je_saist

*snickers*

I know upon which thread you refer. I would point out that "Heroes" cross-dressing has been a staple of the genre for decades.

A not so direct case in point for me: the television show Hogan's Heroes. At some point, everybody but Ivan Dixon (Kinchloe), Werner Klemperer (Klink), and Kenneth Washington (Baker), wound up in a dress for the show, and I suspect the only reason Klink never got put into a dress is because the writers couldn't ever come up with a story concept where it would be believable. Even John Banner (Schultz) was put in a wedding dress at one point.

Given that we play a SuperHero game, it'd make sense for our Heroes to get put into situations where they'd have to dress up to fool an enemy. Even if it's for role-play purposes only, expanding the "cross dressing" options would still fit the genre and the game itself.

*snickers*

Okay, this made me laugh. It does raise something else I would like to know. I've commented on the forums after the announcement of the market merge that I would not have liked to have been the one to tell the coders the databases had to be merged. Now, as I understand how the system works now, there's an extensive amount of legacy code in place in order to account for the separated markets. So, what I'd like to know:

Is the merging of the markets bringing a new database system?

e.g. would you be moving from say SqlServer to MySql or Postgresql?

Is the merging of the markets allowing your team to clean up the code for drop generation?

Is the merging of the markets allowing you clean out code for database lookups?

e.g. If a Hero tries to give a Villain a recipe now, some processing cycles have to be spent on looking up that the two are of different alignments, and some network bandwidth has to be expended communicating this status and rejection of the gift to the players.

What exactly was the reaction you and the other coders had to merging the markets?

Where you looking forward to the challenge of bringing the databases together and simplifying tasks on the backend?

*watches Fey from the rafters*

probably safest to be up here....

... ... I'm going to pay for this. I just know it...

I thought the Tech Support budget included funds for Depends?

yeah. that's kind of by design.

These are POOL POWERS

Let me spell this out: THEY ARE INTENTIONALLY WEAKER THAN PRIMARY AND SECONDARY POWERS IN NATIVE POWER SETS.

There is nothing wrong with the values on the pool powers, they do not need to be reviewed, and they do not need to be changed.

I've got a bottle cap... will that do?

You don't play stalkers. They already do. http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Patron_Powers

• Spirit Shark 41 Ranged Damage over time (Lethal) Foe: Knockback
• Water Spout 41 PBAoE Minor Damage (Smashing) Foe: Knockback/Fear/Disorient
• Spirit Shark Jaws 44 Ranged DoT (Lethal) Foe: Hold -Fly

• Mace Blast 41 Ranged, Moderate Damage (Smashing, Energy), Foe: Knockback
• Web Cocoon 44 Ranged, Foe: Slow/Hold -Recharge -Fly
• Disruptor Blast 44 Ranged (Targetted Area of Effect), Moderate Damage (Smashing, Energy), Foe: Knockback

• Mu Bolts 41 Ranged, Moderate Damage(Energy), Foe -Endurance
• Electric Shackles 44 Ranged, Minor Damage(Energy), Foe: Hold, -Endurance
• Ball Lightning 44 Ranged (Targeted Area of Effect), Moderate Damage over Time(Energy), Foe -Endurance

• Dark Blast 41 Ranged, Moderate Damage(Negative), Foe: -Accuracy
• Moonbeam 41 Sniper, Superior Damage(Negative), Target -Accuracy
• Soul Storm 44 Ranged, Moderate Damage over Time(Negative), Foe: Hold

Every single Stalker gets at least 3 ranged attacks from their Patron Power Pools, with every single one getting exactly what you asked for at level 41: a ranged medium power attack.

It's quite possible when you realize that although Game Moderators might be flagged as non-targetable to players, such flags may or may not extend to pet creatures. Pets in the game already work on different targeting mechanics from players to begin with.

For example a summoned pet can target and attack a critter that falls outside of the players active perception range. If a Night Widow were to drop Smoke Bomb, while I myself as the player would be unable to target or see the Night Widow, my pet would still be able to target and attack.

