flipside

Why yes I did miss that part. Thank you!

But it doesn't give the 50% boost the character you claimed it on?

If I get a free amount of anything, let it be a day of game time, a free month of HBO from my cable provider, a free day of service from my ISP, that is monetary compensation. It's money I'm not spending, and it is money they are spending to provide me that service. It would have been money I would have otherwise spent, so I "got that money back", so to speak. That's how I see it as monetary compensation. I understand what you are trying to say, but I disagree.


Not that I don't agree with Hyperstrike's position, but we are all posting our own opinions on our own accord, thank you very much.

Perhaps we all jumped to that type of conclusion because historically that is the most requested type of compensation that always get's asked for when game outages occur. These people either want their time back (which costs the company money if they hand out free play time to VIP's) or they want money back (which, obviously, costs money). You can't fault anyone on that since that is always what is asked in return. If these people always asked for cakes or pies sent to their home as compensation, then we'd likely be having that conversation instead.

What do you call an extra day of game time? Money compensation. If my monthly billing cycle ends on April 18th, but you make it end on April 19th, you've paid for me to have an extra day. Dollars and cents, that is identical to paying back (in my example) $37,500 to all subscribing customers the "day" they lost.

And again, how do you extend that to free/premium players? You can't, since they don't pay a cent in the first place.

As Forbin noted up thread, it is not only an unrealistic expectation, it is explicitly noted in the EULA (that thing you sign each and every time you login to the game) that we do not get this kind of compensation. So, right there, this argument is blown out of the water as the company has already acknowledged this fact and summarily said "you will receive and should expect nothing from these downtimes."

Now, this other MMO is not the first to do such a thing, and I'm sure won't be the last. But, these should be viewed as outliers, exceptions to the rule. These should not be viewed as the norm? Why? The amount we pay as a monthly subscription does not allow for these sorts of measures to happen. You want guaranteed 100% up-time or compensation for it? Ok, you got it... but you're monthly fee will need to go up as well. Why? Well to ensure 100% up-time, those servers we need to play on need to be mirrored, such that if something were to occur, (for example) Freedom can fall back to Freedom-backup seamlessly. Also, all that character data needs to be backed up by the second to these mirror servers. Those new servers need maintenance, parts, etc. That money adds up over time. And who is going to be paying for that server? Yup, you, the subscriber. Be careful what you are asking for.

I've been here since launch, and I've been impacted once, maybe twice, by "lengthy" unexpected down time. Sure, we have unexpected down times that may only last 20 minutes. I don't count those. In 20 minutes, I've barely shifted in my seat and I'm back in the game. So, I'm willing to say CoH has maintained a 99% uptime over those years. In my life for such a thing, 99% uptime and 100% uptime are indistinguishable.


It lends no weight, as we are not entitled to anything back. The company says so, and we agree to it. You agree to it, each time to log on. But, let's put it in a different perspective...

I'd willing to guess that the average VIP player is a monthly subscriber, so they're paying $14.99/month. Let's average out a year to 30.417 days per month, getting us down to paying just under 50 cents per day for access to the game. Key words there: access to the game, whatever that entails. Per hour? We're talking 2 cents. 2 ... whole ... cents, per hour. Now, again, I've been playing since launch, and if CoH has gone offline for more than an 8 hour publish stint, I don't recall it. And those were expected downtimes for game upgrades. You're talking about being reimbursed for unexpected downtimes, and we're only paying 16 whole cents for known ones when they do infrequently occur.

Now, let's say it does happen. CoH decides to reimburse us a whole day for whatever reason. That's 50 cents, which can't even buy you a can of soda these days. I'll take a wild stab that there's 75,000 paying VIP subscriptions out there, so CoH is going to reimburse $37,500 USD. To do that, they'll need to get marketing involved, their accounting people, support to ensure the money goes through, further support if it doesn't get done properly for all 75,000 people, charge backs to credit cards, or vouchers if people paid using time cards... you know what, keep my 50 cents. It would be much easier, and that $37,500 can be used for more hardware to keep from whatever happened to cause the downtime from happening again. I'll sleep pretty good knowing my 50 cents helped to outfit their data center with new tech so that the 8,000 people playing while I'm sleeping had a good experience.

