Job Openings and Changes at Paragon Studios

And he writes them all in iambic bat-ameter!

I was going to say something along the lines of "Anyone can build a house. Whether you'd want to live in that house or not is another thing entirely." But, it seems that others have done a better job than I. Alas!

What I find interesting, is that I am not creative enough to actually invent code from scratch, but I do tend to be able to tweak it and make it better on occasion.

I was certainly baffled as to why, when the game as being created, the power colors were "baked" into the power animations rather than allow that to be changeable from the outset. Seemed logical to allow for adjustments that didn't require completely redoing every animation for a power just to change its color (or colour depending on where you're from). Of course, I guess it could have had something to do with processing times and other such stuff. I just tend to think modular. But, I'm weird like that.

From how I've seen it, it's not so much that power colours were baked in (they are no less "baked in" now than they were before), but rather that both the artwork and the infrastructure to tweak them did not exist. As you'll note with customizable powers, the effects they use aren't exact copies of the default effects. The default effects have their colours written into the power, which allows them to have more than two colours, allows them to get away with some pretty elaborate textures on the sprites and generally gives them a much more professional look. You can't do that with a basic greyscale sprite because it's limited to... Well, greyscale.

From what BABs has said and what costume files have revealed, the game references specific effects scripts for powers, and the system simply does not allow you to define which script to play in real time. I'm not confident that has changed, so much as you are now able to alter the script itself. This required technology to implement, it required UI to handle and it required specific artwork that could handle it.

As to why not add it from the get go? Ignoring the fact that MMOs tend to run into deadlines and have to launch with whatever is ready (and, no, City of Heroes is not an exception), it's the simple fact that you just can't plan for everything. Even with all the planning in the world, you're just going to run into features that you want to do but can't without making massive changes. Either those features come up after the fact, are overlooked or are simply not anticipated. To give you an easy example, commas in the Market interface. Originally you needed a pretty sharp eye to tell 1000000 from 100000000. It wasn't something you'd immediately think the system needed, but people burned themselves and the problem became evident, so they adjusted.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I thought Umbrage was currently part of the ministry of magic?

Shameful.

The thing is, at the time, the Dev's never thought that people would want to be able to change the color of their powers. Which is understandable, because CoH was the first MMO to truly allow you to go crazy when designing how your character looks. The Dev team at the time didn't have 5+ years of feedback to realize this would be such a wanted feature.

I liked both those arcs <.<

I didn't think the Airlia and Daedalus arcs were all that bad; they just came off worse in comparison to some really superb recent arcs/TFs. Players had become accustomed to much better content.

For me, Harlick was the guy who made a complete hash out of the return of the 5th Column. So yeah, I agree: I'm relieved he's gone.

(An SG-mate once remarked to me that my "Project Parallel" arc "should make that guy resign in shame." Perhaps that's how it happened after all...)

Er...I don't see anything particularly evil about those things. Except for foot ball.

*pummels Hickman mercilessly*

As for the "how hard is writing" argument, I've made all the same arguments as the "it's hard" camp at least since MA went in, and people keep scoffing in my general direction.

I actually think both arcs are above decent, and I wouldn't really want to complain about them. Daedalus is written in a way that's believable for someone from his time and background, and his story, though simplistic, is at least solid. His Malta story isn't bad, either, if only we can get rid of the sentence "I tracked the energies to your time." THAT'S NOT HOW ENERGY WORKS!!! Really, even in a fictional universe, at least TRY to make things a little more believable. That said, the writing was good.

Sister Airlia is an interesting case, herself. Her first arc is crap, basically consisting of doing the same mission twice, but her second arc is actually well-crafted. Any story that can make me feel sick of working for a contact gets my seal of approval. And it didn't have any fuzzy science of tracking things through time... Mostly.

Personally, I'm not picky when it comes to stories. I will, of course, gawk at a really great one, but I won't turn my nose up at a decent arc by any stretch. Bad arcs, though... Let me just say that whoever wrote Montague's arc has no business putting words down in writing. That arc has no feel, no character, no interesting events, almost no logical progression... It's just one gigantic mess of bad writing and unwinding plot thread. It's not like Ashley McKnight's arc is anything spectacular, but at least Ashley is written in a very memorable, very characteristic way, so her antics cover up a mediocre story. But Montague's writing is just BAD. He doesn't come off as a wise and travelled leader of an occult organisation. He comes off like a random guy off the street who's trying to sound erudite and failing badly.

Given that the other stories surrounding the Midnight Club, especially Mercedes Sheldon's frankly completely outstanding, superb arcs, is very well done, I'm willing to accept that Montague is some kind of aberration and not hold his HORRIBLE WRITING against the development team.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

While I cannot comment on Umbrage, I can honestly say that Umbral is not.

I would have killed for one of those jobs as a power designer however... I have a strange feeling I would never have gotten that job anyway because I've got some pretty strong opinions concerning intra- and inter-AT balance, not to mention a strong and oft-voiced opinion that there needs to be some comprehensive analysis of debuffs done along with a substantially greater proffering of debuff resistance other than DDR.

And that's the worst kind of evil... insidious.

I'm convinced that they're some sort of villain plot. If I had the cash and time, I would've flown across the country to hug the guy who showed me how to block those announcements.

Nope. The Television is Matt Stults who's been working here a while and was promoted to lead programmer.

The new community moderator is Arbiter Kim.

The new content designer is Dr. Aeon, mentioned above.

One of the new producers is Doc Delilah who only has one post so far.

And that's it for new-hire rednames.

Unknown about GW.

Ross got a promotion and his new job title seems to indicate that he's working for corporate now. Whether that means he's still at Paragon Studios or not is unknown.

He's QA

And yet ya leave us hanging on the other speculation? :P

I keed, I keed.

Damn, Harlick left? He wasn't even here a year, was he?

Thanks for the info.

But... that's odd... the job listing for a moderator was removed sometime last October, but there's been no new mods on the boards.

<shrug> Like Kremlinology, Dev-watching is not an exact science.