In situations of extreme lag or forced system overdraw, such as players grouping together to take on the Hamidon, a Pet Will automatically target and attack the Hamidon, even if the Hamidon is not being rendered or is not targetable on the player's computer.

Other examples of a pets abilities to target critters beyond the reach of the players can be found in the restrictions on attacking reviving / rezzing critters. A player must wait until an enemy critter is fully revived before initiating attacks. Pets can still attack while the enemy critter is in the process of the rez.

What is unknown is whether or not this is a bug in the Villain Animated Stone attacking a Game Moderator when they aren't supposed to, or if the Game Moderator simply forget to set protection flags. We probably won't have any confirmation on what exactly what went wrong... I would expect QA is trying to replicate the event though.

yes / no / not really.

Yes, City of Heroes does collect some user-data. That user data isn't exactly accurate. E.G. a few years back there was a sudden flood of Windows 98 users after an update went out. The flood of Windows 98 users was caused by gamers using Cedega atop Linux having to change their program identify from Windows 2000 / Xp to Windows 98 after that update to maintain the ability to play the game.

No: the Paragon Studios staff don't openly share the hardware information that's collected.

not really: We can make some guesses about the average hardware base by what the developers do. E.G. the statements at HeroCon that the developers would be maintaining some level of support for Intel Graphics Accelerators. We can guess that there is a large enough player-base still using the Intel GA's to influence that decision.

1680x1050 is based on average monitor sales and average monitor prices, as well as the break points on the GPU's themselves.

The RadeonHD 4850 and Nvidia Geforce 9800 cards were strongest in this resolution: While the RadeonHD 4850 and Geforce 9800 / GTS 250 could drive higher resolutions in many games, they started to suffer when applying filtering affects. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2008/..._4800_series/9

Ergo, since we knew from HeroCon that the RadeonHD 4850 was the starting point (according to the developer Ghost Falcon) for all UltraMode options at once, we knew where to start looking for Ultra Mode support.

We also knew from a post by Positron that under the developers on tests, the 9800 GT / GTS 250 were the starting point for all options at once on Nvidia graphics cards.

You haven't been reading a post I've made on these forums have you...

what more raw data do you want. Pie charts? Line graphs?

Fixed.

Okay, I'm honestly not sure what you want here or what you are going for.

If you want to know what is the minimum hardware for running all UltraMode options at once, that empirical data is already known, and documented in multiple places on the forums, including some of the stickied threads. I've just re-documented the starting points for support yet again in this thread.

• Either you have a system that has better hardware than that and you can start turning UltraMode options up
• or you have a system that's lower than that and you can pretty much write Ultra-Mode support off.

Yes, there is a bit of wiggle room between the 9800 series cards and the 8800 series cards, and there is a bit of wiggle room between the 4850 and 4770. So, lets go back to the 1680*1050 resolution where I can tell you what the performance is on the next model cards down:

From the AMD side the RadeonHD 4670 will struggle to do UltraMode options no matter what processor you throw at it.

The Nvidia side the Geforce 9600 spanned 5 different models. The top end card, the 96 watt 9600 GT can drive Ultra Mode options in 1280*720. Lower end cards can't.

Their next generation siblings, the 5670 and the entire GT 2xx and 3xx line-ups are simply too weak to drive even 720.

* * *
The interaction of Reichsman with alternative dimensional selfs also raises another question: Was Reichsman draining power from the Praetorian Marcus Cole, aka Tyrant?

So? What exactly was Issue 17 anyways? Wasn't it, oh yeah, Ultra Mode and the Praetorian introduction arcs? Check out the I17 issue release: http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/gam..._overview.html

two of the pictures are from Going Rogue:





Those zone's are not from any existing CoH / CoV zone, ergo they must be from Praetoria. One of the things a lot of players either forget, or just didn't pay attention to, is that if the development had proceeded as planned, Issue 17 would have been the accompanying issue for Going Rogue. Ergo, it stands to reason that many of the original art resources and promotional materials for the accompanying issue with Going Rogue would refer to Issue 17, not Issue 18.

interesting bit of trivia.

