Chase_Arcanum
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Quote:Originally Posted by _Prankster_
I never said that "Devs" like farming.. I said
Sure the dev's don't want farming in AE, and if they made the decisions I'm sure there wouldn't be any. But there always needs to be a way to farm in any game that requires as much grinding as this game does. Now if you are talking about exploits of game bugs, I can understand wanting to get rid of those. But how is AE farming any different from the demon,freakshow or family farms? It's only a different scenery with MUCH harder foes... you can go in there and think your gonna just prance through and make lotsa xp for no work, but for an all boss mission you need a good team and some teamwork unless you want to faceplant multiple times and even then you still might.
I think we're using different definitions of "farm" here.
You seem to be using it in a way that's synonymous with "grinding" (taking mission after mission after mission to get through.) That's basic hunting, not farming.
Farming involves "cultivation"- sticking with a single thing/place (different AE missions don't count) that offers optimal reward (whatever you're interested in- gold, kills, xp, etc) at minimal risk. That's why it's so often associated with "exploit" -- by pushing the limits of maximizing reward and minimizing risk, the farm often steps into exploit territory.
If you're just running missions toward a goal, still experiencing risk that's proportionate to the reward, that's not the 'farm' we're talking about. -
I've been so tempted to come out of retirement and do another guide...
...and I16 Closed Beta starts on the first day of my work's two-month crunch time.
Fate, you are one mean b**ch. -
Quote:Actually, you do recall rather well. it was a little more than "didn't help their case." That was the reason that those claims were discarded (you can't infringe upon yourself, so claiming that they were examples of CoH 'enabling' infringers wasn't correct.)Originally Posted by Schismatrix
i'd completely forgotten that, though now that you posted it it sounds really familiar. Marvel didn't help their position when they had employees create attempts at clones of Marvel characters in the game IIRC. (Which i probably don't recall correctly at all since i'd already forgotten the prior bit.)
The problem is that, because that WAS the reason that most examples were dropped, we never got a definitive answer on whether a non-Marvel player making these clones would be an infringement.
IIRC, there were a few issues left that could have gone to court. NCSoft cared to settle (in my opinion) as risk-management. They weren't guaranteed a win on the remaining issues, so the cost of settling was more prudent. -
My wife and I play together too.
It is funny how our ideas for alt duos will arise in the strangest places and conversations. We often create character duos- couples, brothers, sisters, best friends, etc. They're not necessarily paired in name or appearance, but the character's story would be incomplete without the other. We never really pay much attention to the gender- both of us have male and female alts.
That can lead to some moments similar to what you mention. Of all my female alts, it happens most to Russian Blue for some reason I can't quite fathom. Some guys just can't comprehend that a guy would play a feral catgirl wearing nothing but a scarf.
Usually starts with some compliment on the look, then an invitation to team / supergroup / or "meet up sometime." I say I'm waiting to team for someone/ usually team with someone, etc. They press, "your boyfriend?" so I finally try to dash their hopes: "My wife."
I kid you not: I've had a few people swear that they KNEW I really was a girl and just using lines like that so guys won't bother me... or that I really was playing with my boyfriend/husband but he got on my character specifically to scare off the competition, etc.
Hope springs eternal? -
Not too bad.
1) No AV's... EVER. They bore me to tears when I'm fighting them while teamed.
2) Easiest set up with their "ambush" spawn code, which shows some of the limitations. Just like ambushes, the players travel too fast. NPC spawns have trouble tracking and keeping up. Most players never "encounter" the foe... still, if these guys could spawn in mission instances... -
Well, options 1 & 2 I can get behind- I've had my own posts on that subject.
Option 3 (PvP) forget it.
I've played plenty of PvP-centric MMO's. The weakest part of every system is the PvP that occurs within zones with PvE content. You either have to be VERY careful of your PvE battles so you're ready for the unexpected PvP encounter (which makes for BORING PvE) or take a challenging PvE encounter but make that random PvP encounter a guaranteed win for the other guy.
