AE Enhancements?

Bull. Excrement.

Let me repeat that for you and Mod 05. You. Are. Full. Of. It.

I am going to stand by this statement, and this statement is going to stand. Period. I am not going to let you or anyone else think you can get away with this type of post on this board.

Now, that being said, I'm not going to go back and recreate the other stuff that got gutted from this beat down. Even I'm not that pedantic about making a point I should not have to make, and anybody who was actually interested has already seen this post the other 6 and half billion times I've linked to it.

There's this thing called Resource Management.


Paragon Studios has a limited number of developers. These developers are broken down by their specialties.

• Some developers are writers. They create the story content.
• Some developers are artists. They draw the artwork for the game.
• Some developers are modelers. They take the artwork that the artists draw and turn it into a 3D model.
• Some developers are animators. They take the 3D model's that the modelers made and then create the data needed to determine the actions those models can perform.
• Some developers are power developers. They calculate how much damage an attack should do. They also try and make sure that the game experience is relatively balanced.
• Some developers are reward developers. They calculate what reward should be given in the game for what-ever action.
• Some developers are User-Interface developers. They figure out how to display information so that it can be easily understood by the user.
• Some developers are coders. They write the actual code that gets compiled by a processor.

Here's the key thing to these breakdowns:

Developers that are good at one specialty probably aren't good at another specialty.

Noble Savage is an artists. If he was over in Black Scorpion's cubicle messing around with the power spreadsheets, we'd all have flashy dual-pistol animations for every single attack. If he was over in Television's cubicle, the source code would be filled with ASCII drawings.

Black Scorpion is a numbers calculator. If he was over in Noble Savages's cubicle messing around with the art we'd all have stick figures for maximized network efficiency. If he was over in Television's cubicle messing around, the compiled code would gain a 512bit encryption key.

The point is: the developers only have a limited number of resources. Scheduling these resources to actually produce content is a monumental task.

We know without a doubt just where the developers time has been taken up. Since I13 Paragon Studios has been exceedingly transparent about explaining what the development staff is up to.

What you don't know, probably out of ignorance as that's the only way your post is possible, is that Architect Entertainment was originally scheduled for Issue 13. Architect Entertainment was delayed to Issue 14 in order to complete the system to expose custom NPC critters to the player.

The delay to Architect Entertainment meant that the developers had to switch up gears. Game upgrades like Day Jobs, Leveling Pacts, and Multiple Builds were originally scheduled for Issue 14. To keep from delaying Issue 13's release these I14 features were released in I13 since they were almost finished.

The work needed to create Issue 14, the architect entertainment release, was one of the reasons that Issue 15 was so light on content. If the developers had stuck to the original plan, Issue 14 would have been the Anniversary release, containing the Dr. Khan and Cuda task forces.

Behind these issues was the ongoing work with Power Customization, which debuted in Issue 16. We know, for a fact, that Paragon Studios took over 2 years to implement Power Customization into the game. Even then Power Customization was still incomplete, lacking support for Costume Overlays, epic power pools, patron power pools, and regular pool powers. The developers went on record, very explicitly, that exposing these costume control options to the players required development resources that would not be made available until after Going Rogue had launched.

Key point here.

I'm going to repeat it since you do not understand developer resources.

The developers flat out told the players, in a very explicit manner, that adding some features to game, such as additional costume customization options, required development resources that were already scheduled and accounted for, and would not be available until after Going Rogue had launched.

Got it? No? Well, I tried.

Something to keep in mind here is that Going Rogue was delayed at least twice that we know of. Issue 17, released on April 28 in 2010, contained most of the free issue updates that were developed alongside the Going Rogue expansion, and were scheduled to launch alongside Going Rogue. As these free issue updates were finished they were added to the game. This was delay number 1: Going Rogue development did not synch up to free issue development.

We didn't know why there had been such a delay, but we did find out shortly after the second delay occurred. Still on the Going Rogue news site from March 2010 is a news post declaring that Going Rogue would launch in July: http://goingrogue.na.cityofheroes.co...ing-rogue.html

Going Rogue did not launch until August 17th, 4 months after Issue 17, and 2 months after the original expected launch date.

We later found out that the reason for this massive delay was the result of hard decisions from the Paragon Studios staff. One of those decisions involved the Paragon Studios deciding to go ahead and merge the market databases. Another decision was to flesh out the Praetoria world and have a Loyalist and a Resistance faction for players to work through, rather than simply having only one Praetorian faction.

We do know that towards the end of Going Rogue's development the development team was split. Positron and a selection of developers started to work on creating the Incarnate Content.

We also know that Positron made the call to pull the initial Incarnate Alpha Slot from Going Rogue's release because there wasn't enough time or resources to implement the Alpha Slot in time for the retail release.

Let me repeat that so you can understand it.

The developers, specifically Mr. Miller, announced that a major feature update to the game was being delayed because there simply was not enough time to finish developing that major feature update. Development Resources Allocated to the Incarnate project had to stop what they were doing in order to help get the retail expansion out on the announced date.


The point is, the earliest, and I do mean the EARLIEST any developmental work not tied to Going Rogue or the Incarnate system could have been started, which is put into pre-production, would have been August 18 in 2010.

Let me repeat that so you can understand it.

August 18th would be the earliest possible date that Paragon Studios would have been able to start scheduling developers to work on aspects of the game that were not tied to Going Rogue's retail release.

Now, from that point, we already have Issue 19, which was the result of Positron's Task Force working on Incarnate Content. The same guys that had to stop what they were doing back in July and August to help get Going Rogue out onto store shelfs.

We don't know what any of the other Paragon Studios developers have been working on since that August 18th date. Issue 20 has a signed NDA clause, and you get a nice little ejection message if you aren't supposed to be on that Beta server. We won't know until either that NDA lifts or the Developers tell us straight on.

To cap this, you can take that developers won't do this attitude of yours and shove it in a trash can.

Unless you can somehow show me where in Hades Lakes of Fire Paragon Studios managed to find coders, artists, UI developers, and everybody else needed to create updates to the game, not to mention PAYING THOSE DEVELOPERS TO DO THAT WORK, you need to shut up.

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

Um, no. The Alpha Slot was done. There wasn't enough time or resources to develop new incarnate content to go along with it, and people complained about having the Alpha Slot released without new content to go along with it. It could have gone live as it was.

Except that all kinds of "fluff" game changes that weren't tied to Going Rogue have been implemented since i14. We've had Doppelgangers and fancy new mission tech added. The "developers won't do this" attitude comes from over a year of asking for things and being ignored.

Your entire post is completely irrelevant. We all know damn well what "resource allocation" is. The point is THE DEVS WON'T ALLOCATE RESOURCES TO IMPROVING AE.