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Everything posted by PaxArcana
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Chrome here, as well.
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Those are, as PK notes, emoticons / emoji. What I typed was : and ), right next to each other. Thatproduces a little "smiley face" icon. Below is a screencap of your post, as I see it. I can only speculate that your computer, for whatever reason, is not displaying emoji correctly; that little box means "I am unable to correctly display this character" ...
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... so of course they spent millions of dollars on a longshot lawsuit. They weren't looking for income. They were looking to preserve and even strengthen their Trademarks and Copyrights (while shopping for a buyer with deep pockets - which they eventually found, in the form of Disney). Which they successfully did.
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Because Marvel Comics actually sued NCSoft and Cryptic for exactly that. Drizzt and Bruenor are actually part of the same IP ("The Forgotten Realms" setting) as Neverwinter.
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... one almost might say, "like a pack of rabid honey-badgers" ...! 😄 😄 I don't usually do Melee anymore, but ... oh hell, why not? 🙂
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Where's the server stats page?
PaxArcana replied to EmperorSteele's topic in Website Suggestions & Feedback
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Female character, name "Honey Badger" ... Claws/WP or Claws/Regen Brute. Ape the classic "yellow spandex" look as best you can. BAM, tribute character. 😄 ... 'sides, honey badgers are scarier than wolverines .... just ask every Far Cry player ever! 😄 😄 😄
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But what if they want you to think, that that's what they want you to think, so that you'll think something else, and THAT'S what they really want you to think? 😄 😄 😄 😄 😄
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It's not your mistake, it's mine. I actually remember giving you that 4th point of Rep ... testing out my theory at that early date, that the trophy (having the same color as the Reputation field in our profiles) was how you gave +rep. 🙂
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Okay, I just re-read my post, and it comes off way more aggressive than I wanted to be (or thought I was being). I apologise for that, so ... let me try this differently: This game's Buff and Debuff values are so strong, that you don't need to cover specific "roles" in the party. In World of Warcraft, a full team of debuff mages is going to have a hard time with dungeon content. In City of Heroes, a full team of Debuff Defenders and Corruptors is going to faceroll almost anything. In World of Warcraft, a full team of Warriors and Rogues with no healers, CC, etc is going to get hammered in dungeons. In City of Heroes, a full team of Tanks, Brutes, and Scrappers is going to faceroll almost anything. In World of Warcraft, a full team of "healers" (Nature Druids, Light Priests, etc) is going to get slowed to a useless standstill until they go OOM in dungeons. In City of Heroes, a full team of "healers" (anyone with Empathy, Pain Domination, etc) is going to faceroll almost anything. The kicker is: each of those teams is going to do their "faceroll almost anything" in different ways. But they absolutely will faceroll almost any content. Specific AVs or GMs (ArchVillains, Giant Monsters, respectively) might be more of a challenge for some teams than others, but short of things like the Hamidon or the Rikti Mothership (that are for way more than just ONE team, anyway) ...? They'll get through it all. Thus, you do not absolutely need "a healer". You might instead have so many buffs on your team, that no-one ever gets hurt in the first place. You do not absolutely need "a tank". You might instead have so many debuffs on your team, that the enemy is turned into hapless baby ducks just waiting to be pushed into the alligator pond. You do not absolutely need "crowd control". You might instead have so much DPS that you defeat enemy spawns before half the team even knows there's a fight going on .... every fight, for hours at a time. 🙂
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You don't get it. EVERY team, no exceptions, can run without a healer. No exceptions. This game long ago eschewed the "Holy Trinity" approach to gameplay. You can literally take any eight characters, and take on any mission in the game. The only things you need specific roles for, AFAIK, are Hamidon Raids. Which need more than just eight players anyway, so that's an entirely moot point IMO. Literally, you do not need people filling specific roles. ... When I have a new character, and I jump into a DFB team, I will look at the ATs and powersets of my (completely random) team-mates. Not because I'm worried about "are all the roles covered", but instead, I'm curious about which flavors of win and awesome will we be enjoying this time? All defenders? "Buff and deBuff city, population: us!" All Brutes? "It's clobberin' time!" All Masterminds? "Jeeze, I better turn down the FX settings a bit!" It doesn't matter, any eight characters is a viable team. ANY eight characters.
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The problem, Justicebeliever, is that superhero characters are BOTH. Specific pictures of, for example, Superman are covered by copyright; specific stories about superman are covered by copyright. But, Superman himself - the character, the overall look, the core principles of his origin story - are matters of trademark. And that must be vigorously defended lest it be permanently lost.
