Hyperstrike

C'mon. Your bridge is getting lonely. Don't make us get the torches again..

Rather than just waiting until everything crashed or corrupted, they brought the servers down to fix it.

Or would you have preferred to have lost XP, Inf, and stuff you bought on the market from a possible server crash and accompanying corruption of your character's config table?

Which is why the eventually brought it down. One person crashing and burning is an anomaly. Dozens or hundreds of people experiencing aberrant behavior in the game is NOT an anomaly. A server going *POOF* on them is an indicator that something major is wrong.

They had a couple of the servers go away on them and brought the rest down in a controlled manner so that they would lose as little as possible.

So you want a phone call every time Paragon needs to bring down THEIR servers? You need to be included on the action memo? And they can't proceed until you've acknowledged them?

Howsabout a big helping of NO there.

As to what was wrong. You don't need to know the details. You simply need to know something was wrong and they're working to fix it as rapidly as possible. Downtime is EXPENSIVE. You have a lot of people getting paid overtime to get your stuff back up and running. You're losing revenue every second the systems are down. And your devs can't continue with their new work because they're busy trying to get the live stuff back up.

As to knowing how long it would be to fix. HOW THE *BLEEP!* are they supposed to know that? When's the next time you're going to have to take a ****? How long until your next car accident? How many beers are you going to drink after 3PM on October 17th 2014?

When there's a problem, they bring the servers down and they have to spend time assessing the problem. Then trying to come up with a solution that ALSO needs testing or they're simply dumping bad patch on top of bad patch. All of this takes an indeterminate amount of time. Throwing SWAGs at players doesn't help. Setting artificial deadlines WHEN THEY DON'T KNOW does nothing.

You can say it a thousand times. It just makes you look like a greedy *****. They ARE a good business. They DID the right thing. They brought the service down until they could properly patch it, rather than just leave it up until it bombed out COMPLETELY.

I'm not NCSoft staff. Therefore, I have no corporate mandate to "make nice" to an unreasonable person chucking out the "disgruntled customer" schtick and trying to get something they're not entitled to on the "squeaky wheel" theory.

As such, I have no compunctions about telling you that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. I've actually done programming work. And I do work for customers now as well. In some cases, where EVERYTHING is routine, I can give my clients a timeframe. But when something screwy is happening, I refuse to give a timeframe. Because, until I've studied the problem, I don't KNOW.

The only check needed here is upon your greed.

Jeeze. Entitlement issues? MUCH?

This is software development at it's base. Tens, thousands, possibly even millions of lines of code. And no, it's not something any reasonable person would be able to read and immediately understand without annotations.

Small changes in various places can have drastic effects that may or may not be evident in small-scale testing. And because all these systems interact, it is nearly impossible to tell what may or may not break when updating various things.

Occasionally things break. And sometimes in non-obvious ways. And while, on one level YES it's the fault of the devs. They're human. Not omniscient. It's not like it's intuitively OBVIOUS that a piece of bit-wrangling over HERE is going to cause instability elsewhere.

If YOU can do any better, please apply for a job there. It'd be great if the service could achieve 5 9's.

Until then, accept that the service has downtime. Most planned. But, occasionally, some is unplanned.

And essentially begging "GIMME SOMETHIN' FER MUH TROUBLES!" puts you on par with the window washers who come up and slather your car in water and rub a dirty squeegee over your windshield and then demand money for their "labors".

You have your access to the game. You aren't "owed" anything else.

That's just it, their team is mostly nerds. All the non-nerds are in technical support and management though.

Thing is, the nerds on the team wanted to download the update too. So they 'scheudled a maintenance' to keep you from suckin' their Intarwebz whilst they download.

Layla: So they tossed a net over me!
Empowered: SO been there!

Saturday
Night
Live

Same exact format. Except SNL didn't have Statler and Waldorf.

Thing is, with Hami, you have the ability to avoid some of the damage with EoEs.

What've you got in the Keyes trial?

Yup. I incurred a monster debt for...education? Nonono!

I incurred a monster debt for a piece of paper that says I know something.

My Comp Sci degree taught me nothing. It merely confirmed a bunch of stuff I've been doing for years (decades in some cases).

Unfortunately, a Bachelor's is the new High School diploma.

Klingon country music.

My mate was unfaithful
She shot my pet targ
She stole my Battle Cruiser
She damaged my bat'leth

For this she must die!
But I'll miss her so much...

Well the servers just went down for some emergency maintenance. So let's see if the patching they did fixes your issues.

Back when I hung out with the hacker crowd regularly, one of our guys worked at the Adler Planetarium. So we got to go in after-hours and watch it on the big overhead from the old Zeiss Mark IV projector.



Only 15 people in the room. Absolutely awesome.

In Ur Market Takin Ur Inf?

Freedom? Downtime?

Yes. But Beta isn't running the same software loadout that Live is.

Yeah...NO.

Simply because ANOTHER game works fine does not mean that CoH will work fine as well. That's a logic failure.

You may want to rephrase that. Just a little. I'm fully cognizant of the effect flippers have on the market.

In short, because the pricing volatility has been reduced, it's no fun for you anymore. And that's a negative...for you.

Doubt not the power of the Mighty Fifty Cent! And his sidekick. Two Bits!

