the hand or the chest or the mouth."

There is not a lot of Photoshop used, they do make some textures. Usually TR jumps right in to the animation and particles. She says imagine a bunch of index cards telling them all to to scale, what color to be, how bright to be, etc.

She tries to do the most elaborate and visually impressive power first so she can use elements of it in lower tier powers/attacks.

Stream is being laggy, Zwill stops by to say it's because the patch is downloading internally.

Mastermind sets take forever, Blast sets take the longest of the rest typically.

They start with the Male animations, then have to do the female and huge from there, and then the flying ones, and then Shield, if applicable.

Kheldian power customization is not a priority at the moment, it's still on the table, but the effort required could be better applied elsewhere for better returns.

TR's most time consuming aura was the Atomic aura.

CB's hardest animation was Whip, he had to use a special rig to animate the whip itself. CB says he will burn down the building if he had to make it into its own powerset. Or dual whips.

CB: "IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN!"

"Can we get a drunken emote for the Pinnacle server?"

TR: "We're T for Teen, so I suppose so. Would the stunned animation work?"

Animated hair is a no for PC's. It's possible on an NPC because of the limited animations, but with players situations go up exponentially.

TR and Swill in the background would buy a Flash Dance emote.

They cannot do two person emotes due to the way they have a kind of forcefield capsule around each character so you don't clip into each other. Which is why NPC's push you around on the streets.

BACKGROUND TANGENT: Tunak Tunak Tun and Chocaron being the catchiest songs.

Leo/Honey Badger couldn't make it, apparently. He's busy with visual effects.

CB: "Beast Run is an abomination unto mankind. We did it only because you wanted it."

TR: "IF you want to get into video game design, don't go into fine arts. Painting on canvas and drawing cuss words on orange skins will not help yiu get into video games."

TR loves blaster because they're the laughing maniacs of all the AT's, and she just tried a Brute and found it to be pretty amazing.

TR's first character was Emp/Elec, but found her Energy blaster to be more fun.

"Why can't you sit on some tables in Pocket D?"

CB: "You should be dancing! We've given you so many emotes, DANCE!"

"Will you add more objects into Propel?"

TR: "What ISN'T already in Propel?"

TR and CB are amazed to find that Propel has a forklift.

"What has been the hardest thing thrown at Animation/FX?"

CB: "Nothing! Whatever they threw at us we can take! WE ARE MADE OF MARBLE!"

Colin draws a rat on the Whiteboard.



TR makes a Granite Armor pun and opens the floodgates for puns in the chatroom.

If we buy Rocket Board we will get more things like it.

Chat is still making rock puns. I think the entire chat room is full of schist.

TR goes to draw a turtle on the white board. Zwill wants a turtle-rat hybrid.

TheNet is hanging around in the background.

Customizable MM pets is a possibility but not in the pipeline.



So is Freitag.

TR draws a smoking turtle.



Chat crashed/died, so Zwill is summoned.

TR is adding to the Zwill smiley face, a Zwillinger-Turtle-Rat hybrid on a rocketboard.



Beastyle can shout our questions across the divide between cubicles.

TR listens to the Off the Cape podcast, and confuses The Cape Radio for them.

"Powers firing from the chest?"

Colin would have to do animations and TR would have to go in and move the firing effect manually.

There are apparently going to be new powers and animations involved with the Signature Story Arcs.

Apparently Colin has done animations for some of the next Incarnate powers.

Colin erases Turtle-Rat Swill;s body and starts something new.

It takes about a month for Colin to do animations for a new powerset. TR's effects take 2-3 weeks, if there are no pets.

Colin drew a midget ninja on a rocketboard.



CB says Tunnel Rat is better than him at PVP.

Samuraiko's I21 vid is up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mP6ebB-6YI

"Customization for Super Speed?"

They said they could do like Beast Run and make some replacement powers, but it would be better to do full-on Power Pool Customization rather than have stopgap measures and workarounds. They want to do it right.

Emotes are pretty easy to do. Colin loves doing themes, like holidays.

I think powerset-themed costume change emotes are brought up, but since you can't tint them currently they don't want to do that. Maybe after pool customization tech is involved.

Hug emotes, see the forcefield capsule from earlier.

No bro fists or hugs.

Colin plays with things on Zwill's desk and has Tunnel Rat name them.

TR: "It's a nerf bullet, it's for shooting Black Pebbles!"

TR: "It... makes a loud noise and I don't like it!" (can of compressed air)

Team Animation/FX head off and Zwill returns to give us an update on the servers. Still no ETA.

Zwill is going to turn the Ustream over to someone else. Beastyle creeps in in the background and makes a goofy face and flees before I can screencap.

Zwill is making another dice roll for a shirt.

We have to sit through Zwill typing out a forum post stating there is no ETA.

Zwill has a Three Warwolf Moon, and two Hero Gear Kits, which have game time, a heroclix, and some CoH Collector's Edition cape/Slide power codes.

And as the give away happens the chat freezes.

TJMat2000 gets it with 143.

Apparently I was not the only one who crashed.

We have 330 named people in chat and 400 guests.

Zwill is going to download Samuraiko's I21 Trailer.

Zwill has found my post of the first 6 hours of this and is impressed.

Zwill wishes me a happy birthday. Zwill calls Avatea over to sing me Happy Birthday. She refuses since he mouth is full of bread.

Zwill used to work as a singing waiter.

Trivia is going to be dug up for I21, and the first person sending in the e-mail with the right answer will be the winner.

Oh god. He's going to sing Happy Birthday Operatic Style. In Italian. Possibly. He doesn't know if it's the true translation or not.

It was actual rather nice. Better than my grandfather's usual deranged warble that he uses.

Zwill says if the Ustream goes on much longer he might start taking requests.

Chat requests Zwill take his shirt off.

Zwill: "Oh good lord no. Definitely not. Not going to happen. Are you INSANE?!"

Zwill is watching Samuraiko's video to make sure there's nothing untoward in there.

The video is played. Zwill will turn the chat over to Beastyle and write some e-mails.

Reminder that the video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mP6ebB-6YI

Zwill turns it over to Beastyle and whoever decides to come over to keep him company.



We're joined by Beastyle and Freitag. Beastyle's hair is channeling the spirit of Wakka and Travis Touchdown.

Chat suggests that 7 de Coure and Avatea take next shift. Arbiter Bacon waves hello.

Freitag wanders off and TheNet materializes.





Freitag wanders back and disses Beastyle's TF2 skills and provides running commentary apparently.

Favorite Final Fantasy:

Beastyle: 4!
Net: 9!
Freitag: X-2 to troll you.

Net's second favorite is 6, he had Kefka poisoning the river as his desktop background.

Beastyle occasionally pops up in people's missions. He popped up in someone's ITF arc. He waited until they had just defeated Romulus and were celebrating and he goes uninvisible and does the clap emote. "Congratulations, you defeated Romulus, now you must defeat me! *Reichsman Lightning*"

Beastyle would give out his evil overlord name, but his Steam handle is actually his evil overlord name and doesn't want us talking him. Or leaping off of high places and backstabbing him.

Avatea and Beastyle disagree on if the Commodore 64 being a gaming console.

Positron hovers around off camera as we have TANGENT: Molton Hot Wings potato chips.

Zwill thinks that Colin's work on Titan Weapons is amazing and he says that he does not want to see any xXxCloudxXx type people.

There is a Vanguard Titan Weapon.

TheNet's sister was in CoH blosed beta and broke NDA by letting him play. She also bought him his SNES.

Beastyle heard about it in 2004-2005, but didn't really dig it until the CoV beta. First thing he made was a Ninja MM.

Avatea hops in to mention their working on the logging onto the forum issues.

Beastyle talking about how he was going around last night for the various Farewell Parties for Galaxy City.

Beastyle used to have waist length hair.

Beastyle was 28 a few weeks ago, I'm 28 today.

Beastyle was reading Homestuck, from MSPaint Adventures.

Offscreen is Dark Watcher.

They discuss the best place to SPARTA! Kick people.

The Abyss
The top of the Web in Grandville
I suggest the Eden Trial

We're up to almost 800 people.

Talk about the CoH Hero Gear Kit.

Talk about fighting games. Street Fighter and Soul Calibur.

Talking about Half Life 2. One of the devs used to work in the office and was a face model for the game.

Beastyle knows the guy who made the Full Life Consequences video.

Talk of more Valve games.

TheNet heads off.

Dark Watcher arrives



Talk of the three official costume contests.

Somebody has Vaseline goo on their hands and got it on Zwill's mouse.

Zwill is hovering off camera.

Freitag is doodling on the white board.

Zwill steps in: "No to the Iron Cat!"

Dark Watcher: "New stuff for bases that is beyond cool, but I can't talk about it. It is not base raiding."

BS: "Sadly."

DW: "Or ponies."

BS: "I want a Nemesis Pony. And I listen to The Cape Radio."

DW personally pulled the logs from beta for MARTy and has given them to Black Scorpion.

BS and DW both reiterate that they'll be looking at things and adjusting it.

Dr. Aeon and Black Scorpion are responsible for the design of badges.



JayLove arrives. Dark Watcher goes to check on the servers so Jay can sit down.

Jay doesn't like the cheapo chair. He wants something made of leather and maybe of a child's skull.

"Jay, do you eat babies?"

Jay: "MAYBE!"

"Can we get fezzes?"

Jay: "Or will I allow fezzes?"

BS: "Will you allow fezzes?"

Jay: "I bought a fez. I can't tell you the story, it's sexual. Seven people died that year."

Jay: "We have a list of things..." *motions from top to bottom of the screen* "And before I used to go through forum threads and go "You want a fez, hey I'll do it!" and I'll stay after work to do it. But now we've got this whole design process. So now if you're like "I want a fez" or "I want a ponytail for the front of my head," and it's like "Will it be just a fez, or will there be a whole costume set around the thing?""

Zwill calls for wipes to banish Beastyle's lotion-y corruption.

Jay states that he does not own a time machine, but he borrows one from his future self and that it's a Quantum Leap type of thing with Tetris blocks stuck on it.

Jay: "I started here 7 years ago, and I had the jerk job of taking all the costume pieces somebody else made and porting them over to the Female and Huge models."

"Were you the inspiration for Captain Awesome?"

Jay: "I am just in general an inspiration."

Jay scoots closer and strikes a comical chest out pose but does not hold it long enough for me to screencap.

We are now on Hour 10 of our Ustream broadcast, we have broken the Marathon record.

Chat wants Jay to rip off his shirt and dance like a Chippendale.

Jay: "It's something that just happens naturally. I can't do it on request."

Jay: "Are we still on the air? Can I swear?"

Zwill: "No."

Jay: "Confound it!"

Jay: "Let me serenade you with armpit farts!"