I'd get behind it if there was the option to CHOOSE a PvP or a PvE instance, but effectively doubling the zones just distributes the playerbase across more and more empty space. If they ever managed a single-server integrated solution, maybe. -
I don't know.
Back with AA & TR, it would be a no-brainer.
With Aion?
We have two accounts in the house and have to maintain two gaming computers. Only one of them meets Aion's min requirements, and I can't really justify the upgrade just for that one game. I don't see us even considering a package deal until our machines can actually play the full array of games offered. -
Quote:You can get it assigned to you even if the meter's turned off (and see it on your UserCP). It's just that nobody else will see it.Originally Posted by CDN_Guardian
I want to see how negative I can go. Ah, hell I'll just disable it. I don't need to start some flame war with a real troll to see if they can out-negative me.
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Quote:We agree!Originally Posted by Nethergoat
0.0
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Quote:Given the world's current state, one ruled by our devs would be...Originally Posted by Golden_Girl_EU
World conquest? I'm not so sure that's something we should encourage.
...well...
a wreck, a total absolute mess of epic proportions... so business as usual, really.
But it'd be a a FUN wreck. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Nethergoat
Accurate terminology describing a specific
But when you equate players with criminals and garbage, that's not supposed to be what you meant at all.
Yeah, sure.
Actually, I equated YOUR choice of terminology as one frequented by juveniles and criminals, which is factually correct. The terms you chose originated in and are still most associated with juveniles and criminals. You choose the association with your selection of the wording. I even inquired as to why you chose to use such negatively-loaded terms (and it wasn't rhetorical, I do wonder).
I also said, "Of course, if you feel more like "the trash" than the community, you're entitled to those feelings." I apologized for any misunderstanding, but as you continue to address it and challenge my mastery of the written language, let's read exactly what that says.
IF YOU FEEL MORE LIKE "THE TRASH"
A conditional statement, If in this situation (not stating the situation is true), you feel like (your feelings, not mine) the trash (the stuff that's being policed in the community-policed metaphor). Nowhere there does it imply that I think you are the trash or that I consider you or anyone else to be the trash. It acknowledges, though, that you may legitimately feel like you're being treated as such.
THAN THE COMMUNITY
comparing feelings of being the outcast to feelings of being a communty member. Implies that there may be feelings of prosecution, of being an outsider, of being excluded.
YOU'RE ENTITLED TO THOSE FEELINGS
I do not have a right to challenge those feelings. I neither endorse them nor discourage them. They are yours.
Of course, that right doesn't extend to distorting my (albiet easily-misused) words to imply an insult on others. That's why I keep coming back to them
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Getting kinda back on topic
I have a question that's related to the miscommunication here.
"Farming"
I still default to the "exploit" association unless context says otherwise (historically, I've only experienced the term with dev-verified expliots -from gold farm, to Drek farm, etc.) I've been aware that the meaning has been evolving for some time, and some people use it without ANY idea of it's association with exploitative behavior. How do you use it?
It seems that much of this debate is really between the two meanings, with many of us seeing someone reporting a "farm" meaning "reporting an exploit" while others see it as wastefully reporting a totally innocent bystander. -
Quote:Said much better than I...Originally Posted by Lady_Sadako
It's stuff like this, together with 'hall monitor', 'grass' and similar epithets, that make me wonder:
Do the people who use these terms have any terminology to use that isn't derived from either a high school environment, in which complicity in rebellion in the face of teacherly authority is prized, or a criminal environment in which complicity in lawbreaking in the face of civic authority is prized?
In other words: are you actually holding up adolescents and criminals as role models, or is there something I'm missing? -
Quote:(flinches)Originally Posted by _____
"i'm not saying that you ARE trash, just that you're acting like it (you trash)"
Damn, I really didn't want it to sound like that.
I was trying to avoid the "police state" arguments of going with "neighborhood watch" too strongly. It was meant to be more like "if you feel like we're treating you like trash (forcing you to be the outsider that's being tossed away) then I can't stop you from having that feeling."
