Dev Chat Highlights, September 7: Zwill Spills Beans on Dark and Controllers, Maybe, w/ Positron

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

Quote:

Originally Posted by reiella Until I see something that states to the contrary, going to assume VK is right .

Pretty sure Controller won't be getting Smite and Midnight Grasp and stuff.

So fluffy. Thanks as always VK.

Oooh, Miasma. THAT makes more sense.

Our dev team is the greatest ever.

As much as I have enjoyed some of the past ustreams and it was nice for them to highlight some of the community sites, these ustreams are quickly becoming a big waste of time. And the VIP start date teasing was not cool at all.

Please please please add Dark Control and Dark Assault as well?

Ghost Widow being a Dominator has bugged me for YEARS.

You guys should have HeroCon around Atlanta to make up for missing DragonCon all these times

And how is DragonCon NOT your target audience? I know there are a TON of CoH players around here!