He proceeds to do just that.

Jay: "What is my favorite pokemon? That dead one. He's still in my heart."

Zwill: "There's a dead one?"

Jay: "The one I killed. I was walking through the woods to Dr. Whatever's house. And I was all like "I'm walkin' here!" I didn't want to kill him, I wanted to hug him. But he was in my way!"

Zwill: "Crazy artist says what?"

Zwill says he does not smoke.

Jay mimes Zwill doing heroin.

Jay does a bit of human beatbox.

7 de Coure does not do human beatbox.

Zwill can do club noises.

Zwill mutes the mic while Jay goes off on a rant when a chat room member says "The chick from Flashdance wants her headband back."

Zwill: "We need to start recording."

Jay: "Can we get some new world music with maybe some African bongos in it? Like some NPR music. Something soothing, lull them to sleep, and then I wake 'em up with my McLovin story that'll make them just jump out of their pants!"

We have nearly 1000 people.



Zwill and Jay shill It's-It's.

Zwill is hearing sounds and it's the vending machine being broken.

Still no ETA on the servers and the forums are down.

Jay eats his ice cream thing in a suggestive manner.

Zwill: "People are asking you to do things, like a webcam thing. Should we be charging for this?"

Freitag goes to fetch a question for the Hero Kits from Posi or Dr. Aeon from I21.

Jay continues his McLovin ID story. He's going too fast for me to do it justice. It's at the start of one of the latter parts.

We go for the first hero gear kit trivia: "What is the name of the spouse in the first kit of New Atlas Park?"

Crap. I'm rubbish with names.

The answer is Dana.

Talk about Jay's crazy Lebanese Digipen art instructor.

Talk about Jay's schooling background.

Jay: "Maybe I went to Yale! Maybe I attended a party there one night. It's the same as going to Yale, right?"

Zwill: "Well, I was thinking you might be one of those mad geniuses who persued his dream of video game design rather than going into the lucrative field of economics."

Jay: "Maybe. Maybe I am. Maybe I ate paint chips."

Zwill: "I'm sleep deprived."

Jay: "Is it because of the babies? A new puppy? Left the TV on? Ate too many fruit by the foot? I've told you about those Fruit by the Foot. Not before bed! Gummy Bears are easier on the digestion!"

Jay is stunned people have been watching this whole time. Work is no object, which leads to a talk about prison, and a not T for Teen anecdote from Jay. Zwill has to remind him they're still recording.

Jay does a bad rap and Zwill outright banishes him.

IF this goes on for much longer Zwill is going to get Positron and Protean over her to run a D20 campaign.

Zwill sings Chumbawumba.

We're at the point where statuses on the statuses is Soon™

Zwill states that he is not wearing an adult diaper, he has taken several bio breaks.

Zwill does play minecraft but has not played 1.8

Another Beetlejuice movie, wait what?

Zwill sings "Carry on my Wayward Son"

Zwill flashed Action Comics and Detective Comics #1 again.

Once again Zwill states there are plans in the works for PvP, but nothing he is able to talk about.

Level Pacts will be back eventually.

Zwill's signature character would be have caffeine consuming powers, his origin would be being tired, and his costume would be a bed.

More PvP whining from people who have been told THEY HAVE PLANS FOR PVP, THEY CANNOT DISCUSS THEM AT THIS TIME! Next time I have to type it, it gets bolded. They it gets underlined. Then red. Then bloody huge.



Ryan Green, one of the designers comes over. He has no red name and Zwill suggests Mysterious Stranger, Dark Watcher's Praetorian double.

He made the training missions.

Chat suggests his redname be Dillo. *hoorb*

Zwill has to go check on the statuses of the statuses. Avatea and Freitag are both doing translations. He has to put out the signal to anyone watching. Zwill will not allow Beastyle and his Vaseline Hands.

JLove offers his services as question reader. Zwill makes him promise to read the questions in a serious and mature manner and not make the show about him.



RG has been here since January of last year. He was QA, and he started on content design in June.

Jay: "I remember you being on the QA team and you busted your ***."

RG: "I pretty much bugged the producers until they gave me an interview. QA is all about showing your love for the quality of the game and beyond that point they were like "How well can you write?""

Jay: "When you tell people you're in video games they go "Oh, you play games for a living?" No it's not like that. You're not having fun, playing games and ripping lines..."

RG: "You're not?"

Jay: "Well... parking lot."

RG: "It's like having to find that one glitched animation bug in a blaster powerset. Or finding an error that occurs on a certain type of map and having to go through 35 maps of that type and try to replicate the bug on every square inch. We have to do it naturally, with no debug. Just like the players would do."

"Sometimes we have things like the BAF where we go through and play just like normal players."

Jay: "Let's say there's a group of bad guys, and these guys are too overpowered. Hey these dudes, we gotta go with him, make more of 'em, power 'em up, power 'em down, so that when the game goes live it has to be at a polished level."

RG: "The internal playtests are like a second stage. It's not just people from a base QA level and just about everyone on our QA team love CoH, they're real players. Our internal playtest metric is that if the internal QA team can beat it at all it's probably too easy. We're not the epic, top tier players. A lot of it is just tuning up the difficulty and having a good, fun, challenging experience."

Jay: "Before the restructuring our QA team was small, about four people. Since then we've grown the team, it's huge."

RG: "We've got 10-12 in local QA and then we have the Austin team as well making sure everything is top notch. 14 according to TheNet. Paragon is one of the few companies that makes sure everything is top notch in their end product. A lot of companies QA is seen as a necessity but doesn't really have a seat at the table."

Jay: "A lot of the best games out there spend like 25% of their dev time in QA so you have a fun, playable piece of art. And you were like this QA thing is great and all, but I want to make my own content, make something they can test."

RG: "It's not people sitting around wanting to play games all day. Most of it is like the mail room, folks wanting to get the foot in the door. There are not entry level positions for a producer or designer. Starting in QA and just getting a job in the industry is something I would recommend to anybody."

Jay: "QA is your first gig?"

RG: "Out of college I did QA for Sega."

RG drives about 120 miles a day, he lives closer to the desert than the peninsula.

Jay: "What was the first thing that the players have gotten a hand on that you made?"

RG: "The training missions. A lot of the character concepts, like Dillo and *hoorb* was some of Sean's work.. (Referring to another designer, not Dr. Aeon, possible Manticore/Sean Fish. Says he took and overseas job.)"

Talk about the new tutorial and training and the help missions while I look up other Sean's at Paragon.

RG thinks the contact finder button is one of the best things added to the game.

Jay: "Issue 21 is overly. What do you do for the next issue? Go through your process."

RG: "As we follow an issue we go through a step by step process, brainstorming documentation with all the content designers. We have three full time people working on just mission content. We greenlight all the storyarc ideas, and once we have the go ahead to start working we put down the basic mission structure. Then you start adding in the costumes and custom maps. Protean touched on this at the PAX conference."

"A lot of mission designers in the industry are just writers, just writing text. What we do are really designers, we're not just game writers. We make the custom maps, make the spawns, create the costumes. Everything you see in a mission in part or whole by the content designer. It's a lot of work but also freeing. You have a lot of creative control over what goes into the missions and how they're structured. We can create a lot of more interactive content, like people will see."

"Apparently chat says you're going to crack my skull and feast on my brains."

Jay: "Well, if you want to skip to the end, not build up that whole "I know it's going to happen, but oooh! Now he went and did it...""

RG: "Well, I'm not using my brain."

RG: "Paragon studios isn't the biggest studio in the world, which has its ups and downs, but we have people that are capable of making content for the players from start to finish. We can take a story idea from the documentation and concept and build it out in the game and see it in action. That's a really cool feeling. When players start playing it, that's even better. We react to what players say. A lot of people think that their feedback on the beta forums get ignored, and that couldn't be further from the truth."

Jay: "I deal with character design, costumes, and I see all the comments positive and negative. We read over that stuff religiously, we're dedicated to making you the best content we can."

"Do we do a fez, or do we do a whole costume set that people will be able to use everywhere."

RG: "Fez shoulder pads, fez chest pieces, fezzes everywhere. There's a new zone, Fezburg."

Jay: "There's Fez melee, it's like swinging a trash can."

RG: "We're changing the name of the game to City of Fezzes."

Jay: "The freedom of the Fez."

"You were a player, and outsider coming into the studio, what was the craziest thing you heard about the game?"

RG: "Dr. Aeon explaining to me how the sound system worked. We don't have a lot of music in the game. Mostly we have city sounds. I have my headphones on, I hear city sounds, I take my headphones off, I hear city sounds. Our game has a very archaic sound system and we're only just now able to break out of that. We've got voices in the tutorial, new music, new sounds. We have a full-on sound guy and we're paying attention to the uses of music and sound in missions and taskforces."

Jay: "One of the uses in video games of sound is setting things up on a subconscious level. Like in horror movies with a big rush of sound and then a silence, like three seconds and then a big scare with a violin. That';s wht they';re doing over in sound, making it seem more cinematic."

RG: "We've got some Halloween content coming up and we want to really hit home that... well... I dunno what I can say about it."

Jay: "Let me put on my community hat..." *places Zwill's Diet Coke can on head* "I'm community, I know everything!"

RG: "I've seen the monster you made, the costume pieces."

Jay: "I don't know we've showed them the one thing..." wavy hand gesture beside the head* "I've been able to make a costume piece I'd tried before and I finally managed something that was far better than what I did before. And I make things that these guys request. What is something you've requested?"

RG: "I haven't gotten many art resources. But we can make a lot with an expanded version of the costume creator. I don't work on them, but the Signature story arcs have a lot of that. People have been able to see the progression of the art with Celestial armor. Stuff that is really cool looking."

Jay: "Aw shucks! You're just saying that!"

RG: "The art has really grown in CoH."

Jay: "That was one of my goals when I came to CoH, looking at the characters and wanting to bring things up to where I know I was at."

Zwill has returned with Second Measure to deliver announcements.



Servers are coming up right now! HOWEVER:

1. Paragon Market is not up tonight.
2. Neither will the bonus points we've been gathering since July 1, it will be delivered by the tech guys overnight.

We still can access Time Manipulation, the new content, the First Ward. But we can't buy Beam Rifle or the Rocket Board or anything like that. Points bought via the account page will work, but you can't spend them yet.

Exalted should be up and running.

Zwill: "Here's the fun one, the we don't want to blow our servers up thing. The free transfer token will not be available immediately. We're going to hold off on granting it for now. It will be awarded in a patch next week. This does not change any events for our current plans on the Exalted server. Character costumes can be copied over."

"Rush now to claim your names on Exalted!"

Zwill: "We're going to be extending the 6 server transfer for $6 for a day. The log in screen, the server select screen issue where the scroolbar rubber bands. There are 16 servers now, but only room for 14 on the log in screen."

