GraspingVileTerror

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/21400-name-assistance-brigade-the-nabbers/ Remember: If someone else already has the name, then chances are it wasn't good enough for you anyway! You deserve something special and unique, after all.

So this thread went to a lot of the places I was expecting. Although one in particular hasn't come up yet, so kudos to the community for not going there! I kind want to explore the topic a little more, ask a few questions, gather some contextual background information . . . but given the overall knee-jerk reaction, it seems unlikely it'll be productive. But hey! Anti-Nipple Folks. You can rest assured. Even if the Devs were miraculously all of the opinion that the original request was fully meritorious and would be worth pursuing in an ideal world, I think they would still be aware enough of the Maude Flandersism tied to this that they'd never risk it in the current environment. And chances are probably quite good that the Devs here -don't- all share the opinion expressed in the original topic of this thread, so it's not like we're even remotely close to the possibility. So . . . relax. No need to be the irreverent rebels of would-be satire. If you don't like it, and don't want to discuss a topic like this maturely and calmly, you can just let a thread like this die a quiet death without replies. It would probably be more effective, honestly.

Obvious problem upon retrospect, with potential solution/correction: Enhancement Inheritance - using the Grant Power method like this would potentially prevent Accuracy, Confuse Duration, and Proc Enhancements from propagating down the line to the group of enemies. While I'm personally not phased by the Accuracy bit (since a player would be best served by targeting high-rank enemies, who naturally have improved Accuracy over their minions), the Confuse Duration would probably necessitate the origin of the AoE Confuse component to remain directly sourced from the player or a pseudo-pet in the same location as the single target. I don't know enough about how Procs work in the backend to say whether they could be successfully inherited or not.

I realize there are probably a dozen Mind Control threads by now, but this suggestion is specific to Mass Confusion, and improving it to a status where it's decided better than Seeds of Confusion. Change it to Single Target. The target gets the standard Mag and Duration on Confuse. The target ALSO gets a 1 sec Duration of a Mag 500 Confuse. During that 1 second, the target gets a grantpower which they use as a PBAoE Confuse on the remaining 15 targets. After a .5 delay, the single original target gets a high Mag and equal-to-unenhanced-Confuse-Duration Taunt that only affects (former) allies. Suddenly Mass Confusion becomes a powerful tool to get a mob to dogpile on a single target, and once that target is down, the mob turns on its own. What do people think? Is it a viable solution for making Mass Confusion worthy of a Tier 9 Control Set slot while living in a world where Seeds of Confusion exists at Tier 5?

Interesting take on it, @Takel. Thank you for sharing it! Although, I'm not sure my reading of the canon can fully support coming to the same conclusion, but it at least inspires some interesting ideas for future content. Sadly, knowing how certain people would react, I can't quite feel comfortable delving in to a public discussion on the subject matter any further. "Too real" for some folks. Still . . . I hope the current lore Devs look in to this and give some consideration to what might otherwise be an inscrutable source of this particular departure from reality. And to attempt to pre-empt a response I could see being made: It matters because a cogent and internally consistent lore is something I personally value quite highly. It's something which I feel City of Heroes has skirted with, never quite falling in to the levels of absurdity which Champions Online's lore exists within. It's the sort of reason why I think Shadowrun v4 is the best edition of Shadowrun, as a positive example. There were writers who took the time to analyze how a setting like theirs could make sense within the constraints of sociological or anthropological contexts, and the setting was all the richer for it. I want to encourage the current Devs here to do the same, or if they feel out of their depths, to invite others in to the space to assist them.

Take a look at the wider game industry, especially right now, if you want to see what a Culture of Secrets leads to. There are three big names in the industry who are having their dirty laundry aired out, and it's about time. And every one of them started out by saying "don't question the secrets." But to the point of the original question, @ThePhlebotomist: I believe it was either @Cipher or @Telephone who explained the basics related to their plans in case the current hosting solution were to fail (whether that be from OVH falling apart, C&Ds and/or DMCAs, or DDoS, or whatever; it wasn't explicitly detailed). The general thrust of it, though, is that they have some redundancies in place which they feel confident would allow them to redeploy on another hosting service with minimal downtime. Whether that's sufficient to answer your particular question, Phleboto, I can't say. I know I wouldn't mind more details in that regard either, but I also personally think there are other divisions within Homecoming that more pressingly need further encouragement to stop keeping secrets. The physical server operations have been fairly transparent, all things considered. A positive role model, as it were.

