MetaVileTerror

I've been humming and hah'ing over an idea I had about making an asset hub website, akin to places like Nexus Mods. Thing is, I've not really improved my web development skills since the '90s . . . so I'm feeling pretty confident that I'm not the one to bring such an idea to life. Still, if we can muster the interest and the support, I would be willing to draft up some UX plans and flowcharts. I'll admit I haven't done /that/ in a while either, but it's been a might bit more recent than the '90s, that's for sure.

Fair enough. In my experiences, I've just noticed a trend of larger businesses usually having accrued more safety nets. Nets which also end up facilitating greedy activities from the bad apples, compared to small companies which are more likely to die from a bad executive. But then, I think I've pulled this thread on a bit of a tangent . . . should we get back to dipping our hands in to the spaghetti?

I'm all-for that. I mean, I don't know what kind of impact it might have on good ol' stability and the like, but being able to have more Coalitions is not a bad thing. While we're at it, could we add "Coalition Members" to the Permissions on base storage, please?

How about +Recharge which Scales with Level? Starts at a mere +2.5%, but progresses up to +10% by level 50?

Regardless of the financial risk involved; lying and cheating to make extra money is damnably disgusting in my books. And then, with large-scale developments, we see plenty of insurance systems in place to give the money-types comfortable landings in case of failures. Small businesses are an entirely different kettle of chips, of course. One will often see the chief financial officer also being the lead programmer, or other such overlaps of responsibility. These people may not be the best at wearing all the extra hats, and their ventures may fail, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt before I trust another exec who chants the mantra of "a business' only purpose is to make money."

I'm right there with the sentiment that artificially creating a "haves and have nots" mentality _for costume pieces_ is absolutely no good when tied to real world finances. The reason such mechanics are popular is not at all in favour of the players or even the developers; it's standard practice for investors and executives. Feeding in to a system like that is NOT healthy for long term success, as evidenced by the wider industry flirting with another collapse right now.

Not to dismiss anything that has been said already, but the Management Factor really needs to be stressed. Seeing that side of the business, a lot of the time you can have AMAZING coders working on a project, but one greedy ass near the top can (and does) tank it because they'd rather get their overly generous slice of the pie, rather than see the employees with their feet on the ground and fingers on the keyboards getting what's owed to them. So, "fast and good, but not cheap" suddenly becomes "fast and good and overpriced," and it never gets finished since the contracted bankroll dries up.

The best job security, in my experience, comes from sucking up to the boss, or the boss's boss. I've seen plenty of incompetent braggarts holding lofty positions uncontested.

Cosmetics have been, and should always remain, City of Heroes' greatest strength, in my opinion. Locking them behind paywalls is NOT conducive to the original spirit of what makes this an amazing game. A spirit which is very much alive and well with this free server. I'm happy to pay for new content to be made, but I'd sooner go for a crowdfunding, subscription, or "donation" based model as we currently stand. Pay the asset developers in advance, and trust that they'll be held accountable. Yeah, I know . . . a lot of crowdfunded endeavours have been huge boondoggles. But I'd still rather take that potential outcome than see microtransactions ever return to this game.

Oh, yeah, I'm not saying "don't document." I'm just saying I've had teachers who told their students not to do it, and that was their apparent reason.

Tanking as a /Traps Mastermind is also great fun, especially after getting Poison Trap. There's this moment when jumping in to a mob at high velocity, but you haven't attacked anything yet, and you can squeeze an Acid Mortar out, letting it take some of the initial brunt of the attack, and then the Force Field Generator catches up while planting the Poison Trap, and finally those damnable slowpoke Henchminions get in to the mix. I've had teammates confused as to how a squishy Mastermind can pull this off, but it's my basic modus operandi as a /Traps.

You had different teachers than I did, Twisted Toon. Sure, one of the younger teachers told us to document. The older ones? They gave the "job security" excuse for why documenting shouldn't be "too detailed." Then again, that might have been why they were teaching, instead of still working in the industry . . .

Someone asked for screenshots, yeah? Steel Canyon Ouroboros -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- Not that I'd ever be significant enough, but I wonder . . . with over 100 characters presently (and over 150 on Live) . . . how many of them would get immortalized . . .

What /is/ the Merit quantity cap anyway?

Lawsuits* nothin'; in my teams it was always about keeping them under wraps for reasons of "ensuring the customer trusts us," or some other P.R. malarkey. One of the many reasons I'm now a professional cook instead. * (not saying lawsuits aren't a more pressing fear in other sectors which use software solutions; I only had the game industry to base my experience on)

My guess? Mobility. I find Hover's plenty good for a Ranged character, but in Melee . . . it's usually more of a pain in the ass for me to try and utilize it.

Thanks for the information on that Widower. I had been curious too. An in-game description on these NPCs would probably be a nice little bit of rememberence?

Trade secret: Basically every publisher-dictated game is a mess in the coding department since deadlines are always looming, and getting it to "work well enough" is usually the modus operandi. There are, however, degrees of mess. On the one end, you have Nintendo Seal of Approval NES games. On the other, you have Bethesda. (little joke. Bethesda's bad, but they're not the worst) And, yeah; the simpler the game, the easier it is to avoid bloat, but good luck finding the holy grail of efficient coding when it comes to games that have been released for sale.

It was TonyV who promised that Homecoming would /always/ be free, Nericus TonyV also recently stepped down from Titan Network and the ncsoft negotiations . . . Yeah. I'm worried too. Some reassurances of that promise from others still engaged in the negotiations would go a long way to placating those fears.

The Pride Channel has a name for this . . . what was it . . . what was it . . . Terrible Tuesdays? Damn. Can't remember. Something like that, though. They also have Praetorian Pthursdays, or something like that too.

I realize this might be a bit glib of me, but . . . how did this thread get 71 replies in 8 hours? . . . and there I go, contributing to that. Oh well. But, yeah. I kind of see this as the natural progression in what was already happening anyway. Step by step, Travel Powers were becoming more and more accessible, and still had no real impact on game balance, while they DEFINITELY had a positive impact on game experience and roleplay. Plop in Limited Flight (halfway between Hover and true Fly), Limited Teleport (half the distance), Limited Super Speed (halfway between Ninja-Beast and true Super Speed), and Limited Super Jump (halfway between Ninja-Beast and true Super Jump). First pick for free, limited to Level 14, since that's the first level when you don't unlock a new Primary or Secondary. What's that going to hurt?

I get this at random when my computer's been running for a few weeks without reboot. Not sure what the /actual/ cause is, but it hasn't stopped me from playing yet.

Never discount the value of multiboxing for the purposes of roleplay!

Not to undermine Homecoming's Devs or GMs efforts to keep their methodology under wraps, and not /knowing/ the specifics of their methods . . . the easiest way to make sure you aren't falsely flagged as being a real-money Influence seller is to not play on the same computer as one.

Hmm, the language isn't robust enough to be a little more dynamic? I admit, I suck at my syntax and constantly need reference materials while coding, and regularly put the wrong types of logic in to my programs. So I know some things have a /helluva/ time with "figuring stuff out" with if-thens up the whazoo . . . but I've also had some code which I know doesn't require its hand held quite so much. . . . maybe I should just go ahead and download the source myself one of these days, eh? Other than discord, where does one go to actually do that?