Second Measure: "We've been working on this all. So until we can fix this we'll be arranging the servers randomly. So if you don't see your server, log out and log in again. It's fixed internally, but we have to go through the process of getting it live. In addition the servers are going to have some weird information about which are more populated than the others. We're tricking the client so you might see low pop servers appear full, and full servers empty."

Zwill: "Don't worry if your home server is red and isn't Virtue."

2M: "Your last logged in server will still be on top."

Zwill: "The log in server is getting slammed from everyone trying to log in."

The mac launcher has an issue with Mac's new OS to get 10.5 recognized. They hope to have it recognized within the next hour or two.

2M: "I think if you have 10.5 you have to deleted the launcher and install it again. JUST THE LAUNCHER, NOT THE WHOLE GAME, MIND YOU!"

Forums are online, log in may be borked a little bit. They are for the devs, at least. Zwill will try to get us an update on that ASAP.

Recap:

Market will be up tomorrow with the points
Points from the last 3 months not showing up, the script will be run at that time
If your server does not appear on the list, log out and log back in
The free transfer token will be granted with a patch next week
Log in server is getting slammed, please be patient
The Mac font issue is something they're looking to address later in the week
The issue with Mac 10.5 will be fixed within the hour, delete and redownload the patcher, NOT THE GAME OR THE CLIENT

Gunslinger listed but all the pieces missing is a known issue. Almost 12 hours. Zwill calls the 12 hour Ustream marathon to an end.




Zwill thanks everybody who has shown up on the chat today, everyone by name.

Here's the first 6 hours of today's Livestream for anyone who didn't want to get up eartly and suffer through TANGENTMANIA, brother!

*flexes pythons*

Part II is here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=271507

---

It's VK's birthday, and CoH is giving me Issue 21!

I come in to find an apparently dead Zwillinger. Someone off camera pokes him.

The whiteboard is missing for once!



Zwill greets us and talks about Fantasy Football and Tom Brady doing awesome things.

I go to check my Fantasy Football team and find Tom went and scored 76 points. The rest of my team combined? 124.

Chat recommends Beastyle going to slap Zwill awake, Beastyle says he'll have to trade slaps with Zwill so he's kept awake.

Zwill sings Bohemian Rhapsody.

Positron arrives, wearing a Fancy Fedora painted with a Distinctive Lack of Hue. Zwill is wearing his usual Peculiarly Drab Tincture Baker Boy.



Talking about the tech issues with the Paragon Rewards program at the moment. They are still planning on having the Paragon Reward tokens be delivered up front, but they can't get it in place for the Freedom launch. They will be fixing it but will not set a timeframe.

Out of all the items in the store A LOT of things have come down in price. Posi says one or two things might have gone up, but almost all price changes were downward.

Talk about the 6 server transfers for 6 dollars.

Zwill: "I'll buy that for a dollar!"

Posi: "By Grabthor's hammer, what a savings."

Posi didn't like Galaxy Quest the first time he saw it, but when he watched it with a bunch of other Trek fans it transcended itself.

Discussion of Galaxy Quest.

Zwill marks out for the Bilbo Baggins song Leonard Nimoy did.

Both sing it.

Posi says the Y in MARTy stood for Yolk, but Zwill didn't like that.

It can stop rewards for 1-10 minutes.

They will be adjusting the system.

The code for MARTy is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from the Incarnate Trial participation metric. They share nothing code related.

It does not affect incarnate rewards or Incarnate XP.

They usually try to wear Paragon related attire for dev chats. Positron just wears whatever geek-related item is clean.

There is going to be a 21.5 before Issue 22.

Zwill says there will be some surprises on the store today.

Posi has a coffee burp and the chat room wonders if he's having a heart attack.

Posi relates a story about heart attack and heartburn having similar symptoms. He had chest pains for a day and went to the ER after calling a nurse line, that told him to go to the ER after 10 minutes of questions. They hooked him up to an EEG machine.

Stuff in the Collector's Edition items are not going to be in the store.

Posi: "Certain people will have to be not employed at the company for that to happen."

Chat question, short version: "OMFUX Y U NERF FARMIN?!?!?!?!?!?"

It's not aimed at AE or anything like that.

I'll likely be trying if I can trigger MARTy with my fire farmer.

They say they will be looking at how often it's getting triggered.

Zwill: "It's like a garden, it's not a fire and forget thing. We will be paying attention to it and tending to it."

They don't have a firm date in mind for cycling the VIP Tier 9 rewards.

The rotation design was made in mind with being able to get your tokens up front. They might be looking into changing the cycling depending on if they can get that fixed or not.

There will be a sale in the Market every week.

They've got what's going in the market and what's going on sale up until May.

The patcher has the Issue 21 patch downloading now.

Filtering out previously purchased items from the store is a design goal.

MARTy was not announced because it's an anti-exploit measure, and they don't announce exploit related items and fixes. So as to not have an exploit fix announced in Beta and have weeks of it being used on Live by people who did not know about it otherwise.

The market is currently in-game only, but they are wanting to make it be easily acessable to take your money.

Zwill: "Make your checks payable to Andy Belford..."

Zwill's wife plays CoH, but mostly plays with the Costume Creator.

There are going to be winter event improvements, but no Winter trial.

Starting with I21's launch you get 550. Everyone has been getting 400 points a month. If you get 550 think of it as a bonus.

Zwill: "It's safe to say you'll see some items come back on sale again."

Posi: "If it sells like gangbusters, guess what? It's going on sale again!"

City Vault is officially dead. It turned out to be a massively huge negative impact on bandwidth.

The quick downloader isn't going live with the headstart.

They won't allow gifting of paragon points until their customer service department is satisfied that it can't be taken advantage of.

Blood of the Blackstream/Avallians.

Posi: "We had things that were people's ideas, they were hinted at and had some minor stuff in game. Those people don't work here any more. We have people here with their own ideas. What kind of boss would I be if I said "You can't do your ideas, you have to do ideas from people who were here three years ago. You have to go in and find the hidden threads and work from the loose documentation we have on them.""

"It's just like when a new writer comes on to a comic book."

Black Scorpion comes in to sit for Zwill as he takes a bio break.

BS: "I find the old design documents on things, stuffed in corners, written on forgotten whiteboards, that sort of thing."

They were going to do the Avellians as an EAT because their animation system was thought to require wing animations included in the files for attacks. So when they discovered that they could do it without tying animation code for wings into every power, they added wings as a costume piece.

Discussion of the bug with Rest popping in and then popping out of the tray.

/Bug command is looked at less often than the Bug forums. They look over the bug forums constantly.

"Any chance of future EATS?"

Posi: "There is always a chance of future AT's, Epic or no."

They plan on doing more MM sets, but they are the biggest drain on resources they have. They try to make them special.

Posi: "It's the biggest drain for the least bang, since we can't proliferate them."

Chat demands BS join the club and wear a hat.

Dominator love is on the list but BS can't state a timeframe. There are some sets looked into for proliferation, but not with I21.

Arbiter Hawk and BS have been looking at KB/KD with Khelds especially. It's on the list of issues that they think about all the time. It's been talked about with a per character setting.

The Information Kiosks were one of the aforementioned big bandwidth hogs. They didn't work very well, and so they didn't put any in CoV and Praetoria. So they don't plan on doing anything with them.

"If there are bandwidth hogs, does that mean there is bandwidth bacon?"

Discussion of bandwidth bacon.

Posi says they have a lot of ideas for UI upgrades, but everything they wanted would make it take 1.5 years. If they'd did everything they wanted to do for the UI and upgrading it they'd just start testing it internally today.

"Where do you hide the bodies?"

BS: "They fade out after 30 seconds unless you're on a BAF."

Synapse has FOUR dogs.

BS: "No one has brought one to the office yet."

Posi: "Some people used to but there were, how shall we say, accidents. People didn't want to step in that at work."

There are further zone revamps planned.

Allowing players to build maps for MA?

Posi: "Maybe in the far future. It might be prone to being abused."

Zwill has donned a pair of Extrodinary Abundance of Tinge Summer Shades in his Misc slot.



Posi says to Zwill that he can't answer questions for 8 hours because eventually they'll run out of safe answers and have to make stuff up.

Zwill: "And I'll start singing."

So they go into the Underground Incarnate Trial.

Lunch at Paragon today? Costco Pizza.

Posi goes into the background of the trial.

Desdemona's tattoo prevents her from being mind controlled. Positron calls it a "Circle of Protection" that makes Zwill crack up. They reference something I'm not getting because I'm playing with my box of birthday Gobstoppers.

Zwill and Posi accidently refer to the trial's boss as the Seed and not Avatar of Hamidon.

Posi says in terms of mechanics the trial is on the easier scale and is probably the easiest one they've done mechanics wise. Not a lot of gimmicks, and it's more like a standard door mission.

"Will the more complex Trial mechanics ever show up for simpler solo-able missions, like a showdown with an elite boss?"

Posi: "It is possible, but we kind of want to avoid that. We don't want players to go through solo content and come up with a gimmick-y boss fight."

Positron can give the sewer trial a backstory if you give him 10 minutes.

9:29 coh_beastyle: Backstory: There are enemies in the sewers!
9:29 coh_beastyle: Take them out!

"So if you remove the Vahzilok from the sewers, is that a Vahzectomy?"

Groaning laughs all around.

Posi: "When I was going through for the first time and found the trainer, I was like: this wasn't in the design document but this is awesome!"

I21 is indeed a 2.5 GB patch, they've reorganized a lot of the file structure.

Zwill and Posi joke around about staff fighting and Posi mentions he hasn't yelled at anybody in Paragon in years.

Somehow we've gone back to questions and Posi just now notices it.

HOORAY! THE CHAT HAS OFFICIALLY TANGENTED THE HOSTS!

Zwill: "I am easily distracted!"

Posi talks about the backstory of the Incarnate Trial.

Me to Zwill via Ustream PM: "I AM AN EASILY ZWILL DISTRACTING SHINY THING!"

Zwill (on air): "Thanks, Von Krieger."

There will eventually be a wrap up to the Praetorian storyline.

The Underground is a longer trial and there are not a lot of ways to shortcut things, and because of that it has increased rewards for that time.

Posi plugs his blog MMODesigner.com

Positron mentions www.trails-end.com, click on the link that says "I am Support" and search for Andre M. in Foster City of Pack 447 as the result of him having a Fleur de Lis on his hat as he's a cubscout leader. So if you want to buy popcorn, go there! Since 70% of the proceeds go directly to his troop. Link in the corner where it says "I'm currently supporting no one."

"how will MARTy work with the XP Booster store item?"

