srmalloy

Champions, as a PnP RPG, relied heavily on having a human GM to sanity-check character builds. With an online game, you either accept the fact that you're going to get characters that... bend... the limits of the character design rules, or you block off the ability to even get close to the limits of the design mechanics. Cryptic took the second route with Champions Online and, in my opinion, did it badly, and then tried to patch over the holes and pushed it out to the players.

Virtually all of the Asian-style MMOs, particularly the mobile games, are F2P, and make their entire revenue from the cash shop. MMOs in Asia had a fundamental difference from Western MMOs; the average home computer in Asia didn't have the graphics capability to run MMOs (if there was a home computer at all, and one with an internet connection), so the MMO publishers made deals with the PC baangs (internet cafes) to supply systems if they'd install their games. So where a typical Western MMO player would go home, log into the MMO from their computer, and either join their friends online to group, or play solo, the typical Asian MMO player would get together with their friends, go down to the bang, and play together as a group. Anything done solo in an Asian-style MMO is virtually always peripheral to the progress of any questline and is extremely grindy, with almost all quest content requiring a group for completion. Into this goes the cash shop; when you're already paying for the time on the computer at the baang, paying a subscription fee on top won't fly. So the basic game is free, and the publisher sets up a cash shop where the players can buy bits and pieces of upgrades as they decide they want them; this is seen as commonplace because of the many Asian countries where people have low incomes, and you see micro-transaction sales in RL -- the sachet, for example, where you could buy 5ml of shampoo for ~10¢, instead of buying a whole bottle of shampoo -- selling low-cost, low-profit-margin merchandise in large amounts. And Asian MMOs have gone in on this fully, from selling wide varieties of character customization items to items that 'eat' the XP loss from character death and even, in some games, raw materials for the people who don't want to take the time to gather them. And because of the churn rate in F2P MMOs -- in most F2P MMOs, a player who joins a game in the first month after launch has only a 6.2% likelihood of still playing a year later, and players who join a game a year after launch have only a 35% chance of logging in the next day, with only 3% logging in a month later -- the publisher has only a relatively small window to get the average player to interact with the cash shop, so it is in their interest to put a wide variety of shinies in the cash shop, both to attract an initial purchase and to encourage the player to continue with the game to use or show off the shiny. Now, contrast this with City of Heroes. According to the player data that was reported by Matt Miller and other sources, CoH had a one-year retention rate in excess of 90%; you can see where nickel-and-diming the player for each little cosmetic item would rapidly become unsustainable in terms of player satisfaction.

Oh, not at all. You should look at NCsoft's Asian-style MMOs if you want to see a microtransaction-driven game. I'm convinced that one of the reasons NCsoft killed CoH was because it couldn't be turned into the cash-shop-centric games everything else they ran were without huge amounts of rewrite that would destroy a core part of the game. Back on Live, you could buy costume packs, unlocking new costume pieces that you could use from that point forward with any character and costume slot, as many times as you wanted; the pieces in the pack were unlocked permanently across your account. Now imagine, in the NCsoft cash shop, you have to pay for each costume piece individually, and buying the piece lets you use it on one character once — you want to use it for a different costume slot, you have to buy it again, and if you change the costume so it's no longer using that piece, you have to buy it again if you want to change back. You want to use the piece on a different character, you have to buy it again, too. Buying the unlock for a new AT, or a new powerset? You get a single-use token and can make one character using it; you want to make more, buy it again. That's the kind of cash-shop monetization NCsoft wants, with you buying 'NCcoin' directly from NCsoft, so NCsoft gets the money, and then you use the NCcoin in the game-specific store — that way, NCsoft gets all the money up front and can control what fraction (if any) the game development studios get, as another tool to keep them subordinate to their corporate masters.

And declaring that, for him, 'fun' was throwing your character at the end boss again and again and again, being defeated each time, until you discovered the one tactic that let you beat them. And displaying a complete and utter ignorance of the way the internet worked by failing to realize that, no matter how complicated he made the end boss defeat technique, that fifteen minutes after someone figured it out, it would be up on the internet and read by the entire playerbase, completely defeating his intent to make each player figure it out for themselves.

There is an anecdote I've never been able to confirm about the F-16 fighter that illustrates this. Supposedly, when the Air Force got the first F-16s for its flight testing, the first test pilot had gone out, done the full pre-flight, and got into the cockpit. He was looking around, and decided to do something stupid, just to see what would happen. He hit the 'gear retract' switch. The landing gear retracted, dropping the plane onto the concrete. General Dynamics hurriedly modified the planes to add a 'squat switch', so the landing gear wouldn't retract if there was weight on them. Nobody in the design team had thought someone would do something that stupid. This caused a secondary problem, one of pilot behavior. Knowing that the gear wouldn't retract with the plane on the ground, pilots would hit the gear retract switch as they started their takeoff run, so the gear would retract as the plane lifted off the ground; a snappy retraction so quickly after liftoff being 'strack'. Unfortunately, if a gust of wind comes down the runway, it can create enough additional lift for the plane to lift off before it has actually reached flying speed, so when the gust passes, the plane is below stall speed, and the gear having retracted when it lifted off, the pilot bends the bird as it settles back onto its belly. The use of the gear retract switch before the plane was actually in the air was formally prohibited (although I'm certain that it didn't stop entirely). The developers are often the worst group for finding bugs that exist in the odd corners of a project, because they're so close to it, knowing how it should work, that it's hard to get out of that mindset and try the stupid and ridiculous things that 'nobody would ever do'.

