Hyperstrike

Agreed.

The basic gist of it is, that they'd have to devote some full time staffing to forum moderation. Think about it. You're allowing people to log into a forum in a completely ungated manner.

Yes, it's all dreadfully manual and probably would be a ***** to script auto-signups for. But would YOU want to have to comb through 60-70 individual forums looking to root out malicious spammers, in addition to having to do your REAL job during the day?

UBB? Ewww. Think about migrating it to something that doesn't eat between 5 and 10 times the bandwidth and CPU it needs to just to server pages.

The main problem is the NCSoft web team that works on this stuff. Cheap, fast, good. Pick one, so long as it isn't fast or good.

It's probably not that they're totally incompetent. It's just that, compared to some of NCSoft's Triple A games, CoH is small potatoes, and gets blocks of work time allotted as such.

On the forum end, they'd just have to create another user group.
On the back-end in the customer database they'd probably have to change the data type that indicates paid/VIP status to something non-boolean.

Instead of

VIP_Status: True/False

They'd have to have something like:

1=VIP
2=Free/Premium
3=Paid-Premium

The first part, adding another group to VBulletin is relatively easy.
The second? Dunno.

I actually kinda liked the "Where are they now?" finale cut scene.
Kinda like "Animal House".
With Darrin getting a cross between Mark Marmalard and a dark/wrong/bad version of the Bluto ending.

That's not NCSoft. That's the brick and mortar's markup.

Maybe we can come back to this when you can comport yourself a bit more maturely on this subject.

Well, if you don't want to deal with 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, and 2 mice you could get yourself a small KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch.

Then you simply have a keyboard macro/hotkey combo that's used to switch back and forth between the old computer and the new.

Or you could set up Remote Desktop for your old computer and access it that way.

Wandering Aries guide to moving CoH

MUCH faster than completely reinstalling the game from scratch.


And:

Or they could be opening us up for something truly horrific.
Like this.

I disagree. It's actually quite organized. And someone can deliver you a direct menu matrix (Click Tools, Options, Blah Blah Blah, etc) quite easily.

Only if it's not well organized. And yeah, I've seen programs with menus that look like they were puked into place.

It was designed from the perspective that every user was going to be somewhat experienced and advanced, not "simple to learn, difficult to master" as it really should be.

It's a single interface convention that's now been there for the better part of two decades. A menued system application launcher.

Try to describe turning on versioning in Office 2010.


On the flip side, the interface shouldn't be dumbed down to the point where productivity suffers.

The thing is, it's NOT simpler. It's still JUST as complex. But now, instead of a well laid out menu system, everything is hidden behind an obtuse icon/glyph system. Worse, these new interfaces completely destroy the ability to navigate without the use of a mouse. Where, before, a few well-learned hotkeys could allow you to accomplish in keystrokes what would take minutes or more to do by click-around.

That's the thing. It's NOT more concise. Nor more obvious. What it definitely is, is a waste of screen real-estate.

The thing is, as you get these higher-level languages, you wind up trading performance, flexibility, and efficient system footprint, simply so Joe KnowsVB might actually sit down and figure out what you were doing in 5 years instead of 10.


No. The older system was smarter. Because it required you to have more knowledge. And didn't try to hide functionality.

The new interfaces are hiding anything more than bare functionality and making it a ***** to get to the rest because they're programming for the lowest common denominator.

Which can be taken to absurd lengths.

If you want a simple interface, howsabout we give you a nice, easy DOS PROMPT. We can shortcut to "Browser" and have everything else run off a web platform somewhere "out on the cloud".

Yeah. NO.

Yes. I took the time to learn how to use it.
I fail to see why others can't learn to do the same.
The current interface is incredibly forgiving and pretty much allows you exacting control within the limits of your familiarity.

If you don't want to learn "the whole shebang", you can get by with a limited, easily learnable subset of just the stuff you need.

I'm happy to see new experiments. Just not on a shipping mass-market OS. As to whether this is an "improvement"...

I'm hoping the stink over the lousy interface prompts them to rapidly re-expose the functionality of the original interface.


You're entitled to your opinions. I have to support numerous clients and Windows 8 will NOT be on my "recommended" platform when clients ask for new systems.

What can I say? I'm a snide *******.

Sorry, you're trying to make it conditional.

I'm saying it's not.

I'm not. I'm not a huge fan of ditching a comprehensive, deep menuing system in favor of "What the hell does THIS non-helpfully non-labelled button do?"

Let's be frank here. The Metro interface, and it's predecessor, the MS Office Ribbon? They're not better. They're not simpler. They're not "more elegent". They're dumber. Plain and simple.

They're "good enough" for anyone who doesn't know how to use a computer in the first place.

But for people trying to be productive on a computer?

Damn. Scooped.

So you're marketing...lite?

Release one at a time.

Players: "AUUUGH!!! WHY U NO 2 SETS!"


Release both at the same time.

Players: "AUUUGH!!! CASH GRAB!"

Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.