Posi: "They won't. It does not look at things like XP Boosters, or Double XP weekend, or team-size bonuses. It works just off the base rewards rate."

Back to Underground trial.

They're using the new tech for contacts to have an image of the head of the person that Desdemona is following in the trials.

"Is there any way to say 'Crap, I'm the tank. Desdemona shouldn't follow me!' and pass her off to a different player?"

Posi: "IT ought to be fine, she's pretty tough."

"What if you're in first person view?"

Posi: "So YOU'RE the one!"

Posi: "One of the ideas we had was giving you a badge for tripping MARTy, but that got shot down with pretty quick as a TERRIBLE idea."

Desdemona does follow through stealth.

"Why is the Lichen-infested WW so annoying?"

Posi: "Because I am a cruel, cruel game designer."

"Avatar of Hamidon costume pieces? Those shoulders are sweet!"

Posi: "It's on a totally different rig, sorry guys."

Posi: "The store will be up when the server goes live. Please don't break it."

Posi: "There was a time when the team designed encounters that we couldn't beat because we knew the players could. But that was too brute force and didn't really end up being as fun as the more gimmick-based bosses we use now."

"I have seen fights from other games and we are never going to be anywhere NEAR the amount of complexity in battles. Keyes Island is about the upper limit of what we're going to do, and if you compare it to other games, it's a cakewalk."

"Where do you draw the line between "frustrating" and "challenging"?"

Posi: "About four or five attempts with zero progress made."

Zwill: "Not taking into account PEBKAC, of course."

(PEBCAK = Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.)

Posi states once more that they have plans in mind for incarnate trials and powers for many issues into the future.

Jumping onto the PVP question that keeps coming up.

Posi goes to get water.

Zwill: "We have plans for it, but nothing I can discuss yet. Right now we're trying to focus attention on players and community like the upcoming PVP league and the just-finished PVP boot camp. I'm here to bring you team down, this guy. Literally. I'm here to bring you're team down. I'm TERRIBLE."

There are plans for new 30-39 content.

VK: "Zwill, can you tell me once again who's bad?"

I manage to provoke Zwill into sing "Bad" and "Fat."

"Which in game group would you join?"

Zwill: "Maybe the Goldbrickers, since I like jetpacks. Definitely not the Syndicate. I would nopt be a Ring Mistress, though I would not mind hanging out with those guys. Maybe I would join the Knives of Artemis so I could throw caltrops at you guys repeatedly. I hate Knives of Artemis."

Posi links to the popcorn: http://www.trails-end.com/estore/hom...equestid=16406

The Signature Story Arcs will not be going live today, but with Freedom proper.

TANGENT: POKEMON!

Posi's team was all evolved Eevees, and the dog trio.

Beastyle names them off camera and pops in to show his Lucario figure.

Posi: "I played Red and Yellow. Then tried the next one and it was the same game again. I got Pearl on DS and IT'S THE SAME GAME AGAIN!"

"Which NPC would you want to live with?"

Posi: "Manticore, a billionaire!"

Posi has avoided Minecraft thus far, he has League of Legends installed, but not played, and his copy of Marvel vs Capcom 3 is on his xbox unopened.

TANGENT: Digimon

Zwill: "The Go-Bots of Pokemon."

Posi gives a story about the handheld Tamigotchi style Digimon and there used to be fights between people with Digimon. Until after a fight instead of a KOed pokemon there was a gravestone.

TANGENT: Furbies.

Manticore used to work for another game studio right next to a toy store and the office was filled with Furbies.

Someone in chat mentions that at Wal*Mart one of their duties was to patrol the aisle and make cure no one was teaching the furbies dirty words.

Positron thinks the best CoH tie-in toy would be LEGO's.

Posi: "The Orenbega playset."

Zwill: "The Orange Bagel playset? That would be terrible. Building all the stairs. Nothing but stairs."

The look for another topic.

Posi: "Why we destroyed galaxy city, maybe? Because I just hated it. The players can guess why. Because we had two start zones on one side, and one on the other. And considering what we're releasing today..." Hinting at the Atlas Park and Mercy revamps.

Talking about Zwill's posting in the "Will You Miss Galaxy City" thread:



Some talk about RP servers.

Posi: "Official means customer service requirements that we don't want to deal with. We're much happier with unofficial RP servers since the community can monitor it themselves."

Posi: "When were designing powersets we looking for things we haven't done before, cool things, comic book things. Adding to the genre to superheroes, to MMOS, etc. We want to make sure that what we do is going to be cool."

It either begins with animations or power designs. Titan Weapons began with an Animation proof of concept With Beam Rifle it was the other way around.

They have templates with any given power sets, the first two powers in a set usually have similar purposes. There are others that are usually in there, like Taunt or Aim or Build Up.

Sometimes they need new tech to pull it off; the Titan Weapons momentum mechanic is mentioned.

Zwill: "Someone says I know you're on Ustream, but you'll probably not be paying attention and mention this."

Zwill goes to grab something to give away.

Posi: "A five dollar bill!"

Posi: "I had a boss with a list of rules on his wall that I never read, rules to interact with him. I went to Universal Studios and I got change for $14 with 7 $2 bills. I've never seen so many $2 bills in one place. I show them to my boss and he says "Any $2 bills I can claim and give you $2 in exchange for." And I liked my job, so I did."



Sean "Single" "Dr. Aeon" McCann shows up in his Color of a Gentleman's Business Pants Fancy Fedora and accuses Positron of stealing his hat.

Chat dubs this pairing Spy vs. Spy.

Chat wonders if Dr. Aeon is the prize that is being given away.

" Since we can now take Travel powers at Tier 3, will the requirement for other Pool Powers be similarly changed?"

Posi: "No, because it breaks a lot of stuff, like characters!"

"Who's the current Art Lead, I need to know who to bug."

Posi: "Right now at this very second we don't have one."

"Will we get new stuff in the AE?"

Posi: "Want to talk about it Sean "I got hired here because of my awesome AE missions" McCann."

Aeon: "You tell me Mr. Matt "Makes the decisions" Miller."

Posi: "No, that would be Nate "Second Measure" "We don't have enough time for this issue" Birkholtz."

Aeon rates his wants:

Dialogue Trees: 10/10
Cut scenes: "If we'd put them in it would be enough time to do 3/4 other things"
Custom maps: "It would have to be enough to be another AE-like system."
Button to give XP/rewards:

Aeon: "It's called SS/Fire."

Posi: "No, a button."

Aeon: "Footstomp. The button is called Footstomp."

Dialogue trees is the thing he'd want to see the most.

Positron makes a mad dive for the mouse as the screensaver starts to take root.

Posi just called Zwill Rain Man because him and someone else is going "Uh oh, uh oh!" off camera.

TANGENT: Fantasy Football in the office. Posi had the #2 score in the league and he played Bryan Clayton, who had the highest score. The other two teams in the division had the lowest and second lowest score.

Posi: "Fantasy Football, the RPG for people who used to beat up the people who used to play DnD in high school."

Aeon relates his own fantasy football story. He went with his gut and picked an entire team named Kevin without regard to if they were any good or not. And was told to never play again. He would only take trades for players named Kevin. Positron nixed another player from trying to steal Aeon's only good Kevin.

"Most likely sport to put in CoH?"

Soccer or rugby.

TANGENT: Sports movies.

" So with 21 going live hows the schedule in house for I22 work?"

Posi: "Are you working on I22 now?"

Aeon: "Is this question going to get me fired?"

Posi: "Of course not!"

Aeon: "Then yes, I'm working on I22."

Posi: "We have things planned out to Issue 29? Who told you that? But yes, we have things planned out to I29."

TheNet shows up to show off his awesome hair.




Chat dubs TheNet "Arbiter Beiber" and wonders if he's really a girl.

First Ward was almost all Protean.

Posi: "Do you know the story behind hoorb? No? I don't know it either!"

Aeon: "Do you want me to make it up?"

Posi: "What I need you to make up is one for the sewer trial."

Aeon: "There is one! With the destruction of Galaxy City the Hydra is creeping out from it's lower sewer lair into the higher one. For heroes it's stopping it, for Villains it's harvesting power from it."

TANGENT: Languages, California English, Cot and Caught being pronounced the same.

Zwill returns with swag.

They roll a d100. Voodoo Girl beats me to 87, as does Mega-Troll who had it before either of us.

damienkellis: Megatroll has won the T-shirt. Now I, Starscream, am the leader of the Decepticons... no, wait.

TANGENT: LotR and the Giant Eagle explanation. Aeon uses his Comic Book Guy voice.

Ghost Falcon comes over with a sign.



I have 12 pages of notes so far and many hours to go.

For the Star Wars blu ray edition: Alderaan shot first: http://i.imgur.com/xWweh.gif

Discussion of Death Star shooting the planet Yavin 4.

Positron references BadAstronomy.com with talking about the amount of antimatter needed to destroy a planet, and the core of a gas giant being made of metallic hydrogen.

Second Measure comes in to see the GIF and asks "Is that real?"

Posi: "How dumb are you?"



The whiteboard returns!

They're going to go to a Part 2 now as they're reaching the recording limit. Zwill has to do the T for Teen thing again.

Noble Savage and Tunnel Rat may be stopping by.

War Witch stops by.



For I21 War Witch was more of a professional nag than contributing anything. She has two content Strike Teams, Alpha and Omega.

WW shows two sets of dog tags that the details cannot be made out of on the video. Alpha team was the start area team and Omega was endgame content.

The Eden and Sewer trials came about as the result of Strike Teaming at Cryptic. WW's team was the only one that actually got something in game.

TANGENT: Groupon and Crepes.

TANGENT: Boysonberries. Hybrid of Black and Raspberries. I did not know that. And also Loganberries apparently.

Chat says "Don't eat too many Loganberries or else you'll end up with Logan's Runs."

Another chat member is still working on the whole Yokes and Reins thing from earlier.

Zwill has a meeting in 15 minutes.

TANGENT: WW's vest.

TANGENT: Zwill cannot make short jokes, WW can, Zwill can only make Asian jokes.

Some sort of horrible singing from Zwill.

WW is ashamed for him.

WW has a Russian Blue cat named Miko after some kind of rocket.

Chat says WW and Zwill ought to have a talk show.

TANGENT: Lavern and Shirley.

TANGENT: Zwill's bartending career and the Colorado Bulldog. Which is apparentl like a White Russian with Coca Cola. I wouldn't know. You can fit all the alcohol I've drunk into a 2 liter bottle.

TANGENT: Milk types.

"WW task force!"

Zwill: "What would that be? Go to the UPS store and get my package. Literally a FedEx quest."

TANGENT: Perfumes

WW says it's hat day and she didn't get the memo. I heard my name mentioned for some reason then he went into something else.

Chat says WW looks like one of the Newsies.