On one of my characters, I remember doing a mission that was like that; the mission goal in the nav window was to "defeat all thugs" or the like, and I happened to be playing a character with invisibility and a gonzo range, and I went through the mission map defeating all the thugs, leaving the mobs they were fighting (Crey, IIRC). When I was done, the mission wouldn't complete until I went back and defeated all the Crey, too.

There is insufficient time before the heat death of the universe to iterate the full list... 😁

Yes, certainly, we need this so we can spawn chairs to sit in and have people sitting in chairs randomly scattered through the room while the booths and chairs already in the room are all empty...

Expecting professional, paid-developer-grade work from the unpaid HC staff working on their own dime on someone else's poorly-documented spaghetti code? They're doing it out of their love for the game, and doing a far better job, with far too little appreciation than they deserve, than we have any right to expect.

As an addendum to the manifestation of this bug, it occurs when you have any storage object open in a base when you are applying a catalyst to an IO; however, only in the case of a Salvage Rack will the bug put the catalyst in the storage object -- for other storage objects, it will not go into the object, and you will see an error message saying that you can't put Enhancement Catalyst into that storage object. So it appears to be a bug with the open storage object trying to take control of the catalyst when it is 'put in motion' by using it on an IO.

I made a figgy pudding for Yule a few years ago; I should do it again...

...where you're not limited by having to wait for the TTS to finish reading the text. How much of that 'time to play the game instead of reading text would you lose if the mission text stayed locked up on the screen while the TTS played out? Or being able to experience the joy of being attacked while the window with the mission text was locked on the screen because the TTS hasn't finished?

Along with the inevitable need for additional emotes...

I believe it was part of a series of upgrades they were looking at implementing, including zone revamps like the Atlas Park update and the two instanced outdoor missions in AP using the feature developed for Praetoria, although I believe the latter proved problematic and was shelved.

What galls me the most about the 'advance at the speed of narration' segments is that, even if you use the Section 508 tools to get a transcript of the narration (for example, for a deaf individual taking the training), it's still dragging along waiting for the narration to complete before you can advance to the next section, even if you're unable to hear it (not that I have a hearing problem; I was just looking for ways to get around the slow, deliberate drone of the narration).

From my experience with mandated training at work, waiting for the narration to complete before you're allowed to advance to the next section, and even worse, when there are several bullet points that aren't even displayed until the narration gets that far in reading the text, has severely poisoned me for unskippable (or undisableable) voice over; I'm able to read the text four or five times before the narration gets through the text once. Now consider that, with a thousand character slots per server, you're going to be listening to the same VO again and again and again, until it stops being a clever addition and becomes a drag on play, particularly with 'wall-o-text' interactions that you don't bother reading through any more.

"So you're okay with being able to dress up as Wolverine for the two weeks it takes Disney's lawyers to issue a C&D order to NCsoft as the IP owner, triggering them out of the state of benign neglect they've had toward the rogue CoH servers and issuing C&D orders of their own, forcing all the rogue servers to shut down (or at least go underground), cutting off the game from everyone and ruining things for thousands of people for a brief satisfaction on your part?" FTFY.

It sounds to me like it's 'use on an enemy, get this effect, use on an ally get this other effect'.

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The woman below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude." "You must be a programmer," said the balloonist. "I am" replied the woman, "How did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, "Everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help so far." The woman below responded, "You must be a manager." "I am," replied the balloonist, "But how did you know?" "Well," said the woman, "You don't know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow it's my fault."

Since the object being thrown is just a visual, perhaps it could be set up as a weapon customization, so you can pick the big rock, a present, another box (like the one being used as a soapbox by the Lost and others), the larger objects from Propel (like the forklift), and a 'random' option that would pick the object when the power was activated.

And there you have it. Singularities collect and carry around random things they can toss around inside them to make them look prettier; they're clearly female. 😁

The ToT league(s) in PI fixate on the murder motel because it's a nice, tight cluster of doors, and members don't have to move around much between the doors. Because of the layout of PI, it's the only place in the zone for this; if you want to ToT in the other areas of the zone, you're moving around an extended area due to the paucity of doors — the brownstones have the closest array of doors, but you're still moving down a row with only a sprinkling of doors as you work back to the start. Kallisti Wharf has clusters of buildings to use, along with several buildings that have enough doors that you can just work your way around the building again and again. Elsewhere, except in Grandville, you have to worry about outleveling the zone, which cuts off XP and forces you to go to another zone. So the PI murder motel became what it is because it's the most efficient ToT location in PI.

Or like Alaska, except that there they've figured out how to capture the mosquitoes and use them like helicopters to airlift supplies to remote communities...

There's always the nuclear option of razing the murder motel and replacing it with a parking lot, or a warehouse type building with one double or quad door. No murder motel, no league spawning mobs in a tight area from a dozen doors, so no target-rich environment for an AFK MM to park in and take advantage of other players' activities.

Except that they should be base objects to go along with the Kronos titans -- and it's easier to make a model as a static entity than it is to rig it for animation (even though they'd just be scaling up the rigging and animation for the Hercules titans) and work out where in the data files it would need to sit to spawn under various conditions, so it could be available as a base entity faster than it could be added to the game as a new Malta mob.