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Still quite relevant, for the Primaries and Secondaries that were released at the time. Especially discussions of controlling and managing your herd-of-cats Henchmen. Bots, as I understand it, have a bit of -regen in many of their attacks. My main, back on Live, was Bots/FF. I solo'd 99% of the way to level 50 - the only character I ever got there, in fact. I don't know about soloing "high end" content - if you mean Trials and SFs, I have no clue, those weren't allowed to be done Solo back on Live. Accuracy is the #1 thing to slot on your pets. If you have one pet, it spawns at your level. Two pets, they spawn at -1. Three, and they spawn at -2. (All within a single "type) - e.g., two Battle Drones and a Protector, the Protector syould be at +0, the Drones at -1). That means, everything you face at-level is going to be harder for them to hit ... so, more Accuracy (and some +ToHit through Leadership) is of especial importance for MM pets. Damage is also good, of course. If your pets have a significant debuff (e.g., -ToHit), slotting that can possibly help. There's one thing that's useless to put on Pet Summon powers, though: recharge. It doesn't affect the pets, it only affects how quickly you can re-summon them. When your pets are in Follow mode, and not "Attack my target" stance, any damage that happens to you is shared out with your pets. This makes MMs much harder to kill when they use their pets as "ablative meat shields", heh. There is a channel, "Looking for Group", that is server-wide. Watch that. Or, if you're up to it, start your own team, and advertise it there. It's really not hard to lead/manage a team. 🙂
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I really wish I still had the screenshots, but "back in the day" I went through making a Superman tribute. "Captain Proton", I think I called him. Costume and everything ... and a background/bio that absolutely SCREAMED "I am a superman tribute", while being sufficiently different that no Judge would ever have ruled it was a trademark or copyright infringement, even if I'd somehow profited off of the character. And it wasn't hard. Changed the name, changed the vulnerability, moved where his rocket pod landed, then took Superman's costume and swapped out the Red for Green, added some retro-SciFi elements, and called it a day. Anyone who ever read that bio, would absolutely know it was Superman with the serial numbers filed off. But it was different enough, JUST, to pass muster without a problem.
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Wait Just a Minute.... Somethin' Ain't Right Here...
PaxArcana replied to _NOPE_'s topic in General Discussion
Yyyyyeah, that's definitely an oops. 😄 -
I prefer OCs too. If I were to make a copy of, say, Batman, though? TRIBUTE CHARACTER. You can make a character that "absolutely is" the one you want, but is also different enough - has had enough of your own creative input put into it - that it's not an infringement. One sort-of example of this, though it's by the same publisher: Batman ... who was copied, for the Watchmen comics, in the form of two characters: Night Owl (the nocturnal animal theme, the wealth, the gadgets and even specialized costumes), and Rorschach (the predilection for violence, the detective/crimesolving, and even the tendency to expect the worst of people in general (ask any long-term Batman fan why he NEEDS a Robin)). Or, another tribute to Batman, is Vampyr, from the Gods & Monsters animated feature. It's not as close a match, but it's quite obviously intended to be the parallel to Batman, in that world. The trick is to make a character that shares enough points of commonality that anyone who reads your bio will think "OH, that's a Batman/Superman/Whoever tribute" ... but is just different enough to not make some trademark lawyer think "aha, this week's meal ticket has just been delivered". 🙂
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Exactly so. Let me relate a little story about my own actions, and use of someone else's copyrighted, trademarked, and even patented property. I wanted to run a game, on my own private part of a public forum ( rpol.net ), using the "Dream Park" game rules (by R. Talsorian Games), and setting (by Larry Niven and Steve Barnes, in the form of several novels; offhand, "Dream Park" and "The Barsoon Project" ... i think there was a third, but I can't recall the title just now). Problem is, the game had been out of print for years; to make the game work, all players would need access to the rules, and that meant I would have to reproduce them word for word in several threads of that forum. And, having known tabletop-RPG writers on a first-name basis, I was not about to just wholesale steal the game rulebooks like that. So I did the right thing, and contacted R. Talsorian Games to ask for permission. Fun stumbling block: their license to publish the game had run out - but the underlaying system, they held patent on. So, while they were willing to work something out with me, they said I also had to get permission from the authors. As I'm sure you can imagine, Niven and Barnes get a LOT of mail from fans, not all of it friendly. But, I tried anyway - and after a very friendly back and forth (during which I offered/promised to direct players to Amazon links they could buy the books at), they gave their permission. But, verbal / email permissions weren't enough. Especially not for RTG; I had to sign a legal document, essentially sub-licensing the rights to the system underlaying the game itself. And it's not that they wanted money - I wasn't going to have to pay a penny for the license. It was to protect them, and preserve their ownership of the various pieces of the game: by granting me a specific-use license, then my use of their IP for that purpose did not weaken their ownership of said IP. An IP which each of the parties involved (except me) absolutely relied on to put food on their table, and a roof over their heads. ... Yeah. IP really is that serious an issue, especially for the smaller creators out there. Losing your trademark (etc) to something, could literally mean "I can't pay rent next month".