TANGENT: Newsies and Christian Bale.

Zwill wanted to call the sewer trial Down the Drain.

Death From Below is an in-joke, the Sewers had special spawns that dropped down that were internally known as Death From Above.

"What NPC would you like in the house?"

Zwill: "There is the SFW answer and the NSFW answer. I would say Fusionette. She'd be fun."

Zwill: "Titan Weapons in I21.5?"

WW: "I can shrug just like you can. Synchronized shrug on 3, 1, 2, 3!"

Favorite Kung Fu movie?

Zwill: "Kung Fu hustle. No, The Last Dragon is not kung fu, it's Black Fu, there's a difference."

Zwill singing the Glow and The Last Dragon.

Someone off camera suggests that the 'hoorb' sound is a joke based on the male jumping sound.

Second Measure comes in to do Dillo's voice, as related to him by Pitt, the guy that wrote him.

WW: "It reminds me of a dog eating peanut butter."

2M: "I just wanted to stop by and prevent a grave injustice from being done."

Beastyle suggests that it's like the Bug from MIB.

Zwill thinks that Meg Ryan would play WW in the CoH movie.

Chat:
Natalie Protman
Milla Jovovich

Apparently I missed some more chat on the dream casting for the CoH movie.

Patrick Stewart as Positron!

Beastyle suggest Gary Oldman as Relucse.

"Will dual pistols get unlockables?"

Zwill: "If it's requested often enough."

WW: "Kevin Spacey as Positron."

Zwill: "I could dig that. That would work!"

TANGENT: Felicia Day

Zwill gives his PAX Wil Wheaton story.

Both hosts have an Altoid.

Celebs playing CoH, Abraham Benrubi and Jim Butcher.

Continued casting for CoH movie.

Charisma Carpenter as Mother Mayhem.



Avatea comes in to sub for Zwill, who is on his second bio break of the session.

Talking about WW's height in comparison to Avatea. WW is 5'1 and a bit, Avatea is 6'1"

Continued talk about height and lack thereof and it's advantageous and disadvantages.

Avatea speaks French for a bit.

Freitag wanders in and says that Armenia in Germany is like Canada of Germany because they say 'Eh."

IRL costume pieces?

Avatea wants cupid wings.

I try to convince Freitag to sing "It's a Small World" in German so it will sound scary.

We get the translation of the first few verses from Zwill and Avatea, but no singing it from Freitag.

Avatea and WW head off and Patrice gets his chair back.



I ALMOST get a screenshot of Patrice looking at the camera, but only snag his elbow.

A wild Baryonyx appears!



Bar does a bit of everything. Powersets, villains, etc.

Desdemona's pathing and AI and getting her to follow was the hardest part of the trial, as the Underground is a fairly massive place. The other big problem was getting her there with her demons in tow.

The other major challenge was selling a world that had been infected by the Devouring Earth. You start out getting little hints of infection and then end up in a completely alien world.

Zwill: "We're tying a bow on the Pratorian storylines and this is the start of that, measuring out the ribbon and cutting it."

If they do one trial at a time it'll be both types of Incarnate XP, and if they do 2 it'll be one and one. Due to length it gives massive amounts and 2 Empyrean merits at the end.

Some more talk about Desdemona, Zwill shows his Going Rogue Desdemona Mousepad.



Bar and Arbiter Hawk did all the villain groups in First Ward.

Zwill has some problems with Ustream.

I get up to grab snacks and the Carinvals of Light, War, and Vengeance designs.

Talking about the Parallel Worlds thing, the Hamidon and magic in Praetoria are the two major differences.

Bar has to be warned about touching the table.

Talking about the Oracle bosses using new, unique, lightning from the sky type powers.

The Awakened have a visceral, violent, brutish psionic feel to them. Mentions of some of their powers, like a boost to Psi damage for the mobs around them, a Fear effect that grows stronger, and a Psi melee attack.

Zwill gives us bad news that they're run into some problems, so they might go past the time goal.

They'd already set the entitites in First Ward to be able to scale up to level 34, so it wasn't hard to scale it up from 20-25 to 20-29. They were planning on using the groups in future content at a higher level, and so it was easy to change the zone levels based on player feedback.

Positron comes over to deliver a note "STOP HITTING THE TABLE."

Bar: "Regarding the Carnival of Light pieces I've already told the costume team "Shut up and take my money.""

Zwill is being summoned away and Avatea returns to be our question reader.



Praetoria is a world of differences and don't expect any groups to be exactly the same in future content.

I suggest Praetorian Malta wear Hawaiian shirts. That is shot down.

"Why are Gorgons so annoying?"

They're Elite bosses to begin with and scaled down. They have some nasty Broadsword attacks and we wanted to sell them as fully corrupted and have natural, brutal combat ability.

The Underground design has been going on since at least Bar joined in February.

Mention is made of incarnate trial difficulty. BAF and Lambda are not level shifted, Underground is level shifted by 1. Future trials will go higher.

"Will Praetoria ever be invaded with Shivans?"

Bar: "The connection with the Shivans to the Batallion with the Coming Storm... maybe. Just remember that the shivans are mainly a threat to Primal Earth. You can count on the Shivans appearing at some point in the future."

Bar did not work on the Halloween event. The event was Doug Woolsey and Court Carney and Arbiter Hawk.

Zwill is back and Avatea leaves.

"My favorite part of designing new content is taking powers and systems that we already have and challenge your expectations and preconceptions and to make ways to think outside of the box. It doesn't always work but one of the most exciting parts is making new and interesting experiences for you guys."

"My personal favorite part of the new issue would probably be the Atlas Park revamp out of all the things I didn't work on. It and the tutorial. Seeing AP and Mercy changed from what I knew since the being, not having to go from Kalinda to the city of Mercy. Seeing that content evolving into something new and enjoyable is something I love to see."

Bar is kicked out to make room for Noble Savage, who has brought his SPAM cup for moral support.



Zwill passes out altoids to yet another guest.

Zwill flashes Action Comics #1 and Dectective Comics #1. He says he really likes the art style.

NS: "I come from a comic book background so I'mn happy to see companies doubling down on their investments, making it fresh and cool and relevant."

Talk of NS's comic book connections.

We are nearly at 500 people watching, almost match the marathon Ustream of Doom.

NS: "With Freedom we were thinking what artistic direction would be the best to represent us as what we'd like to be. What we settled on is the semi-realistic concept painting style. Within the concept art community there are a lot of people that work in Paitn and Photoshop in that kind of exaggerated style, but also inspired by like Alex Ross and painters in the comic community as well. Not like comic line art and super-bright colors. Our game is a little less cartoony."

Zwill: "We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we're a little less tongue in cheek than some other people.

Talking about Alex Ross's use of photo references and props, like sewing a leather Batman cape to make the end result look more realistic.

Talk about Bob Ross (no relation) and happy trees.

NS does a quick "photosource" of a smiley face to Zwill.



Zwill: "And that is why they pay you the big bucks.

NS: (to self) "You're fired, clear out your desk."

Talking about the CoT revamp. They don't blame Leatherpup.

NS: "With any new feature you never know how people will respond to it. That is what beta is for. We are willing to make changes. But the way it was revelaed was not on our terms, it was a blurry shot, on like the worst character shown. IT was incomplete, some pieces were still in concept and not complete yet. There are like 70 pieces between all the CoT characters."

"I thought the creepiest thing about the CoT was the black, faceless, glowing eyes thing. And I thought that ought to be the defining thing for the Thorns. I thought the bosses ought to be scary and not like normal guys. I wanted the bosses to be poo your pants scary. The response I got from the players was wanting to see that look on everything. The way players expect them to be, and that's alright. We wanted to get everything right, get the colors right. And the best thing is that with the revamp players will get these too."

"The original conception was never tights; it was originally sewn together snakeskin. If you look close at the 3D art you'll see some little dots and sparkles. It's not a latex texture, it's scalier."



"This is a compromise we have to make to get this out to the players, because the robes wouldn't work."

Zwill: "Someone from chat mentions "Well, where do you think all the Snakes went?""

Both laugh.

Talk about David's Alice in Wonderland covers on DA.

http://david-nakayama.deviantart.com/

The 1 PM estimate is no longer accurate, Zwill is asking for an update.

We are now on hour 6.

Q and A time. Zwill has to leave.

"What villain groups would you like to update?"

NS: "From one perspective it's like the older the group the more I'd like to update it, if only to get an HD kind of redo. I'm seeing a lot of skulls and hellions vote. I like the Freaks the way they are, if we touched them it would be the lightest possible touch. Sky Raiders, maybe. They all have a place in my heart and making them cooler and better and upgrading them would be making an awesome project."

"Just think of the Skulls making a sacrifice to join the gang. Think of that whole bone-grafted mask thing, and go more designs involving bones other than skulls."

"Jetpack backpacks, would so love to do that. We're in a back detail reinissance, we're doing backpacks, wings, non-cape stype back details."

"We'd love to do more Vanguard stuff."

"I can neither confirm nor deny specific plans. I see a lot of request for the Egyptian theme too (spammed by one guy a million times tonight), I'd love to draw some of those."

"The Tsoo I wouldn't really want to touch."

"Arctic Theme, some of the Barbarian parts might be good for that."

"The Avatar of Hamidon is one of my favorite pieces we did recently, by concept artist William Ballser. Taking the concept of an existing villain group and evolving it. We have this group of evil nature spirits, led by this jelly. With PRaetoria we have a greyer morality, a darker nature. Bill went with sort of a burned wood look for the caparace, combining it with some Cthulhu elements and the same blue jelly. Same with the Seed and the other Hamidon creatures we do in the future."

Zwill addresses the OTHER spammed topic. The little devil horns are missing on male and huge models. David mentions something like that is probably a tech issue. It's not the only piece that's missing or an outlyer. He'd like to make a list of things like that and fix them. Like cigars for females.

Zwill leaves again.

"Sheathed weapons, that's a trick. You'd need extra animation support. A weapon slung on your back for a back detail. The tech challenge there is that it would be there all the time and when you drew your weapon you'd have two weapons. It would be two cases of new tech in order to do it."

"Least favorite costume piece? I don't dislike any of them, but there's some I never use. There are like some big popeye arm gloves that I never use."

Zwill: "The steampunk arms. Yeah, I never use them, though I have seen some people use them for cool costumes."



Talk about possibly releasing some of the other CoT concept art. Someone in chat wants to try modeling it.

They are aware of the scrollbar issue with the client, Zwill was pulled away for that just now. It's being worked on.

"I've seen seeing requests that you guys have been making while we've been talking, and you guys are going to be really happy with some things coming down the pipeline."

Zwill: "We've been kind of branching out beyond the usual capes and tights superhero concepts."

