Brillig

That's an interesting angle. The initial announcement was November 7, 2007, so it'll be pretty much 5 years when it closes.

I would have thought that NCSoft would have made that part of the announcement though, it would blunt the bad press they are getting.

Unfortunately, this normally would have to happen *before* today's announcement. After today, the team will be dispersed, looking for (and hopefully getting) new jobs.

Without a team in place, the value of the franchise goes down dramatically. So much so that you have to think that NCSoft looked around for a buyer before making this decision, and didn't find one.

Well. I don't think it's appropriate to fight at a funeral, so I'll just say that there are more than the two alternatives you state, and your premise is flawed.

Carry on.

Yes, at a high level, the game play is quite similar. There are some significant differences in the details, for example, Heroes has you managing three resources (plot, energy, damage) vs Ascension's two (power, runes), and Heroes has a timing system built in (cards are removed by enemies) which makes it possible for everyone to lose.

In the case of this game, additions to your deck are permanent (until the next game).

The general flow of gameplay is:

1) You deal yourself a hand of five cards from your personal deck
2) You play cards from your hand - this may allow you to draw additional cards from the deck
3) Based on the results of step 2, you add cards from the central stockpile to your discard pile (improving your deck)
4) All the cards from your hand, played and unplayed, are put in your discard pile (there's an exception for energy sources, which stay played.)
5) Go to step 1 (when your personal deck runs out, you shuffle your discard pile and keep drawing from it)

Yep - that's how this one works as well. You start with a deck that is pretty much the same as everyone else's, then as you play the game, your deck becomes more personalized by selecting stuff from the piles in the middle.

None of those applications are designed to share the contents of your filesystem.

This is absolutely true that at the current time, Pando doesn't do anything bad.

However, guess how much liability Pando or NCSoft have if they release a buggy update of PMB that uploads all your banking information to the wild?

Careful with that one. SLC (single level cell, or 1 bit per cell) SSD's have endurances in the hundreds of thousands to a million write cycles.

Pretty much all consumer-grade SSD's these days are using MLC (multi level cell, 2 bits per cell) technology. MLC has a much shorter lifetime, in some cases as low as a thousand write cycles (but usually estimated at up to ten thousand cycles). This is still better than a hard drive, unless you're running an enterprise database or streaming storage.

Manufacturers have started playing with 3 bits per cell (TLC). The best estimates I've seen for TLC is a thousand write cycles and it could well be lower than that. TLC scares me at the moment, I personally wouldn't use a TLC drive.

(The reason why the drive companies are stufffing more bits per cell is because it allows them to offer larger drives for lowed prices.)

By pasta, I hate the "oh, my job gives me special insight" line. Here's a counter for you. I know from being alive that if you want to encourage a behavior, you give positive reinforcements (i.e., fixing bugs and responding to bug reports.) If you want to discourage behavior, you give negative reinforcement. The PS team have been doing far more of the latter.

Do you know what a false dichotomy is? Because you've got one right there.

If, by some miracle, all the feedback isn't being ignored, some QA person (not a developer) should be checking the feedback and logging issues into PS' tracking system.

If you're going to say it's unreasonably onerous for that person to post a boilerplate "Logged as bug #736222," or "Duplicate of bug #288237," or "Unable to duplicate, please provide more details," then you've got awfully low expectations.

Me, I play a bunch of other MMOs. Pretty much no dev team excels at communication, but there are some that are way better than this.

Getting outward facing communications is difficult, but it's essential if you want to foster a constructive relationship with the community. I congratulate you on illustrating my point with your snide remark.

No one is talking about paid beta testers. However, the point is that only a fraction of the population of any beta server for a game is going to be interested in filing bugs. If Paragon wanted higher density feedback, they could simply run closed betas with people who file lots of bugs.

Sadly, a 30-50 person beta isn't likely to do much good, so they fling open the doors to occasional filers and even people who just want to see the new shinies. Because even those people can unearth bugs.

But you can never lose sight of the fact that none of those people have any obligation to be testing and filing bugs.

And when Paragon consistently falls down at communicating and fixing bugs, it's even more ludicrous to be taking the stance that the problem is due to bad beta testers.

Oh please. There are numerous instances of bugs that have been reported in Beta and still made it live. And honestly, I don't think the total silence from Paragon on most bug threads is at all helpful. If people feel their feedback is falling on deaf ears, they're going to be less inclined to give feedback in the future.

Finally, players are not QA. Beta tests exist in order to get feedback and bug reports, true, but depending on a beta to do your testing for you is the acme of arrogance and futility.

I'd just like to point out that you're making a fairly big assumption here. All we know is that you are guaranteed not to get repeat costume pieces, the mechanism by which that happens it unknown. You are assuming that costume pieces you already own are removed from the 'pool' before randomization takes place, where it's just as possible that instead, substitution takes places after the fact, and there is no guarantee that said substitution is random.

In plain language, it's perfectly possible that if you get a rare costume item in a pack, on further packs, that item isn't removed from the 'rolling table', but is instead replaced with Windfall.

This is why I've repeatedly insisted that transparency in the numbers is essential. Paragon seems inclined to disagree.