Looking back, I gotta apologize if it came out worse than that, nethergoat. Not my intent, honestly. -
Quote:We seem to be using two very different applications of the term here.Originally Posted by Bionic_Flea
While I don't always agree with Nethergoat, I do on this issue. Why? Because "farming" is not illegal, broken, a crime, or against the rules of the game. Engaging in exploits, however, is.
To extend your anology, would you report someone leaning against a power pole because he might knock it down or climb up and cut the wires? Certainly you could. Some might even say "that pole leaner looks suspicious to me!" and feel vindicated in their reporting it to the authorities.
But in reality, you are doing a disservice to both the pole leaner and the authorities who now have to investigate.
Farming originated as kind of counter-term to the MMO "hunt" where you went off, tracked down a challenging encounter or quest item, and killed it. Farming at that time meant where you eliminated the factors: the searching and the challenging encounters, and simply "cultivated" a spot or a series of spots for maximum XP reward for minimum investment. It was originally very negative in context because you're getting more reward for less risk. In many cases the developers have had to take action as this max/min'ing has reached exploitative levels.
It doesn't help that many of the people DOING the AE activities that the devs have since clearly stated as exploitative (and taken action against) as "farms." To quite a few of us, that cemented the association of "exploit" with "farm" (particularly as having "farm" in your searchable terms was a good way to get flagged as an exploiting mission. To us, if it wasn't exploitative, it wasn't a farm.
Like many things though, there are plenty of borderline activities: repeating the same mission, but keeping it challenging... not exploitative, so not a "farm" to us, but it's the term that many people started using to describe their actions, either in defiance of the original definition or in ignorance of it.
Thus, to you, "reporting a farm" means harassing an innocent action whereas I wouldn't consider anyone doing what you describe as reportable either, but I'd report farming that fit my description of the term. -
Quote:1) You used 'criminal' slang with terms like 'rat,' as I even pointed out.Originally Posted by Nethergoat
It's interesting that you choose to equate some fellow players with criminals and garbage because you disapprove of the way they dress or the way they play.
The community is the community.
Last time I checked there was no "trash", just players enjoying the game. And yes, I'm one of them.
But I understand maintaining a bloated sense of moral superiority requires an "other" to hate & blame, so I'll leave you to it.
2) I've never commented on the way they dress, except for ribbing my RL best friend Rian Frostdrake. I used the term "adopt a highway" as a reference to voluntary community-based efforts to keep a place well-maintained.
I added the "if you feel more like the trash than the community" it was just that- I wasn't saying you WERE the trash, but you seem to be behaving as if you see anyone that's working with the devs (the cleanup) as policing against you (thus being the trash). I'd much rather you just see yourself as a member of the community that doesn't take part of the voluntary community activity and doesn't disparage those that do.
3) Bloated sense of moral superiority, no. Hate others? Not a chance. You really have no clue about me. I'm looking at the positive aspects of a user's actions and defending them against juvenile negative labels like "rat" and "snitch." Exactly who has shown the hateful words here, friend? -
Quote:Do you use criminal-element analogies in all aspects of life or just online?Originally Posted by Nethergoat
They wouldn't be.
It's a convinient justification for snitches to pretend they're public servants instead of informers.
IRL, Would someone that reported something broken- a downed power line- be an informant? What if he reported someone cut it?
Should he just wait around until the person whose job it is to maintain power detects it, tracks it down, and repairs it? Could you possibly get better service if you made that person's job any easier.
People that are *knowingly* creating farms are doing enough harm that the devs are wasting resources tracking them down. They've asked for our help and even provided the tools IN the UI to make the help as painless as possible. The better they get ahold of this, the less time & energy they waste policing it and the more they can trust us to safely handle in future iterations.
So, people, report away. -
Quote:Ah, such refreshing posts.Originally Posted by Nethergoat
Justify your snitching however you like, kid.
A rat is a rat.