And we didn't even talk about reimbursing free or premium players. How do you reimburse them? They don't pay a subscription, so there is no paid time lost. Maybe the ones that had invention licenses or something running you could extend out for a day, but that surely won't get everyone. Give them a 50 cent Paragon Market voucher? Er, wait, that would be a 40 Paragon Point voucher. Can you buy even one costume part for 40PP? That's actually a real question, as I haven't really looked for individual pieces in the market and have not much knowledge on their costs.

Finally, to put it in one last ridiculous vantage point, the next time you are at your local gas station/7-11/etc., and you've paid for your bag of chips and you get your 14 cents in change back... when you look at that donation container for your spare change, remember that CoH was down for 7 hours this month. Sorry "Random Society for Finding a Cure For Something", you got bills to pay.


A lot of this post seemed to be directed as the person writing the original post. While sarcastic, it was definitely not directed at said person. It was directed at this argument, which comes up more often than it should, and I find it increasingly ridiculous each time it comes up.

That... that is a very pretty office. Not sure if it's the blinds that do the trick or what, but kudos on that space.

That's an IKEA desk if I'm not mistaken. I had the same model desk from a few years ago when the legs were bolted on differently. During a recent IKEA trip, I noticed the same model desk but it had a different leg configuration like in Zwil's screenshot.

If I'm right, I can say with utmost confidence that the desk is without a doubt the heaviest piece of furniture I've ever lifted.

Except in the Valentine's mission from Duncan, there isn't a loophole. As Venture noted above, they tied that off with "[...]some souls don't want to return to the living [...]", paraphrased. That comes from the mission interaction text with The Conduit contact hero side, also not sure what the villain side has going for it.

So, no loophole there. Who's to say Duncan/Liberty didn't try it already and Statesman didn't come back? Maybe he's truly happy in the afterlife and doesn't want to return. Also, we can't assume he'd come back as "Statesman." Wade stole his powers before toasting him, so it's likely coming back to the living would bring him back as good 'ol Marcus Cole.

While I do agree that the whole "Statesman dying" story is a bunch of rubbish, at least the story here attempts to tie off any loose ends of "well if we can bring back Recluse's main squeeze, why can't we bring back the States?"

Well that is one problem with folks understanding the suggestion, but you've openly been referring to the "trials" as incarnate trials, not iTrials, in most of your posts in this suggestion:
So, is your suggestion now to allow existing non-incarnate trials/task forces to count for doing the accolade requirements? I think you need to restate the purpose of this suggestion as it has been lost in the confusion.

Two topics to tackle here:
1) I think the original PvP analogy is correct, assuming he based his thoughts on allowing incarnate trials to count for non-incarnate accolade requirements as was originally posted. Getting PvP badges for doing non-PvP content is a perfect analogy to this; you were suggesting to allow incarnate content count towards completion of non-incarnate accolades. Seems spot on to me.

2) Our assumptions are based off of your posts and information you are providing us on your suggestion. If we are leaping to conclusions that are incorrect, we are getting that from you. Your suggestion needs to be clear and concise. It doesn't have to be bullet-proof, but it has to put us all on the right track to understanding what your suggestion entails.

Prestige conversion is what I do. Yeah, the conversion rate is terrible, but if the influence is doing nothing anyways, might as well use it for something.

I still believe this was a terrible decision. I understand it's a lot of work to get everything changed over, but do it all at the same time so it at least makes sense in the game world. If that has to wait while you make all those changes, then it has to wait. Quality sometimes is better than quantity.

This is correct. I do this for every new character and never have to change everything once the files are loaded. One thing to always remember is that when you leave a global channel, it doesn't update those saved files. If you then start another character and load your files, you'll join that global channel again.

Just speaking for myself here, but I'm not offended at all, but I do disagree with the suggestion being made. I have responded with what I feel is wrong with the suggestion, and pointed out flaws and inconsistencies in the OP's idea. That is all. If that is being seen as offensive or harsh, I did not mean it as such. Tones never travel well across the internet.