NS: "The most requests we get are from non-super hero things. The top requests are for genres that have not been covered at all. Comics have so many genres, and we're a comic book game, not merely a superhero game."



Zwill: "There are a lot more Barbarian pieces, more like Red Sonja that we'll be showing coming down the line."

NS: "Jay has been working on those."

Talk about updating trenchcoats. Zwill mentions Jay has a long technical explanation for why trenchcoats work as they are.

Zwill is going to break for lunch after a time, giving everyone time to eat lunch. My tummy thanks you, Zwill!

je-saist: *snerks* I just had an evil thought. The next time Zwill yawns, Avatea leaps in, gags him with a cleave-gag, then drags Zwill off camera while David sips calmly from the cup.

NS: "That would be some good internet TV."

Asking the chat what people would like for costumes.

They finally address the third costume part spammer of battle damage.

I request Rikti and Carnies.

Zwill: "Flowing spawn style capes would be a nightmare for the graphics engine."

NS: "Liefield set. Like really tiny feet and like pouches everywhere. And you can't talk any more."

"The Steampunk set is one of the most useful and recombineable sets we've ever done, way to go Cheryl."

"Ape face? If we did another animal pack that would be something to go in."

Zwill: "And dinosaurs!" *mimics dinosaur*

NS: "We are not going to do anime giant eyes. But the way they exaggerate armor is far game. But we're not going to have humans be a totally different sort of human."

TANGENT: Two Pinoy guys doing some lip-synching thing and doing some Anime type thing and their translation of that into real life is creepy and hilarious.

http://wimp.com/guyscartoon/

NS: "We have such a backlog on back pieces. I'd like to do an update of just back pieces to kind of get that filled out."

Both would like to see some 50's era sci-fi, as well as the more silly Clown type thing, that they have to do over Positron's dead body.

They are taking a break, Zwill has to follow up with some folks and the peoples at Paragon have to eat.

The new QA guy behind Zwill is officially dubbed Arbiter Bacon. He wore a shirt with his name, Kevin, spelled out in bacon. Chat points out it's a pun on Kevin Bacon. Zwill only just now realizes it.

Zwill admits that he's slow, and it's early in the morning and he hasn't finished his first cup of coffee yet.

He taunts us by saying they are not announcing the headstart date today.

"What I've always loved about MMO communities is the blogging. I love reading the COH-themed blogs. And also playing without pants."

"I would love to see more COH-centric blogs popping up and I'm going to be putting up a post in the City Discussion forums, putting out a roll call for bloggers. I'd love to see a link to your blog, share it with the community. Because MMO's are all about a shared experience."

We're going to have a in-game fiction article posted sometime soon. Avatea is working on fancy graphics for it.

Re: beta server: "There were things that went wrong that weren't the machines or the code."

He mentions that it might be related to Texas wildfires.

Tangent: Zwill is jokingly having a conversation with non-existent people in chat to confuse the people watching on the replay.

Zwill got married the year COH came out, and clarifies that him saying "Never forget my anniversary year again" does not mean that he's every forgotten his anniversary.

Tangent: He took his wife to some place in San Fransisco to a place called the Stinking Rose, which is apparently not a euphemism for some body part. Apparently it serves garlic.

Posi arrives as Zwill continues to tangent, clad in a Kool Aid Man D20 shirt.



Tangent: Posi making 40 Clove Chicken and getting a new freezer.

There's a website that does flash games where members of the family can challenge each other to flash games. Posi's family won first place in a high score contest.

"Professional game designer wins online gaming contest. Film at eleven. They asked me my opinion on their games."

Chatroom says: "Needs more capes."

VK says: "If you worked at Valve Software you'd tell them they need more hats."

Freedom is coming out "Soon™" Very, very Soon™.

Beastyle has a Team Spirit painted Bill's Hat he renamed "The Classic Soldier," and the description is, "I learned to kill maggots like you in a little game called Tee Eff Cee!"

Tangent: key combo to make ™. Posi says "Also alt+f4"

Tangent: YouTube HQ getting a slide inside their office.

Zwill: "Brian, where's our slide?"

Posi: "Brian, where's our second floor?"

Zwill: "Brain, where's our cereal dispensers?"

Tangent: ArenaNet's awesome office.

Posi: "It's like a packing popcorn dispenser, but filled with cereal."

Zwill: "They're got like ones with Reese's pieces."

Posi: "Until they get ants."

Tangent: plays. Fiddler on the Roof gave Posi a splitting headache, and the Lion King.

Zwill is singing.

Zwill wanted to be a teacher and found he hated kids in large numbers.

Zwill wants to talk about some of the community sites out there, specifically the radio stations and podcasts.

If you have a COH podcasts, and if they're T for Teen, send Avatea a PM.

You can be beyond T for Teen if you have Tunnel Rat on, apparently she cusses like a sailor.

Posi: "If you want to get a dev on your podcast to chat, our rates are reasonable. I'll go on for free. But you'll probably want someone like Second Measure or Tunnel Rat."



Talking about the Off the Cape podcast.

Zwill: "They put out an outstanding podcast on a regular basis. That's offthecape.net "

Zwill: "They so corny and hokey it's so entertaining. Just like our community chats."



Paragon City News Network, it's a French podcast. They've been regularly putting out episodes for two years.

Tangent: Zwill's coffee burps.

7decoure comes over to say it in The French. The camera has a screenshot up, so his secret identity is safe.


Tangent: Foregin languages. The chat gets French, German, Latin, Klingon, and me going IA! IA! CTHULHU FTAGHN!

Several interesting minutes as Zwill wrestles with getting an image off of the interwebs to show us.


KJSR.net, streaming internet radio. DJ Charlie from the station is in the chat. SinnySinistar in chat is also a DJ on the station. They are taking DJ applications and will be waiving licensing fees and getting DJ's properly set up.

Zwill continues to wrestle with the technology.



Another one is Rogues Radio, another streaming internet radio with CoH.



Virtue's very own The Cape Radio. Which I listen to. I was listening to that earlier.


Every time Zwill clicks on the screen it defaults to this:





Zwill: "Oh gosh, why would you default to that? That's so wrong!"

Zwill: "Yes, I know that's such a hot picture. And Desdemona wasn't bad either."


Zwill: "Can you believe people actually watch this stuff?"

Posi: "I used to listen to talk radio. It eventually got so boring, the same stuff every day, and someone turned me on to podcasts. You can find stuff exactly what your tastes are, listen to it on your schedule, pause it, that sort of thing. It's like your own personal radio station."

Tangent: Picture Pages, Captain Kangaroo, and Bill Cosby.

The native client for Exalted, the VIP server, is English only.


Zwill: "There's the VIP headstart, and then there's Freedom. So Issue 21 hits before Freedom."


They will have the beta notes up as soon as the servers come back up.


Both would love to go to DragonCon, but cannot afford it. Historically it's always been the same weekend as PAX, which is more of CoH's target audience.


Street Justice was not pulled for technical issues, but was pulled because it's not a part of Freedom's launch. The powerset is working fine, it's not broken.

Zwill: "Well, in some people's opinion it might be broken."


HeroCon is not likely this year, at the very least a SF meet and greet. Zwill said they'd love to do another one, though.


"Do any Hollywood celebs play COH?"

They know of a few, Joaquin Phoenix played CoH in a documentary. TheNet says he heard Vin Diesel does.


Posi is going to download Action Comics #1 fter the podcast, as he's pumped for the DC reboot.


They cannot share any information on upcoming Mastermind sets.


Buying the 1.99 sale CoH set would count as buying a boxed edition for reward tokens.


Mission maps are all hand crafted and are not procedurally generated.

Will Calvin Scott ever get his wife back?

"Hmm, we'll see!"

Zwill motions that Black Pebble would like to strangle him now.


Zwill tangented off about a PvP tournament on Freedom earlier in the show and forgot to get back to it.


" Why is Abandoned Sewers Trial, Katie Hannon, and Hess not on the WST rotation?"

Posi: "For Katie that's got just bad karma attached to it from the farming that went on, and the others ones, I forget if Hess was co-op or not. But if we do a Hero one we have to do a villain one, and if we're out of villain ones we can't just assign them willy-nilly."


The person in the "Who Will Die?" story arc was decided before it was written.


The fiction thing was posted on the forums from Protean up on the forums, but the North American website is a little wonky.


Several questions are answered with they will eventually get ported over from every powerset.

Zwill seems to let slip that Controllers will be getting Dark Miasma. Though not in Issue 21. Though he might be confusing Poison and the blaster Dark sets.


Posi solicits suggestions for Zwill's Halloween costume, chat room supplies:
Raggedy Andy
Rebecca Black
Pikachu
Foreshadow
Dread Pirate Roberts
Dr. Vahzilok
Becky the Tarantula Mistress


They will be announcing the themes for the official costume contests soon, along with another announcement.

edited date in title -Z

Updated first post with some screencaps. My ISP exploded at about 3:30. So I missed about 25-30 minutes worth of dev chat.

I came in late so I'm just screenshooting important stuff and will be updating this as we go along.

Uploading screenshots on my rural internet makes the Ustream lag like crazy. So you'll be getting those after everything is done.

This was made by a new character artist named Sup from Korea. The Starcraft one, not the Gold Farming one.



An interior for the Halloween Event.



Concept art for CoT



Player version of the CoT Outfits








There are more Barbarian pieces than we've seen thus far, including more for the female.





Positron wanted to make this NPC a contact and give him his own sotry arc at the end that awards a costume piece, so a Red Bull will give you wings.

Jay wanted to give a few ring straps.


Abomination concept.



Map from the signature story arc.



From all of the world designers. Jay's input was "Move the gate back about 14 feet"







My ISP crapped out at around 3:30, so I miss about 25 minutes of dev chat right here.


Q and A with Tunnel Rat:

"Color tintable Khelds?"

It would take a lot of effort to make the powers tintable and she has a few things she'd like to do before that.

Tunnel Rat has not seen Monkey Fight Club in Pocket D.

She has not seen Fight Club, either.

Her favorite effects in I21 are the Shadow Pass in First Ward and she likes the comets and the fires Leo has done.


The Net has abandoned Beastyle and Tunnel Rat goes back to work. Beastyle is cohostless.


It's apparently Beastyle's birthday on Sunday, and someone comes in and adorns him with a tiara.




Freitag joins as guest host.

Beastyle has a meeting and is replaced by Zwill as host.

Zwill has to playtest something in 15 minutes. He hopes the server comes back up, otherwise he'll be playtesting it and won't be showing us his monitor cause it's super secret.



Zwill says he probably ought to have used the restroom after the meeting. He has to bio and thinks the chat room's suggestion to use a bottle is disgusting.

He says we're going to take a station break and use the restroom.

He won't begin playtesting until the servers are back up.