What you see as "a rat" I see as a good community member doing his part to bring possible community issues to the attention of the people that have the authority and responsibility to make the final decision. This isn't an adversarial system of "us (players)" vs "them (devs)" like prisoners vs inmates or children vs the grown-ups... both images that your wording of "snitch" and "rat" evoke. I like to think most of us are above that.
Most of us, at least.
This is just a bit of community empowerment. It's a little bit community organization, a little bit "neighborhood watch" and maybe a little bit of "adopt a highway" helping pick up the trash.
Of course, if you feel more like "the trash" than the community, you're entitled to those feelings.
EDIT: for you latecomers, the above doesn't imply that the other players are "trash" merely that there are often messes left behind and sometimes the devs want help sorting through them. The last line was supposed to joke that some people will feel like the "trash" and nothing I can do will change that. It's been taken to mean that I'm calling people that think differently "trash" and for that, I apologize. -
Quote:Agreed. I'm not one of those "optimal team build" people. If I KNOW my team could really use a defender, and I have a choice between a defender with what I deem an idiotic-looking name and another scrapper, I'm grabbing the scrapper and just adapting my team's tactics.Originally Posted by Jack_Power
One thing I look for when I'm scraping together a PuG, a not-idiotic-looking name. If your name is .Killa, atwork, HELLBLAST3R. You have zero chance of ending up on my PuG. This might sound petty, but it's my PuG and I call the shots here.
//Jack
Of course, I prefer smaller teams & my wife also plays, so I rarely NEED to pug at all. -
Its questionable whether the advertising would ever pay for its cost. The devs aren't stupid- and neither are their marketers. They DO make cost-to-value judgements on these kinds of things.
Maybe they've done their jobs and realized that the COST to run something like a TV promotion would EXCEED the VALUE of the new accounts that it would attract.
Remember,
1) WoW will run on a piece-of-crap 6-year-old PC with integrated graphics. Almost any PC in regular use today will play it. That means that most of the market reached by, say, TV, probably has a PC that could play it. It's much more cost-effective to narrowly target people that're more likely to have systems that'll play the game well
2) Game stores tend to charge MMO's more for their advertising space than "traditional" games that give them higher profit margins (they don't get a cut of the subscription $$, so they extort it through other means) and WoW's driven up the price point further by buying out so much of it. Again, the cost to attract people through those means may now exceed the money that'll be recovered from those people.
3) Banner advertisement? Cheap and potentially targeted toward PC gamers, but there are so many questionable-quality "discount MMO" flooding these markets, you've got to wonder whether you'll just be lumped into them. I know that if I hadn't followed the *other superhero MMO* about to be released, I'd think the ads I've seen for that game represented another 2-d web-based fiasco.
4) Timing is critical. Many of the people attracted to the aforementioned *other hero mmo* through the ads will, if they've never heard of CoH, get exposure to CoH when people make the natural comparisons... free exposure as that game launches. At the same time, I16 and Going Rogue will keep things in the press.
Then- maybe- just maybe- as the expansion gets closer to launch... it'll be time for a few strategic placements. -
Should've been 60 in July.
Still only showing 54.
Guess I'll have to finally submit a ticket to get that fixed.
Never really cared about it before... -
Quote:It could be that they're experimenting with tech that'll allow them larger zones- perhaps a larger mega-zone instead of several smaller ones. Praetorian Earth wouldn't need war walls, after all. Granted, Tyrant might break up the city into areas of control...Originally Posted by Mental_Giant
The last expansion was CoV; it launched with 6 zones, not counting the PvP zones. I would expect GR to have a commensurate level of content. They may even pull the old trick where GR only launches with 1-40 content, and they add the 40-50 zone in the next issue. I hope they don't do that, but it's possible.
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Quote:Glad I turned mine off.Originally Posted by MortisEques
I outta kick whoever gave me that negative
My first negative would probably have been my wife. -
Sorry, Tax_E_Girl. Gotta side with Steele (partially) here.
Yes, petition them.
