Black Scorpion's Guide to Farewell Posts

Hello Villains and Heroes,

I am rather late to the game when it comes to farewell posts. Largely because I, like several of the devs, did not want to believe what I was hearing and experiencing, was true. As soon as I posted this, it would mark the end of the chapter. Over the years I’ve grown to know just about every little part of this cantankerous virtual metropolis known as City of Villains / City of Heroes – and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible – and one of the most awful moments of dawning realization was when I realized I’d have to stop plugging away at the mantra of “FIX ALL THE THINGS” that hung on my wall. That I’d never get to show Dr. Aeon, Arbiter Hawk, Viridian or Protean a new cool thing they could do. While it is a small industry and we may work together in the future, it will be different.

So after spending all too much time dwelling on what has been lost, I figured I’d take some time and focus on the good memories I had plugging away at COH. I would like to try and answer your unresolved questions regarding systems and technology as best as I can – I know Positron collected some of that with regards to lore previously, but RL intervened (Scorpy has to buy his armor polish somehow) and I have not been as available as I’d like to be. I will try to keep up on this thread and answer additional questions, to varying levels of technical exactitude based upon what I can recall. If you want to know more about something, ask - but if you ask a lot of questions, expect brief answers.

So here are some untold stories and useful facts I’ve always wanted to tell:

Woofers

Woofers was invented during the first Player Summit while I was idly bantering with players between sessions. The first canine companion had been introduced, and I wanted to start the rumor that a canine Freedom Phalanx member was soon to come. With the aid of the players, Black Pebble, the community team and the content developers, Rex Woofers gradually filtered into our lighter side of the lore. We often joked about when he would appear in game, but I figure eventually it would have happened as he was beginning to grow on people.

Branforth the Seer

I wrote the Branforth the Seer Omega Team letter. It was one of the first pieces of content I did after coming on board. Horatio (Bruce) vetoed several stanzas which referred to prospective / potential future content. Some of this made it into the game or was planned.

(Moonbase, total powerset/archetype respecs, Battalion)
To guard us all from threat of doom, forces gather upon a moon,
Cosmic rays will unmake their fate, allowing transformations great,
The shooter comes a swordsman now, ice-woman takes the healer’s plow,
Beautiful creatures must be slain, before they see their homes again.

(Water blast, water control, etc, and an underwater base or zone, Coralax/Leviathan content, Pandora’s Box)
You cannot breathe; you gasp for air, while trapped in underwater lair,
Legends old and gods will sleep, consort with creatures of the deep,
Aqual powers shall rise once more, joining the fight upon our shore,
But none can save that fateful box, which is resealed and cased in locks.

Oil Slick Arrow Fix

Originally this “Oil Slick Target” spawned the fire patch after being defeated. This occasionally failed under heavy load. The best guess as to why was that somehow if the map was busy the “dead target” wouldn’t get a chance to do its post-death AI on the same tick it died, and that the system would never retry the post-death power – missing the window entirely and spawning no fire. I restructured the power such that the Oil Slick spawned the Target as a pet, and had a power which it could use to target its dead pet once and only once– and had this “pseudo rez” spawned the fire patch. After that the problem seemed to disappear.

Anti-Matter suck in the Keyes walkways

No one knew our pathfinding and collision code well enough to figure out why this was happening. We boiled it down to AM getting interrupted in AI fly mode (ignore all collision) and switching to AI walk mode instead. Our code protected against things trying to walk with their head in collision or their feet in collision, but didn’t work in the case of straddling collision like AM could sometimes do. The hack fix was to make him never ever leave AI fly mode under any circumstances. A similar bug happened when the mobs inside the Keyes bunkers used AI jump mode (ignore collision, natch) to escape through the doors – there was probably some arcane art to preventing them from being able to jump out of prison cells, but no one knew what it was and we couldn’t figure it out in time. We had to go with it as was, and stay away from entity-doors in other content. I don’t think we would ever have been able to dig into that area deeply enough to fix it.

Badges

I loved writing the new badges trying to fix some badge issues. Originally we weren’t planning on having Praetorian specific badges or variant text for some badges after changing Alignments, but I added them in anyway. I really wanted to elevate many badges to account-wide status and had a low-priority technology project simmering that would have made that happen. Technical implementation of the badge system made going back in to improve how older badges worked a dicey proposition.