He leaves us with a picture of Positron from PAX.

Zwill talks TF2.

The new QA guy in Zwill's cube is dubbed Arbiter Baconater, and Arbiter Whiteboard is the guy behind Zwill.

Zwill's favorite TF2 class? He doesn't really have one. He's played Engineer and Demoman recently, has some new stuff for Heavy and loves to play Dead Ringer spy.


"Anything on two level bases?"

There are some things going on with bases, but Zwill can't talk about it right now.


"Any plans to expand the other power pools to have a Tier 5 like the travel power pools got?"

He says that there might be things coming down the pike.


Someone plans to name their kittens after the community team.


"Favorite/not favorite thing coming with Freedom?"

"A gajillion new people checking the game out and coming back. Not favorite? That it's not here yet."


Paragon Rewards will NOT ever get new tiers. They will be rotating out the Tier 9 VIP rewards quarterly.


They're interested in revamping other zones. Atlas Park was literally 2 people working for 1 year.

No plans at the moment to change or update Hamidon.

Zwill blames Rikti monkeys and their evil death farts on Positron.

If Zwill had his way there would be Clown Masterminds.

Haunted Mansion is a team-only mission and requires 4 people.

Zwill rechedules a meeting.

Option to purchase badge-unlocked weapons from the store? Not that he knows of.

Sound customization for powers? "Wow. That's a whole nother level of... I'll pass that on."

Why are people in Paragon City over 6 feet tall? "Lots of beef."

Destroyable environment walls? "Positron wanted a destroyable gazebo."

Ninjas are defending the servers from pirates.

During the head start they will be running official costume contests. One of the prizes is a Razer Naga mouse, which Avatea hand models. The dev team will be judging one. Another will be a trial with Positron. There will be themes for the contests. There are no catgirls involved. The EU players will not be left out for once, yay!

They could autograph the Naga's box.

Lots of embarrassing pen and paper RPG's at the office. Zwill plays in the weekly 4e campaign.

Positron wants to do Bazooka Melee.

Zwill's favorite anime is Berserk.

They will be introducing some new enhancements.

Beastyle shows off his Lucario figure.

He knows people want buttcapes for non-Widows.

We will not see the actual prices for the items before CoH goes live.

The only word in the English language with three sets of double letters is Bookkeeper.

Zwill likes the idea of a Summer Beach Party as a counterpart to the Winter event. Surfing with the rocketboard, mayeb a Big Kahuna badge.

Asheron's Call was the first MMO Zwill got really into.

They're working with AMD to fix issues with CoH drivers.

Zwill can't sing Prince.

He doesn't know if there is proliferation for I22. He knows there are plans in the works for the next round of it, though.

Zwill's favorite Zelda game is Wind Waker.

They will be adding more female characters to more villain groups, starting with CoT.

Dark Watcher pops on the guest host.

Zwill talks about his experiences with Asheron's Call.

Zwill is a Ps3 guy. Dark Watcher plays some of them all.

Dark Watcher played the CoH card game, is was fun, but it wasn't balanced.

They've improved the ragdolls somewhere along the line in a way that improves the lag.

Zwill says the Sims is evil.

Both agree SimCity 2000 is the best SimCity.

Neither has played Civ V.

Zwill hasn't had a chance to finish Portal 2 yet.

All he's been playing lately is CoH, TF2, and League of Legends.

Two new trials are coming out this year, seemingly in addition to the Underground Trial.

Zwill was playing Minecraft on the plane to PAX and Comicon.

Zwill agrees that Planescape: Torment is better than all.

Nerding out over DnD game writers.

243 minutes of livestream!

It would take 1.5 years to rewrite the UI to be completely customizable.

Sig story arc mega-rewards are once per arc per week per character.

CoH themed hats for TF2? Zwill thinks that would be awesome. Zwill and Dark Watcher love TF2. I think Positron is hanging around in the background, trolling them by saying he can't afford it.

Statesman's Mask and Recluse's Helmet for TF2, Zwill wants to talk to Black Pebble and make it a reality.

Andy will be posting the weekly office fantasy football results.

Positron is 8:1 to win.

Masterminds getting female pets? Not at the moment.

VEAT's will still have the first costume slot taken up by the uniform.

Freedom, Champion, Virtue, Justice, and Infinity are now online.

I manage to get Dark Watcher and Zwill to reference the Space sphere from Portal 2.

"Can we get a jump out and scream boo stalker primary?" causes both of them to crack up.

Zwill plays a clip of Street Justice and makes Adam West Batman noises.

There are lots of plans for end game and incarnate stuff beyond the 10 slots.

Dark Watcher is listening to the Wheel of Time series on audiobook. Zwill has read them.

Zwill is calling it as he has a meeting and most servers are online. Except Guardian.

Pre-show chat tangent, still trying to pick out a name for Arbiter Elbow/Donut/Haircut. Arbiter Backdrop is suggested and I point out that's only if he's in Japan. Otherwise he's Arbiter Belly-to-Back Suplex.

We're getting started a bit late as Zwill is photoshopping PAX pic to right the PAX peeps of PAX pox.

And also acquiring coffee.

Beastyle has made Ecto Cooler and it has apparently ruined his tastebuds with its ambrosial deliciousness.

We have a Server-corn on the whiteboard today.



Zwill and Freitag have been up since 4 this morning.

Arbiter Background/Haircut/Donut/Sunnyvale/Elbow aka Blaire has returned to college. He'll be back after his semester or year is up.

Zwill forgot to update the Ustream producer software.

Positron (in chat) "UStream Producer Pro 2: Producer Harder"

Antec made 4 custom CoH Antec cases. Zwill says calling them badass would be an understatement.

Zwill took pictures of the cases, but they didn't turn out very well.

They had an art panel at PAX.

They kept the presentation short so they could have a longer Q and A session.

Zwill: "Other MMO's are powered by hamsters. Not us. We're powered by Unicorns."

They had a meet and greet on Friday and Zwill hasn't had time to photoshop them up.

Team Evil Marketing.



Some giant mech thing from the game War Machine at PAX.



Panel on Saturday. Here's a portion of the line to get in.



They announced that there will be a VIP headstart, but there were some problems preventing them from giving a date that they might have to push back.

Zwill: "A wild Arbiter Hawk appears!"



Hawk brought notes.

Jeff Hamilton aka Arbiter Hawk has been working at Paragon for about a year as assistant system, he does monsters and villains and zone events and such. He started off in QA. Even though he's not QA anymore, he's kept the Arbiter name.

Hawk has an Altoid from Zwill.

Zwill says he ought to have a 5 Hour Energy between each panels.

coh_beastyle: "When I was a kid, I thought "caffeine" meant flavor. So when I was younger I used to buy jolt because it advertised, "Twice the caffeine!""

Tangent on product shilling and cars.

Hawk worked on the Seed of Hamidon zone event.

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/n...ite_update.php



"We wanted to do a couple things that we hadn't gotten a chance to do. It's simultaneously a Zone Event and a Giant Monster."

"We wanted to create a Praetorian zone event, the core of which was a giant monster encounter. And take the opportunity to stage and encounter primarily in the air. You could kind of count the Rikti drop ships, but those weren't really meant to be destroyable."

He notes that Caleb doesn't count since the bane of my badge hunting existence spawns due to ground-related objectives.

The idea behind the Buoyant Membrane power is that Hamidon is a blend of science and magic. Every time you kill a seedling it covers you in buoyant goo. It's like Group Fly, even invincible pets are affected by it. You can also buy it from a Seed Hunter. 10,000 INF per 2 minutes. It stacks up to 20-30 minutes total. They sell it in the zone the entire time. The power is useable only in First Ward.

Hawk: "It's a pink-purple cloud. I tinted it on the weekend. What do you want from me?"

Zwill: "Don't drink and design kids!"

Hawk: "It's the same color as the ectoplasm in the seedlings, so it's consistant."

It should be compleatable for a group of 8-12 people that are in the level of the zone.

There was so much content in First Ward they had to expand the level range to 29. At 25 a lot of beta testers were easily outlevelling the 8 arcs.

Tangent: Nerf guns, Zwill wants the chain firing one. At his old workplace they mounted the Nerf Vulcan on an AV projector cart and put cardboard armor around it so it was like a SWAT vehicle.

They set up an ambush on people coming out of the elevator with it.

"We figured out a way to make the buffs from the seedlings be additive instead of multiplicative. For each of these alive do this additionally. That was kind of tricky."

It's kind of like Fiery Embrace for the Seed.

Zwill: (Bad German accent) "Now is the time on coffee talk when ve ask ze qvestions!"

Chat says Hawk needs thick coke bottle glasses. Zwill says his are too thin, as they're for astigmatism.

I baffle him with a stigmata/astigmatism pun.

Tangent: PAX security story, Zwill in an elevator with Wil Wheaton.

"What else have you designed recently?"

He did some work on the villaingroups in First Ward, like some of the ones that appear only in missions. The Dregs, rough tough mercenaries and surviving First Ward citizens. It's not a cohesive group like the 5th Column has a leader and ranks. It's like this is a survivor who found an assault rifle.

Hawk has indeed seen Ghostbusters. But has not seen Fifth Element. Tunnel Rat can now lord it over him.

Avatea: "Multipass!"

Zwill: "WHERE IS EVERYONE GETTING THESE HOTWING CHIPS?! THEY HAVE THOSE IN THE VENDING MACHINE NOW?"

"What would you do if you could update any 'old' aspect of the game, what would it be?"

Zwill: "Remember this is purely hypothetical and oh my gosh we have more chips over here right now."

"That's tricky. A lot of the stuff in the game right now is stuff people like the way it is. Even if we revamped something old we'd be adjusting rules on the fly and we'd have to be cautious doing that. If I were to take all a powerset's attacks and make them something else, people who liked the set the way it is would have a fit. Some people would love it and some people would not love it."

"Is Combat Phasing disabled in areas where there are zone events?"

They technically could put combat phasing in a zone event, but it would be hard to make all of the information players would need to complete the zone event play out.

He gives a complex example involving Skulls and Hellions fighting in a theoretical zone event.

They're not totally incompatible, but they would try and avoiud meshing them together unless it was something designed on its own.

Hawk thinks Null the Gull's group fly setting extends to the Buoyant Membrane.

Phased areas are disabled during a Rikti invasion.

Zwill refuses to show a picture of his Indiana driver's license with a beard because he knows I'll take a screenshot of it.

Servercorns are not magically resistant to fixes.

"How many times have you defeated the Avatar of Hamidon?"

Hawk: "OVER 9000! We've been tweaking him all over the place. Sometimes making him too easy, other times too hard. Or too binary, where you needed certain powersets in the league to be effective."

