FloatingFatMan

I know that bat creature thingy (Ilemouser?) kept wanting to use various types of WMD...

Nothing like as far as some of those at that meeting!

(Up their own butts, not hers!)

There have been official statements denying things before. Since the ones claiming that the EU offices weren't going to close, I've not believed ANY of them.

They once said there'd be no server list merge too. Hell, they once said they weren't going to merge the forum communities.

Reality check: They will not tell us their long term plans, and a business will do everything it can to reduce costs and maximise profits.

Me and some friends already have a book running on how long before they DO start a server merge process, and none of us see it as being too long around the corner either. There are too many whopping great big hints towards an accellerated schedule.

For one, server list merge, when announced, was going to be towards the end of summer, and now it's in the spring. Now they're testing improved server load management capability, which can only mean they're prepping for a larger server population.

I think that, within 6 months at the most, we're going to start seeing some servers closed down. It only makes sense, why do we need 15 servers? We don't have the population to support that many.

Dress it up how you like, defend the devs all you want. You cannot deny that the build up they gave it, and the dates they initially announced, made EVERYONE think it was a near month long event.

If all they wanted to do was test the servers under load, then they should have just said that. There's plenty of people who'd have loved to help.. But no, they dressed it up in story, made it appear like there was going to be some big invasion event lasting most of May, get everyone looking forward to the whole thing.

Then they pull the rug out from everyone and reveal that it's just 3 hours on one day, for each server, and you're surprised people are annoyed?

The first golden rule of software development.

NEVER give the users a release date unless you KNOW it will ship on that date. Anything else makes you look incompetant.

I would rather a week long event with no rednames, than a 3 hour event WITH rednames that I can't even attend.

Precogs? Sure... But this sets his character up as "The man", the most important character of the whole plot, who forsaw the approach of doom and called people together to fight it, and no-one character should be set above anothers in this way, not for worldwide plots. We are all equals, and all deserve equal billing. Anything else NEVER ends well (history proves this!)

Besides, we already have a canon explanation for being forewarned, and don't need any more than that.

Quote:

The Priest is among those who've had visions of the Coming Storm.

Sorry, that's metagaming and grandstanding in one go. The whole idea of the war council is a good one, but we shouln't be letting one character take charge of the whole thing like that.

2 alternate suggestions.

1. "Reacting to a warning from the Freedom Phalanx, several organisations, encompassing both heroes and criminals, decided to call a meeting to discuss the imminent threat, and strategies on how to respond to it."

2. "Following the initial waves of attacks from Praetorian forces, several organisations, encompassing both heroes and criminals, have agreed to meet and discuss how to combat this new threat."

The first is a possible way to respond to advance warning from the canon storyline, and isn't metagaming OR grandstanding, the second is a purely reactive response to the invasion (just like how the 2nd Rikti invasion was handled).

Either of this alternative (or variations therein), avoid any kind of metagaming or grandstanding from any one individual.
　
We have no way of knowing what the devs actually have planned for us, so pre-empting the invasion has many inherent pitfalls to it. What we might consider reasonable assumptions may not actually happen at all, making a lot of effort go to waste. Also, we run the risk of taking the RP far off course from the intended canon story line; something I'd rather avoid. There WILL be players who do not want to be involved with any larger RP plot connecting to the canon plot. We should take care not to infringe upon them, so following the canon plot as closeley as we can should be a primary aim.
　
Hopefully, people will use the opportunity to write lots of fiction, in the same way that people did for the Rikti invasion. Given how that thread went, I'm of the opinion that reacting to the events "real time", as if your chars had no advance warning of the mass invasion, allows for some brilliant spontaneous fiction! For that reason, I would kind of prefer a more reactive plotline, than a pro-active one. It worked great before, there's no reason why it can't work great again.
　

Raise a ticket. Despite what Beastyle says, it's worth a shot. If enough people do that and ask nicely for something to be done, it might help push them to change their minds.

Just make sure you make it clear that the inactive account is on the same master account. It's probably the only incidence where we have a chance of persuading them to change policy.

According to a recent announcement, the merge is now scheduled for next Tuesday, May 10th.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=255268

Bottom of the first post.

So you can still join in.

Ah, but neither of those reasons make it technically impossible to do. They just require a little additional support.

This is purely conjecture, as I don't know if their tables are configured this way, however, it's possible that, for some insane reason, when they designed the table structure, they set the account name as part of the primary key.

Primary key fields are always unique, form the main index on the table, and cannot be changed at all. To "change" it, you have to basically create an entire new record with a new key, and delete the old one. You'd have to do this for every single linked table as well, which could result in a LOT of table changes.

It's easy to do when importing records into the tables, as will be the case with all EU accounts, as any key collisions can be detected during the import process, and changed before insert into the destination tables.

Beastyle: Can you confirm if the tables ARE configured this way? If so, then we'll just have to accept the change as there's little that can be done in any real sense. If not, then there's no valid technical excuse for not doing it and the decision is purely for support reasons.