If you Google Image Search for "Groucho Marx Catgirl"... three of the results are from a previous Rookery: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...=194119&page=2

This has nothing to do with the incoming pounce DemonCaller is about to receive.

*POUNCES DemonCaller!*

Issue 18 is the accompanying Issue for Going Rogue. All known details can be found on the City of Heroes main website: http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/gam..._overview.html

*dresses Fey up like Lucy*

FeyFey you got some splainin to do!

Pool powers are intentionally weak. The only time you should take a pool power attack is when you need to take it to unlock a useful power.

E.G. You have to take boxing or kick to unlock Tough and Weave.

Yes.

Just because the developers wipe the history doesn't mean the players will. There will be players who will be waiting to immediatly relist their high ticket items for the same prices they originally bid.

There will also be players reporting what everything used to sell at. The price spikes and base listing practices will basically continue with no changes.


There is also a fundamental problem with influence sinks. Unless they are based on a neutral pricing source, they punish all players. The reason why base enhancements work as an influence sink is because you can buy base enhancements for a vendor for a set cost. You don't have to pay over that cost, but you can pay under that cost on the market.

Influence sinks that exist just for the sake of sinking influence are a different story. The basic problem is, anything that the developers create that players will be willing to spend influence on, generally won't appeal to those who work the farms. Case in point, somebody once suggested being able to purchase a statue with their name and a copy of their character. Neat idea, but if the developers set the prices high enough where only the players working the farms can afford them, the farmers won't purchase the influence sink because they would be identified, and thus stand out. If the developers set the cost low enough where just any player could afford them, the item no longer works as an influence sink.

There's also the problem that just because an influence sink is in the game, doesn't mean players will use it. Case in point, base raids and prestiges. The original intent of base raids was for players to actually put their bases on the line for a raid. Some items would be permanently destroyed after a raid. Only a very few supergroups with really active prestige earners could afford to pay for the prestige to raid. Yet, you could convert influence into prestige. Ergo, supergoups without a lot of prestige, but lots of influence, could raid, then rebuild off of their influence sunk prestige. Even if the developers put base raiding back in, right now, there's the problem that only a really small percentage of the player population would sink their influence destroying each others supergroup bases. Granted, the population that could afford to base raid and influence sink prestige is roughly the same group that abuses the market to begin with, so there might be SOME merit to this particular idea.

Anyways, the core problem remains. Influence sinks without a neutral non-player balance will be useless in their existence as a sink.

Given that you'll need to download all 3.2gigabytes... that's a safe presumption to make.

depending on what your source files started from, yes, it could that long or longer.

If you started with just the NCSoft installer from the web-page, you'll need to download around 3.2gigabytes of data.

If you just simply updated a pre-existing install, you may only need to download a few hundred megabytes of packages.

Have you actually been to the Market / Inventions section? Many of the posters there don't want to address the problems with the game.

As to whether or not it's a technical issue or a bug? Depends on who you ask. In some ways it is a technical issue. There are technical solutions to the inflation problem, such as increasing drop-rates, forcing lower costs, or limiting transactions. In some ways it's also a bug. The in-game economic system was never meant to be abused as it has been abused, but that pretty much goes for any game that implements a shared auction house.

At the same time, it's neither a technical issue or a bug. There's no strict coding problem that results in the prices on the market. Nor is there a coding issue with the drop rate and drop percentages of items that are useful. Everything within the system is working as the processing system intended.

Just because the process itself is working, doesn't mean that the process itself is not broken.

Imagine if you will a truck. The truck is about 30 feet long and has a long platform for the back 20ft with raised sides. The truck builder installs some seats on this platform and thinks, "Ah, I have a bus!"

The truck builder then sells the truck to some interested buyers and a few weeks later drops by to make sure the truck is working properly. Much to the truck builders surprise the owners of the truck are digging up their back yard, putting the dirt from the yard in the back of the bus, and then hauling the dirt to another location and emptying it.

Technically, the truck is working as intended. It's still hauling stuff. It's still moving and running. It's doing what it's owners want it to do... but it's not really doing what the truck builder had in mind is it?

Now replace the truck with Auction House. Our developers built the auction house with the idea that players would put items they didn't need on the auction house.