They are cautionary tales.

He wasn't stating an opinion. It's a fact. You, and others, have exactly zero "rights" to cheaply priced luxuries on the market.

They're not taking away ANYTHING. You still have the right to set what price YOU find acceptable. You place the bid and wait for it to fill. Period. If your price is deemed unreasonable on the market, it just never fills. Nobody "took" anything from you.

If they didn't win the bid IT IS NOT *THEIR* IO.

CLUUUUUUUUUUUUUE!

Simply because you choose to ignore the value they bring to the market doesn't mean they don't bring anything.

Please stop propagating bad information.

THERE IS NO MORALITY!

I will repeat this with bigger letters since you are having trouble seeing what's being told to you.

THERE IS NO MORALITY!

The market is an interactive PVP minigame within the greater venue of CoH.

You are NOT entitled to ANYTHING but ACCESS to it (which'll change under Freedom) and the ability to pay what you want and not an inf more.

THAT'S IT BUBBA!


Scalping, in some cases, is illegal because concert tickets are a limited resource.

Salvage, recipes, crafted enhancements, etc in CoH are, effectively, unlimited.

Scalping is not ENTIRELY illegal. Hawking them on the street at a concert/game is. Because you're running a business without a license.

Take a look at various "premium ticket" services around. That's STILL scalping. But it's legal. And in some cases condoned (or even operated by) the venue.


This is a game. *A* *GAME* Not the real world. In the real world, money and supplies aren't infinite.

So because YOU cannot separate fact from fantasy, WE'RE all jerks?

Uh. No. Go talk to a shrink. The real world (the really real world) doesn't function like that. Nor does the game world.

Your $15 a month entitles you to access the game.
Inf has a net, real-world value of ZERO (0). You know, nada, jack, bupkiss, naught, zip, zilch, one-less-than-uno, NOTHING. This is NOT Adam's second wife. You have not gotten Another Life. In-game currency is worthless.

If YOU choose to attempt to assign a real-world value to it, you're only deluding yourself.


This would be true if you had an impact on supply or demand but a flipper doesn't.
They aren't generating any new goods for sale nor are they reducing demand, they are simply moving the goods along the graph beyond the point of equilibrium.
That isn't a service.

The sellers DON'T. The buyers determine the price.

Maybe. In the short term. Over time, the market would be subject to wild swings in price with almost no stability. Think about how crazy the market was after DXP. Now imagine that on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.

No. It wouldn't. The price floor for all but the most plentiful items would continually creep upwards. The fact that you're naive enough to actually believe this shows your lack of knowledge about the market forces at play here.

Again, there is no "normal". Not in a "market". There are only trends.

That's what we're trying to tell you.

Who said everyone is supposed to have everything, including the nicest, rarest knick-knacks at rock-bottom prices?

The *devs* don't think that way. Hell, for upcoming F2P players, they quite simply CAN'T use them. They can't even get into the market to buy them!

Because nobody promised you an "uber-leet" toon the second you go "I want."

This isn't about NEED. This is about WANT. YOU want nice stuff. But YOU don't want to pay anything for it (though I'm sure you're glad when someone pays a huge "Buy it NAO" markup on the stuff YOU put up).

Again, I don't FORCE people to buy my crap. They're falling all over each other to buy it. Sometimes at 10,000x the price I list at.

Or do you go out of your way to try and find people and say "Nonono! You paid me too much for this! Here's the difference back!"




Again. Different situation than what happens within the game (where supply is unlimited).

Again. Some applications of scalping are legal and condoned.

Does this mean I don't go to some events I'd like to?

Sure!

But *I* am the one who sets the price on what *I* find acceptable.

Ruminate on this at length...

If they got paid for those seats, how they feel is irrelevant. But go ahead and ask a promoter how they'd feel if they sold out of tickets but a portion were scalped and unused?

Guess who's going to tell you "I don't give a ****. I got paid."

I will repeat for your benefit.

THERE IS NO MORALITY ISSUE HERE!

Then you understand nothing of marketing.

That is all.

The only arbiter of what a "fair" deal is, is when a bidder's price meets or exceeds a seller's asking price. If someone was willing to pay that price, it's fair. Period.

Define "fair" in a manner that doesn't take personal greed into it.

Who's to say "fair" isn't the 10 million inf asking price of the flipper?

And how are you to even know that someone has one listed for 1 million inf in the first place? Simply because SOMEONE bought one for a million within the last five doesn't mean it was "stolen" from you.

In short, your example is arbitrary and self-servingly slanted.

Because you are not ENTITLED to that item. Someone who was willing to outbid you, or made a low (but acceptable) bid BEFORE you wanted it more or was there before you evinced interest. What they do with it afterwards is irrelevant and immaterial.

Unlike government taxes, the only one making you pay the "Buy It Nao" tax is YOU. Nobody else.

Technically they're stabilizing supply. That can be construed as a service.

No. Actually, if you're too impatient to wait for low bids to fill, YOU are at fault. Not the devs. Not the sellers. YOU.

The market is just that. A market. Open to all. As long as you get there before everyone else and are willing the pay the price listed, it's yours. If someone beats you to it, tough noogies.

The market is NOT a store. Prices are NOT fixed, no matter HOW you hunger for that.