If you're on top of the 'Ghostbuster's Tower' in first ward you might catch the edge of his debuff cloud or his blasts. There are some safe places to stand.

Zone event mobs don't drop inspirations, Hawk says he'll look into it since they ought to be. They have their own reward tables for them, since they'd be easy to farm.

Hawk: "I wanted to hack together like a shark blast so you can hold out your hand and a laser shoots out and you shoot a shark at your target."

Zwill: "The nemesis pony does not exist! It's a rumor! IT DOES NOT EXIST!"

Hawk: "Please look into this red light."

Hawk's favorite of the game's system is the Invention system since it allows you to do so very many things you couldn't otherwise do. He says it's like infinite variability.

" Can we get a Servercorn Blast or Sharp Blunt Damage powers?"

Hawk: "I could make them. But they wouldn't pass art control."

Dopplegangers couldn't be used to make it look like a statue.

No plans to revisit and update old giant monster encounters.

He cannot tell us anything about the new Halloween event.

For next week's Ustream cast Zwill will get us screenies of the Halloween event.

Hawk did powers for the Abomination.

Zwill says he'd bring Jay on, but he'd talk about the Special Forces Lebanese art instructor who had a daughter with a weird name.

Yeah, odds are he's missing it because of its similarity in size and coloration to the common salvage found message that I've grown to essentially ignore.

I really do think it ought to be a non-white color.

One master account and one subaccount for each child can be easily done. Though you might want to remove the credit card info from the account to prevent purchases from the Paragon Store.

When there's a VK on your team you get sniper set recipes.

Avatea stops by to say hi while she's still half sleepy and working on an Itrepid Informer article.

Zwill informs us of beta with a little program (It takes 3 server blades) that are AI and run into things and the like. They had 5500 of them and barely any lag. But a few times they had a mapserver with a 'chat bomb' all the bots simultaneously chatting at once.

They had 49 instances of Atlas going. The bots movement is terrible, they get sent to the hospital and can't get out.

Chat says they saw an Atlas Park 51. It's like Area 51, but with more catgirls.

Talking about training room events, beta, and general testing.

Soda burps.

Performance in BAF and ITF have been much improved, lag valley is pretty much gone. People are complaining that they're missing Prisoners cause they run at full speed now.

Zwill leaves tomorrow morning for PAX, as is Black Pebble. Zwill says they will be revealing the name of the VIP server.

No Ustream broadcast from PAX, maybe an update from the hotel room. Depends on bandwidth. Zwill says he will not if the latency makes the video "poopy."

Man,

I just hate poopy videos.

Discussion of PAX panels. Zwill says there will be a couple of interesting tidbits on Saturday.

Zwill says his brain has melted and failed several sanity checks. IA! IA! CTHULHU FTAGHN!

Hurricane Irene will not interrupt service since the servers are in Texas.

Zwill thinks Synapse forgot about the meeting. Zwill sicks Avatea and Arbiter Elbow to catch Synapse. Synapse is missing and not at his desk. So Zwill sends the Flying Monkies to fetch Black Scorpion.

More talking about PAX to stall for time.

No Black Scorpion or Synapse so we're stuck with Second Measure, who throws himself on the sword for the team, who are in meetings.

Awkward moment when Second Measure says Zwillinger smells pretty.

Synapse's meeting will be done in about 10 minutes.

Zwill: "Beam/Time Corruptors is extremely effective, though requires a lot of micromanagement."

A power gamer in another cube is nodding.

Second Measure has been testing an Energy Melee/Something brute. He forgets, it just has a few toggles and it's not Regen or Willpower. One of his favorite characters is a Willpower/SS Tanker, kind of based on Luke Cage.

He likes fast-playing sets that have a lot of options to click on. His Second Measure character is a Ninja Blade stalker.

Talking about Street Justice and once more mentioning it's internally referred to as Nate's Abuse of Power Powerset.

Zwillinger does a puppet Kim Jong Il impression "Wry y no release Stleet Justice?"

Exciting announcements coming at PAX.

They're putting the finishing touches internally on Titan Weapons.

It took a bit longer than expected to implement it from the technical team, Black Scorpion found some bits of code that made things a bit easier.

Zwill: "If I see a single Cloud out there, I'm going to reach through the screen and delete your character. No! No Sephiroth clones! Bad! Bad Final Fantasy fan!"

Zwill is excited about more powersets in the works that they can't mention.

Second Measure just realizes he cut himself shaving this morning by seeing his streaming image.

TANGENT: Zwill's electric shaver.

Second Measure shaves once every three weeks. Second Measure says he's rugged, Zweill calls him scruffy.

Chat calls Zwill's face baby soft.

Avatea is still working on the article.

It's a line by line breakdown on Beam Rifle.

They're trying to stall for time by giving personal grooming tips and not trusting Nate around sharp objects.

Zwill: "You're like the Brad Pitt of the gaming industry."

Talking about a new comic from the Penny Arcade and PvP people, the Trenches, it's about a guy in video game QA. There are some anonymous QA stories being told.

Some guy did QA in a barn for a week.

Nate started out in QA and tech support, but sucked at tech support and made himself valuable to the producers.

To fill time they do Q and A a bit early.

What in Issue 22?

Stuff.

Nate is excited about it, but nothing they can mention or else Black Pebble will slay them.

Zwill: "You dawg, I herd u lik slaying, so we put slaying in your slaying..."

Nate: "You are made of memes."

They're working on issue 23 and beyond they. They have up to ISSUE 29 planned, at least in part.

Release date at PAX? Zwill dances around the question and says he's hoping someone live tweets the panels.

Tangent: Meme summoning: "U mad bro" and "Come at me, bro!" for taunt.

Signature story lines wqith Issue 21 or later?

More info at PAX.

Zwill tells us to send our bugs to Second Measure by PM's. ALL OF THEM.

"Honestly, post them in the bug forums. Every day there is a new e-mail sent out with bugs from the forums."

"Will we ever have a chance to see the internal layout of some of the iconic restaraunts in Paragon?"

Up and Away Burger. Infront Steakhouse. City of Gyros.

Zwill laments that he has been eating terribly due to the various teams been working through lunch and having it catered with his favorite hot dogs, Hebrew National.

Zwill and Nate torture Patrice in a nearby cube by butchering the pronunciation of croissant.

Tangent: Con food.

Zwill sends Avatea out at Synapse.

Zwill discusses Frisbee Blast and various tosses. He pulls out the Frisbee to show.

Nate: "Phil isn't here, so let's talk about filler. Er... Phil Rifle. Beam Rifle!"

TMNT tangent: What Casey Jones had as weapons.

Nate thought he was just going to hold down the fort for a little bit. Positron says he wants to watch him suffer.

So we go into Beam Rifle.

Positron demands Nate return to his desk and finish an e-mail, or have McCann do it.

Disintigrate adds effects to other attacks.

Single Shot, Tier 1, moderate damage, Disintigrate targets spread the damage to 3 targets.

Arbiter Nameless/Doughtnut/Elbow/Sunnyvale is up front while Positron is in the background.

Charged shot deals a lot more damage than single shot, has a higher chance to knock down, and will do more damage to a disintegrate target.

Zwill loves the animation on Cutting Beam, the AoE. It's a pretty wide cone. It reduces defense.

Disintegrate is a DoT and a debuff that is even longer which is called disintegration, which can spread to other targets.

Random Coffee Delivery Arm.

The sounds are some of the best, says Positron. Zwill and Doughnut both play with sound off. The Net says they make the sound guy cry.

They added a huge chunk of new sounds to the game.

Aim is self explanatory.

Lancer Shot is your big single target shot.

Zwill: "Big bada boom. Multipass."

Doughnut: "What? I'm a terrible nerd."

Posi and Zwill are aghast that he hasn't seen Fifth Element.

At least he';s seen Ghostbusters. And he DID make a character named Ghostbuster.

Tunnel Rat has seen Fifth Element and she PM's Zwill precisely to tell him.

Lancer Shot has a 100% chance to stun, has a 40 foot range and is fast recharge.

Penetrating Ray.

Posi: "I feel bad for Penetrating Ray."

Zwill headesks.

Hioghest chance of spreading disintegrate.

Piercing Beam, like a 3 degree cone that can hit up to 3. disintegrated targets will suffer additional damage.

Zwill does another "Yo dawg" comment.

Posi: "You are the internet given human form."

Zwill: "The internet vomited something up and it was me."

Overcharge!

They all use Google Chrome in the office, Zweill thinks a window in the article looks funny.

Extreme energy targeted AOE, -Def, DoT, and it has a chance to stun. It singes the ground.

Does not have a crash. 3 minute cool down.

Hints and tips: Drop disintegrate on big targets.

Beam Rifle is primarily a single target set, though it does have decent AoE damge but it depends on micromanagement and a bit of luck.

Disintegration does not stack. Everyone can benefit from one Disintegrate. You can have one beam rifler focusing on spreading disintegrate and two more using the mezes and debuffs.

Zwill: "He used all these symbols and stuff. All fancy. He knows how to use the photoshop."

Lancer Shot is a great damage power and a great mez power.

Interruption of unknown person off camera, who is playing the beam rifle sounds into the mix from some unknown device.

Zwill: "Did we ever decide on a redname for her? Vox? Ok."

Zwill: "Positron, if you wet willy me, I swear..." (Adam Sandler impression) "I'm coming out of the booooooth! I swear, I'll make a Sephiroth clone and kill an Arieth clone, and make you cry!"

Steelclaw is lamenting that he can't play the game until Freedom is release.

Black Pebble stopped Zwill from playing the Beam Rifle video, but we just got the audio from it.

There will be an Intrepid Informer article on Beam Rifle going up later.

There are now actual in-water sharks in First Ward.

Mention that a lot of things are going to be announced at PAX.

Posi: "Oh look, Phil's here! Just kidding!"

And there's a third.

And it's happened to me twice in the past 45 minutes.

I know that doubling all measurements (essentially scaling up a living creature to twice it's original size and keeping everything exactly the same in ratio) results in an eightfold increase in mass.

My problem is I can't seem to figure out what the ratio would be for non-double increases in dimensions. All the formulae I can find are based on overall surface area.

Is it possible to make a formula that I can put into Excel or something with a weight and then a percentage increase of enlargement to find out what a scaled up version of the lifeform would weight at the new size?

I'm trying to calculate what the approximate size of a giant would be for a fantasy story I'm writing.

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Incarnate_System

This will help.

Clockwork Chest detail
Omega Gloves and Boots
Those spiky, glowy wings Wings
Bioluminescent and Organic Armor tails
Sport boots and gloves
Praetorian Police Boots
Posh and Serrated Sugar hairstyles
The Mesh face detail (to give characters non-standard skin tones when coupled with some Tights patterns to mimic Tops with Skin)