What the developers didn't account for is that the majority of item generation in the game was coming from a minority of players. This minority of players was able to leverage their item generation abilities to raise the average costs of items posted on the auction house. Players who were not generating items would either need to pay the item generators cost, or find something that would be worth a trade to the item generator.

Which is where we get to the real big technical issue with the Auction House. Auction houses work great in games where players only have one or two avatars, and where they outlevel that avatar's gear on a regular basis and can resell it as "used"

Auction Houses don't work so well in a game that encourage players to have lots of avatars and where items generally cannot be resold. The item generation has never been rebalanced against character creation. The reason why there wasn't a problem on SO's is that SO's can be bought from vendors, and once a player reaches max level, SO's are a trivial cost.

This then does descend back into the realm of a technical issue. Is the balancing of what the drop-rates are consistant with what the expected character generation is? Does this mean that drop-rates need to be rebalanced across the board to account for the number of avatars players can generate for City of Heroes? Maybe, maybe not.

Not really an entirely fair comparison since those global results don't split AION USA from AION Korea. For reference, here's the slide in question:



Now, what you might notice from this picture is that the majority of NCSoft's profit comes from the Korean markets where Lineage 1 and Lineage 2 still have strong performance. This is also the market where AION simply dominates.

Once you take AION's Korean performance out of the picture and look at the US Market alone, well, that's when things don't look so rosy for the game in the US market.

The developers have indicated that they view some of the prices on the markets to be broken, and that trading items off the market for more than the personal influence influence limit is an abuse of the system. So yes, the developers are aware that there is an issue.

At this time no details have been given on how the developers intend to counteract what they see as abuses.

The developers are aware of the disparity between the hardcore player and the casual player. This disparity is generally agreed to be one of the reasons the incarnate system has been delayed from it's preview.

It has been suggested that the developers want the incarnate system to balance out Invention Origin Enhancements as options to making characters more powerful. The Incarnate system, when fully unveiled, may answer the needs of casual players looking to keep up with tricked-out IO builds.

There's no way to stop abusive player behavior. For example, there already is a hard-market cap of 2 billion influence. Players are already trading around this limit by using off-the-market trades. Setting a lower influence hard-cap would just send more players to off-the-market tradings.

The solution to the inflation, such as it is, is to simply make the Auction House less important in the process to actually build up a powerful character. I outlined this perspective in this post here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...82&postcount=1

1. A solution to the rising inflation of Auction House goods must be equally available to all players on a consistent basis. Solutions based on luck of the drops or time played are inherently unfair to the casual player or may only have 4 hours a week to spend in the game, or for regular players who might run into problems with work scheduling or other outside issues.
2. A solution to the rising inflation must be neutral to all alignments. Devising a solution that only benefits one alignment will do nothing but anger a significant amount of the player base.
3. A solution to the rising inflation cost should be non-farmable, or have decreasing values in farm environments. A system should encourage players to... play the game... and not simply "work the system" for maximum benefit.
4. A solution must keep in mind that the vast majority of the game needs to be balanced against Single Origin builds, not tweaked IO builds.
5. A solution does not need to encourage players to participate in the Auction House System

Unfortunately, a vocal segment of the player base present on the forums is firmly against any solutions that would eliminate the perceived need for farming, eliminate the abuses of the markets, or actually fix the underlying issues with the market systems of the game. So the thread itself is pretty much a loss for serious discussions on how to address the market issues.

point conceded. I haven't actively been tracking direct quotes on the power customization or the market merge.

Nope, not at all. Financial and account issues are largely tied to banking agencies, who generally don't have Saturday / Sunday working schedules. There aren't enough issues occurring over the weekends for NCSoft to pay somebody to sit in the office and deal with one-off issues that have to wait for financial institutions to process.

So it's not idiotic at all for NCSoft to not having somebody in the office on weekends for these kinds of issues.

Now, if you want to talk about their limited operating hours? 12noon to 5pm only on weekdays? Oh yeah, now THAT's idiotic. if you have a job where you work during the day, you need to either take a long lunch break, or somehow get a mid-week day off.