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Just to clarify for readers (I suspect you know this already) but: You do not have to have made a profit, or even a single penny at all, in order to be guilty of copyright or trademark infringements. Let's say Bob gets an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy), in e-format, of the next big Stephen King novel. He prints off fifty thousand copies (at a significant cost - say, $2 per copy), then stands in Times Square handing them out for free. Hell with free, he staples a $5 bill to each copy. If he hands out all those copies, he has actually LOST $350,000 ...! (And he's not to bright, I think we can agree.) The book, when it goes officially on sale, has a cover price of $20 (it's only in hardcover for the first 9 months). Mr. King, and/or his publisher, could file suit against Bob for the full cover price of each and every one of those copies, and the courts will accept on it's face that each copy given away WOULD have been a copy sold. So he/they can sue Bob for $1,000,000 ... plus their attorney's fees and any related expenses. Bob doesn't get to deduct his $350K expenses from that, either. ... If Bob, instead of stapling that $5 bill to each copy, had actually SOLD his copies .... it gets even worse. Let's say he sold them for $10 apiece. Mr. King or his publisher could sue Bob for the same $1M of "lost" sales, PLUS Bob's gross receipts (of $500,000). Bob still can't deduct the expense of making those copies, and yes, they can sue for his GROSS receipts, not his net profit. ... If you poke a big enough tiger with that copyright-infringement stick, and they are sufficiently litigious-minded .... you will get HAMMERED ABSOLUTELY FLAT.
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Logical deduction. They cannot NOT know these servers exist; their existence has been trumpeted all over the internet for months now. And since companies like NCSoft have law firms on retainer, whose primary (if not SOLE) function is to find, and eliminate, infringement of their IPs, and the HC team hasn't shut down, nor even received a cease-and-desist letter .... I can only logically conclude that NCSoft must have given permission, even if it's an under-the-table, ::cough-cough, nudge-nudge, wink-wink:: sort of permission. 🙂
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NCSoft knows it exists, and has given at least tacit permission for it to continue doing so. (Likely, that involved at least two restrictions: (a) not charging any fees, selling anything in-game, or otherwise making a profit; and (b) eliminating the old Auth and Character databases) As such, it's legality is at worst indeterminate. And even if it were full-blown illegal ... two wrongs do not make a right. More importantly, the legality or illegality of these servers does not insulate the HC dev team from possible copyright infringement suits. So don't. JUST DON'T...! It's not worth the potential (very unlikely but still nonzero) chance that a high incidence of IP infringing characters could prompt legal action, which in turn would cause these servers (and all others) to close forever.
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Actually, I'd say it depends more on the resources available to them. If a full team of programmers, artists, etc - whose Day Job was to work on CoX - never were able to do it, then why should a bunch of part-time hobbyists, whose Day Job is not making CoX better, be more able to do it? I'd love to be wrong about that, but ... I don't think I am.
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+1 for this - it would be a solid improvement. Hard pass. CoX is not a game that needs specific roles filled. You don't NEED a tank; you don't NEED a "healer". You just need ... well, anyone. Any possible mix of ATs and powersets can handle any TF or SF in the game (pre-Incarnate; I don't yet have any experience with those). I once, back on Live (in i10 or i11 IIRC) was part of a respect trial, where we had a Brute, a Corruptor, and six Masterminds. (I was one of the MMs). We MMs literally told the Brute and Corruptor "take a load off, we've got this", and proceeded to WRECK the opposition. Like an arc welder through warm butter. We stopped bothering to even buff our pets - just six guys running toggles, telling our pets "go there and shoot/stab/punch ... oh hell, I don't care, SOMETHING or other". You know what six full sets of leadership, and two dispersion bubbles, does for three dozen Mastermind pets? Godmode, that's what it does. 😄 It was like pushing baby ducks into an alligator pond, it was that easy. (The biggest challenge was our computers going to slideshows, 'cause of all the stuff happening on-screen.) ... There have been "all defender" TFs. And not a healer among them - they just buffed themselves into godhood, while debuffing the enemy into feeble kittenhood. Seriously, "picking a role" is absolutely unnecessary in this game. 🙂 That would be a great idea for those who enjoy PvP, but I don't think the architecture of the game is able to do that right now. And I suspect it would take a LOOOOOT of work. PvP zones are not on separate servers, they're just zones on the same server with different rules. Also, it bumps into the problem of what to do if two people, with the same name but on different servers, enter the same zone at the same time. CoH just isn't set up to allow more than one person to have the same character name at once. There's just no way, presently, to do cross-server zones ... and I doubt it's even possible with the CoX program in it's present (and reasonably forseeable) state.
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Radio Mission Diversification - Peregrine Island
PaxArcana replied to Rhinoxx's topic in Suggestions & Feedback
.... now I wanna make a Villain, and call him BOSS_NAME ... 😄 😄 😄 -
Radio Mission Diversification - Peregrine Island
PaxArcana replied to Rhinoxx's topic in Suggestions & Feedback
+1 from me, too. -
I sincerely doubt that any improved version of CoX will involve that radical a rewrite of the code, Sidious.