Coffee Talk Highlights, Jan 25: 90 percent content free! With Positron

Positron is here and I missed a little bit of the start.

TANGENT: Department stores and them potentially closing down.

Zwill gets a message from one of the ArenaNet people.

"You killed Statesman! You *******!"

Posi: "Yes I did! Me and Dr. Aeon."

Z: "Helping him aid in his quest to kill every NPC."

P: "Maybe I'll make him kill Dr. Aeon. Before he kills Positron. Just because it's my goal to make Samuraiko's like miserable."

TANGENT: Oxford Comma

Positron wrote the eulogy, as spoken by in-game Positron, written by the out of game Positron.

12:39 VoodooGirl_COV: Numina doesn't do ghost writing?

Z: "Aargh!"

Z: "I'm roleplaying my character being inhabited by his creator. I'm roleplaying a character roleplaying a character.

TANGENT: Tabletop roleplaying games

Posi talks about Black Scorpion's campaign, where it's like all stories actually exist. Dr. Aeon invoked Zack Morris to stop time.

*Makes T with hands* Time out!

Z: "I'm surpised Dr. Aeon know who Zack Morris is."

Posi: "Don't let the lack of hair up here," (gestures) "fool you. He's 25."

Posi talks about the death of Statesman essentially 'leveling up' the game.'

He says that there are a lot of new stories that can be made with Statesman's death.

Who will lead the Freedom Phalanx? Where does Statesman's power go? Etc.

psychoti: They shouldn't rename it Statesman park. They should just add the Statesman Rollercoaster, complete with the Rikti War loopty-loop and the Murdered Daughter Downward Spiral.

Z: "It lets us push the player back to the forefront."

Discussion of killing Statesman with the formation of Paragon Studios.

P: "We wanted to make the game better before we did it. Because if we did the story then, there wouldn't have been much else."

ZombieManCoH: The STF will be given out by Statesman in frozen carbonite.

TANGENT: Speculation on George Lucas having that copyrighted. Positron had a Star Wars Galaxy character who was a Wookie Architecht.

Z: "I knew a guy who was a teacher who ran home at his lunch break to play."

P: "He was probably checking to see if his harvesters despawned."

The teacher's work suffered due to his playing of SWG, which inspired two of his friends to make a documentary on MMO gamers, which lead to Zwill being involved with it, which lead him to get his job at Paragon.

Posi misses SWG.

TANGENT: Sandbox gaming

TANGENT: Lego Universe

Chat speculates that I will have a tough time getting this on the forums due to the chatter about SWG.

Zwill states that it will be okay.

TANGENT: Shadowbane

Posi talks about a programmer of PS making a box and using it on other players to make them unable to move, then saying they sucked at Box Wars.

Posi and Zwill talk MMO design, one of the customer services people who dis CS for Ultima Online.

Posi: "I quit Ultima Online when I realized it was third person Quake."

Chat is discussion Boot to the Head vs. Arrow in the Knee

Samuraiko wrote a CoH version of Last Will and Temperment: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=282126

Posi talks about CoH's driving force, as it is storyline based. Posi doesn't think you can tell stories as easily in a sandbox style MMO.

He then gets in to the storyline bibles.

Posi: "The other day I was reading some stuff about Rikti, and I was wondering "Does this even still apply anymore?""

Posi says they have some better writing now in game than some of the stuff in the bibles.

Talk about the Rikti stemming from a bet. Jack/Statesman bet someone at the studio that they couldn't get Rikki Tikki Tavi into the game.

Chat asks if Statesman was inspired by Astro City."

Positron mentions that Astro City drove Jack crazy, Samaritans were not nice people, thus Good Samaritan. Jack complained about the Superman analog in Astro City being named Samaritan.

I missed a question typing that up.


Every time they try to merge Ouroburos they run into something that breaks, as it was essentially "Dev hackery" and decide not to do it.


They will be some sort of memorial or gravestone for Statesman at some point.


Posi says they're inspired by some of the things that they ended up not using and even the smallest throw away line can inspire something to be made. Posi fears releasing unused parts of stories, since anything they release becomes cannon. And people would go "OMG THIS DOESN'T MAKE SENSE IN YOUR STORY! CANON IS RUINED FOREVERS!"


Someone's phone goes off with a submarine klaxon that can be heard in the cubicle.

Z: "Eric Johnson, your phone is ringing!"


We will see what Lord Recluse does after learning of Statesman's death. It'll be shown before the SSA is over.


I miss a question getting my shoes back from my puppy.


Posi doesn't want to add the Echoes of DA and Galaxy to villain Ouro. He suggests that badging Rogues change alignment one more to Hero to get the badges.

Talk of the alignment change tokens that will be added to the Paragon market.


There might be a one month gap between the end of Who Will Die and the next SSA.


Posi doesn't know which AV's are 5th Column and which are Council.


Samuraiko: Q: is there a way for players to get hold of whatever you guys use to make cutscenes? (since it's not demorecording)

Posi: "Yes! It's called Microsoft Excel!"

Dr. Aeon is the best at that and has been teaching others to use it.

Z: "You would be surprised about how many MMO's use something in Excel."

Posi advises that anyone who wants to get in the MMO industry to get familiar with Excel.

P: "The thing about Excel is you never run out of things to learn. There's always new functionality you can learn."



Talk of TPN crashing and putting a player into a level 25 group's mission. That is apparently a hard to reproduce bug. Posi says that TPN is the most complicated trial code-wise with the Popularity level.


They talk about known IP's versus created IP's.

Z: "It's easier and more fun to work on an IP that's yours."


There are no plans to add voice over IP functionality to CoH. It takes up a lot of bandwidth and usually it ends up inferior to existing free VOIP programs. It's a lot of resources.

P: "And you really don't want to hear the voice behind that female character."

Quote:

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

Thanks, VK. Is this the eulogy that was teased on Twitter?

Someone mentioned Astro City? Awesome!

Thanks for the writeup VK.

You didn't miss much in the beginning. I made a terrible joke, nobody was amused (aside from myself. You couldn't post it on the forums anyway).

You missed the bit where Positron said he thinks that we'll get to see the Rikti homeworld someday

Thanks again for the write-up

Thank you for the highlights, VK!

For what it's worth, I did eventually find the eulogy on the forums--so no, it's not what was said during the Coffee Talk.