Yeah. You might call Free Guy the "brightly-coloured, fun, and optimistically positive collectivist" version of The Thirteenth Floor. But yeah . . . I figure anyone who has read this thread up to this point . . . spoilers will follow!

Apologies in advance, have to get to work like three minutes ago, but . . . if this thread is still around when I get off, it's one of those topics that'll be interesting to tackle. In the meantime: Strap in, folks! I think it's going to be a bumpy ride.

"Overworked Devs." If any of the volunteers feel overworked, then there's a problem. But that problem is not giving suggestions on how to improve the game.

Conflating an optional form of playing the game with "great harm" seems rather skewed as a perception for me. I think someone's going to have to walk me through that every step of the way, making damned sure that each step isn't a logical fallacy for me to "get it."

I think a bright green STREAMING (possibly with little pulsing Red dot, for added effect) could be a really nifty addition. Good thinking, @Coyotedancer! Streamers would still have to self-select in to this, and it does potentially paint a target on them for photo-bombers and people seeking their 15-seconds of "fame" . . . but . . . yeah. I like that idea! Did you want to post it in the Suggestions board, or would you rather someone else do so, 'Dancer?

Alright, let's pivot the suggestion then: Change Battlecrys to Monologues! Give Redside some love! To the point; I'm not sure why the original Battlecry had the limitation it does. If there's a reason, it would be interesting to learn what it is, and then see if there's a way to overcome it now that the backend of the game is so much improved. And if there is no point, then yeah. Let's just pop it up to the normal message character limit of 255.

I think @Bionic_Flea's point was that the Homecoming Terms of Use do not expressly give permission to streamers to record other players without their consent, since the post from Glacier that Flea was quoting implied they did. The Terms of Use may -imply- that, sure, from some points of view. But they don't expressly state it. And, as I stated in my lengthy reply above, I don't suspect the Homecoming Team will make an explicit clause giving streamers unlimited authority to document other players. After all, the Privacy Policy already has coverage that is sufficient in the form of the admission to Homecoming not having a guarantee of being secure against that sort of thing. Not justifying it, mind you. Just giving a breakdown of what my reading of the two documents mean in this situation. And harassment is still harassment, of course. Whether it's a streamer stalking a player to record their activities, or a player trying to sabotage the streamer's video, either situation could be viewed as harassment, and the victimized party in each case could put a petition in to the GMs to have it addressed. And as usual, the GM would operate with personal discretion on the matter, which may or may not be considered reasonable by others (potentially even other GMs). Basically . . . Homecoming probably just wants us to play nicely with one another, and respecting the wishes of players who express those wishes is a great first step to avoiding any form of escalation. We could probably use the word of @Jimmy, @Cipher, and/or @GM Widower on this, though. I admit that I may have misjudged the situation.

Stone Armour / Claws Tanker. SUPER Hard Mode. Good luck even rolling one.

Privacy and property are not the same thing, even in a digital space.

Just going to say that, unless they've changed it recently, discord's one of those REALLY, REALLY BAD OVERREACHY-AS-FUCK T.o.U. . . . so, chances are good that if anything, you'd be reporting a streamer for stealing -discord's- property if someone used a recording of your voice on a Youtube video . . .

Player Content isn't categorized within the Intellectual Property Rights. That's why other game companies realized they needed far more draconian T.o.U.

More enticing game content at low and mid levels would go much further, I think. Naturally, that takes time, effort, and balancing galore, so it's not a simple solution. But . . . REWARD players with interesting things outside of farms if you want players to not feel like they need to farm. Which also means rebalancing in-game rewards. They're so heavily weighted to Levels 45+ and 50 that there's only niche incentives for NOT farming to cap in a couple of hours. Restricting access to AE will just piss people off, and won't stop them from farming. Deleting AE will just piss people off, and they'll farm OTHER content (like they used to). If we truly want people out of the farms, we need to give them a compelling REASON not to farm. The rest of the game needs to be interesting enough to not just jump to the level cap, and then do it later. And honestly . . . do we -really- care? I mean, I personally would like to have more interesting content to do at low and mid levels. But if someone else wants to farm in AE their entire time playing the game, then it's absolutely no skin off my nose, or anyone else's. That players just gets to do their own thing, at their own pace. They can leave the farm any time they choose to. So, again. Broken record: They can leave the farm any time they choose to. Let's give them a GOOD reason to choose to, and then let them make their own choice.