Null the Gull

Null was the practical realization that some things that were “technical issues” could actually be resolved without additional technologies needing to be added. I did want to get his features in a more natural and useful form, but I more importantly wanted the features out there, somewhere, even if it was a giant hack. One day I would have fixed it.

Things I Wanted To Fix

• Incarnate components and other rewards could have been greatly simplified. More account-wide aspects. I wanted to do a currency consolidation and revamp project across multiple systems, and some true salvage consolidation.
• A system so we could more easily add new features to Mission Architect.
• A more flexible UI framework so we could actually improve UI without impacting core technology time.
• Consolidating TO/DO/SO scale enhancements into a streamlined system.
• Transition some elements of powers, AI, and UI to our new scripting framework.
• Veteran time and more “out-of-game” promotions like referral bonuses and special codes.
• A hot script system so we could add some minor content without a build. (This would have been extremely handy given the current circumstance…)

• Wielding people as weapons.
• MARTY becoming self-aware and going haywire.
• Base Items becoming self-aware and attacking villains.
• Having the “fix” to Base Items go horribly awry and cause them to attack everyone.
• Discovering two unrelated bugs in the general escort script that resulted in the script having “kind of, sort of” worked for *years*, because they just happened to be broken in a very particular way. The analogy is discovering a collapsed bridge after an earthquake, and realizing the additional earth and the rubble made a fairly smooth path over the chasm.

Thanks for all the work that you've done on CoH so far.

Thank you for everything you did for this wonderful game.

Personally, I thought it was awesome when my base defenses attacked me! Had a lot of fun playing around in my base when that bug hit.

Indeed. Thank you for all of your hard work -- it will all be missed. ) ' :

Thank you. It has been a pleasure having you as one of our GMs. May you do well as the future unrolls before you.

So long Tim. It was nice getting to meet you.

I'm hopeful that Hit Streak can sticky this BS thread so that it doesn't get lost amongst the general chatter.



EDIT: Interesting side note (well, interesting to me at least). In Max's arc in DA I only did the mission to fight Black Scorpion of the three optional missions on Live during my original run through. Fighting Blue Steel was something Texas Justice would never have done on principal and it just meant I'd have to be ready for the ambushes. Reichsman and Requiem were a bit too much for a non-IO'd Texas Justice to face alone and Gyrfalcon didn't seem to be much help in any event when it was in Beta. I enjoyed the opportunity to beat down Black Scorpion, even if it did mean I was freeing Slinger, and BS always went down so easy in our fights. One of my most enjoyable fights before starting to build on my Incarnate abilities as at the time I only had the Tier 1 Alpha slotted and had only a handful of common IO's.

Cheers for being generous with your time and what info you were allowed to share with us.

*hugs*

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Thanks for everything, i'll really miss you and the rest of the Dev team, but this...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Black Scorpion Having the “fix” to Base Items go horribly awry and cause them to attack everyone.

i feel is a bit of a mischaracterization. That fix caused base defense items to go horribly awesome and i loved it for as long as it lasted.

Goodbye.

(This had seriously been tearing me up. Nothing about this situation makes the least bit of sense.)

There's no reward more fitting for an artist than to hear during their lifetimes that their work was appreciated and loved.

That's a bit dramatic, but it has the right feel. You and all of the others at Paragon did stellar work and, for the better part of six years, you have entertained me and made my life a bit happier.

And, to blazes with legalities, all of you will remain Paragon Studios, the finest game company around. Whoever gets your services in the future should consider themselves insanely lucky to have you.

godspeed.

Can you tell us what was up with Gauntlet causing hidden to-hit rolls for tanks in PvE content?

Thanks for all the blood, sweat, and motor oil you poured into this game over the years.

I hope you are able to find meaningful, fun, and profitable work.

Just wanted to thank you for all the hard work you've done over the years sir. Our game was a real testament to committment of you Devs and your flexibility , as well as the real sense of community engendered.
I hope the very best for you in the future BS.

Many thanks for all your work, BS, and for the tantalizing preview of your upcoming projects. If they don't see their implementation in CoH, here's hoping your coding talents will find a new gaming project soon (maybe even Phoenix City). Best of luck in the meantime, and thanks again.

Thanks alot BS for all your work on the best MMO ever...since the announcement way back when (I cant even log-in to the game anymore) I actually found out I have a RL...I guess thats a good thing

There will never be another MMO that will give me sooooooo much fun like this one did.

Every good-bye topic makes me just a little bit sadder. There's nothing out there like CoH, and it's people like you that made it that way.