...but you have the moderation controls. You know that someone in your little niche of the game is violating the game's standards (granted, LBx is a private channel, IIRC). Not taking action would seem to be condoning such violations.
So petition them, then modsmack them.
EDIT:
And if people disagree on the standards, then feel free to leave and start your own... which seems to be what Steele is doing.
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I don't have 20 years (quite yet) but pretty close, and I agree completely. Hardcoding is done almost always when something has to go out NOW-NOW-NOW! and is very unfortunately whenever it happens. It does make it a problem later on, but not remotely an insurmountable problem. As Lothic mentioned, I16 is proof-positive that the number of data slots is liquid. Furthermore, there actually is a pretty simple fix that would cover all future modifications and vastly increase the available space for the AE files. Mind you, I said "simple", not "easy". It wouldn't be easy at all. In fact it would be a pretty major undertaking, but it is simple.
Right now the file data for all character descriptions are in essence xml files. They're ASCII text files with custom meta data detailing the fields (category name, sub-category name, field name, value). Since each value has a limited number of options, and there are a limited number of values, that could actually be done in a binary fashion so that each item is placed in a particular location and given a specific range of values. You'd wind up with something that looked like an extremely long GUID but with less than, for instance, 5k you could define any character this game could possible create.
Again, though, the problem is not complexity. The problem is difficulty. I'd be very surprised to hear that the developers hadn't already considered a change to a binary serialization of the character descriptions, especially during their brainstorming sessions for MA, but dismissed it due to how integral the current system is to everything they do.
As to the original idea, I agree with Lothic when she (assuming based on the avatar) suggests that it's likely this will come up in the future, but I wouldn't look for it any time soon.
Robin
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Don't confuse the XML files- the way the data can be understood and stored here- with the data packet encoding that transmits that data. THAT is where the limitations are the most significant. What the code does with the data once it's on your PC is another issue. -
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First off; costume (top,bottom) is cool; if we don't have it then we need it
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(Foreshadow is the Trainer in the Hollows)
Secondly, his 'off set'/one-sided pieces on both his shoulder and glove...
This is something that I would like to be able to do with my toons; have separate Right Glove/Left Glove, Right Shoulder/Left Shoulder (maybe even Right Boot/Left Boot) selection in the Character Creator.
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The challenge is that there's just one slot identifier for "boots" and to have left/right boot, for example, you'd need to use two slot identifiers. You also have a finite number of item identifiers within each slot, so you couldn't realistically just put TONS of combos into one slot (like "pegleg+rubberboot," "pegleg+monstrous" etc)
The devs have noted in the past that there's a hard-coded number of slots possible (due to how it's encoded with all the other data for swift and accurate communication) and at the moment, IIRC, we're down to 1 more "unused" slot and they want to make it count.
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Having only one more hardwired data field "slot" for costume data sounds like a typical software Dev "hand-wave" excuse to me. I should know - I've been a software engineer for almost 20 years now. Think of it this way: Somehow our Devs found the space to transmit all the new custom color info for the I16 power customization adequately enough.
I'm not trying to suggest adding the capability to have separate left and right costumes items would be trivial to do or even that it's guaranteed to happen. But I -am- suggesting that if it ever became a big enough priority that the Devs would be capable of finding a way to make it work even if that meant changing other more far reaching things like general network message formats.
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I'm an engineer too- specialize in antiquated systems at the moment- and I've studied how MMO devs compress data and encode packets to get the most out of what can be a very tight bandwidth. Particularly during CoH's development period, the MMO industry focused on minimizing bandwidth to a near-obsession. A single byte may be divided up between several purposes, and the code that accesses each of these may or may not be easy to track down and point elsewhere.
And remember, we're talking about a 9-year-old codebase in an industry that really didn't have much need for code sustainability. Heck, just go back 9 years and look at the "conventional" code standards back then, and games tended to focus on "expedience" over sustainability & maintainability.
When you think of it in THAT context, expanding to add more slots can be a considerable challenge in something this complex.