Except there's always been a pretty big gap in the Privacy Policies and Terms of Use here in regard to that, @Glacier Peak. Even the original City of Heroes terms of licensing with the Legacy/Retail game never took proprietary ownership of the players' creations in the game. The Players' Content. At most, in Legacy/Retail, the Terms gave NC a limited license to use Player Content for advertising. For Homecoming, players have been warned that Their Content (which, the language of the Terms of Agreement make it clear enough for a legal dispute, if someone tries to overstep their authority) can be used as part of an investigation to determine whether or not to terminate the player's access to these servers. Which, emphasis here: THESE servers. The Privacy Policy does have a clause that basically stipulates that Homecoming LLC washes their hands of anything getting "loose," of course. But players DO still own their own Content. So, can you please-and-kindly drop that one already. Saying that players don't get to say "my this" or "my that" is not what the Terms of Use or Privacy Policy state. Players retain their own rights. Always have. The players just have to take responsibility for their own content. THAT is what the documents stipulate. Homecoming has reasonably (in my opinion) avoided overstepping in that particular territory. Unlike the vast majority of large scale commercial releases in the past decade+, I might add. I certainly don't want to see them cross that line. Sadly, I don't believe there's an easy solution here, though. Ideally, streamers would be respectful of other players and give fair redress for players to opt out. However, streaming software isn't robust enough to block out individual players' content, and putting that level of onus on the streamers is not really going to be fulfilled. Even if streamers cared, the amount of work involved in that would severely limit them. If Homecoming steps in again, they'll either need to explicitly make some declarations regarding player content licensing and/or ownership, which would be putting an entirely new target on their back that just isn't worth the pain and suffering (and chances are it would end up being incredibly unethical, if perfectly within their legal rights, but that would also be a VERY bad bit of optics). Alternatively, if they restrict streaming again, we'd lose a potentially productive avenue for increased visibility. A couple of alternatives that are unlikely due to how fiddly they'd be would be: Streaming restricted to specific Shards, or Streaming restricted during specific times of day/days of the week. I don't imagine either of those would be opted for right now. With a lot of things here, it's one of those "bad situations that could be worse." And while I always try to make a call toward doing better, I can't really see a better solution than what we have right now in this scenario. Of course, I may be missing an obvious solution, so I welcome and encourage others to continue discussing it! Short version: It sucks, but not nearly as bad as it could. Where that leaves us, ultimately, is that individual players would need to try their luck at contacting individual streamers or streaming/video services, and asking their content to be removed from the stream. And I would have to wish those players good luck on that, though, since I doubt many of those mega-corporations are going to care enough to entertain your claims, unless you know how to write a solid DMCA request.

What about college-enrolled villains?

Fair.

What would facepalming a headcannon look like?

Yeah, the beautification of Atlas Park went a little weirdly. In terms of development: It really felt like they were either planning to abandon all the old content that exists in the zone, OR whoever lead that project just didn't care to maintain the internal consistency of the door missions there. On top of that, adding buildings that were made of brick or stone, AND old and weathered during a face-list was wildly bizarre. Diegetically: The renovations in Atlas Park certainly made that part of town more visually stunning, but the over-reliance on false façades and holographic illusions was an odd turn from the City Planning department, to say the least.

For new or returning folks who haven't done so already, please seek out the follow story arcs: By @holymittens: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Bobby_Curtin 25 to 29, Rogue alignment only, Nerva Archipelago (-75, 16.5, 6105) https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Shauna_Braun 25 to 29, Vigilante alignment only, Independence Port (-1929, 16, -2587) By @Piecemeal: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Doc_Buzzsaw New content 30 to 39, Villain/Rogue alignment, Sharkhead Isle (693.5, 32, -1324.5) https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Issue_27_Page_1#New_Story_Arc:_The_Graveyard_Shift_.28Hero.2C_Level_20-29.29 20 to 29 (I think), Hero/Vigilante alignment, Steel Canyon (just below the staircase leading from lower Steel Canyon up to Icon in the north-west) I think these arcs demonstrate some various talents in regard to better writing and game mechanics delivering and serving the story. I look forward to the day when they can both become more polished and united, and we can have the strong writing and engaging narrative gameplay together. Piecemeal and @Cobalt Arachne are also currently working on a new Strike Force and Warriors content in Kallisti Wharf, but there are no guarantees that these will see play on the public Homecoming servers. Word is the Dr. Aeon Strike Force is close, but I have no idea how close. These things are rarely communicated clearly and end up going through a rumour mill due to that.

A Wind Set? https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Wind_Control I mean, I wasn't overly thrilled about it, but I'm so starved for a new Control Set that I'll take it at this point!