Leif_Roar

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Well then... that's nice. So what about the poor shmuck just staring out? You want the game to get harder because you've learned to play it, well.. um... boo hoo.

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As on optional setting or new area of the game, yes. While I don't want the game to become unfriendly to beginners, but I do want something more challenging for me. Those are not mutually incompatible.

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I agree with you on that. ETA for i14?

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Late February would be my guess.

It will have to be the mission architect. I suspect that feature will either reinvoke my interest in the game or kill it off, depening in equal parts on how it's implemented and how it's presented.

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A slower levelling grind doesn't make for a harder one. Just a more annoying one.

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That is a very good point, but on the other hand, debt is feeling entirely irrelevant now, and that can't be right either. (Hell, as a casual player I actually have problems farming debt for my badger after patrol XP came online.)

I'm not so sure I'd say the game was really any more difficult, as in that it required greater skill, it was mostly just more unforgiving. Still, even as a very casual player, the game is starting to feel coddling. Coupled to CoH's fairly trivial challenge level, it's all becoming a bit ... humdrum. Like a bumper car ride with a collision avoidance system.

I'm not sure how to go about upping the ante in CoH, though. To make the game more difficult, rather than just more arduous, would require new behaviour and patterns for the mission mobs, and making an educated guess from how the game appears to work and be wired together, I suspect the existing engine just isn't suited for something like that.

Cutting-edge graphics -- your video-card will commit seppuku

Massive world to explore -- large, empty wastelands to cross. On foot.

Thousands of unique items -- Ten items in one hundred different colours.

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I merged the leftovers of two sunday dinners and now have a monday night dinner

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You fool! Don't you realise that the merging of meals will be percieved as the first sign of a famine? Banks will lose confidence in farmers' future credit rating and stop lending them money, the farmers will be unable to raise money for new machines or necessary repairs to old ones, tractors will be left rusting in the fields, crops will be wiltering on their stalks (for those crops that have stalks, other crops will wilter in similar, but not identical, manners), the farmer will go personal bankrupt, there will be no food harvested, with no food harvested bakers, grocers, jam and preserve factories will collapse, unenmployment will skyrocket, the stores will be empty of food, people will starve, the economy will implode, there will be war, conquest, pestilence and famine. The government will fall, anarchy will reign, armed bands of Australian hoodlums will roam the countryside searching for the last, dwindling hoards of petrol. But that's not all -- it will get so bad that FloatingFatMan will have to change his name to FlitteringThinBloke. Do you want that on your conscience?

Personally, it's not so much that I'm opposed to a server merge (I don't think it's a particularly good idea, nor do I think it necessary, but I'm not fiercely opposed to it either) as that I'm opposed to the incessant demands for it. The horse is long dead. You can stop with the beating. For the sake of Ull, Morgaine and Vishnu would people just give it a rest already! It's getting more annoying than the ED complaints.

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I think the days of huge EU population explosions are over to be honest.

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*shrugs* Possibly, but from the work NCSoft has done on the game in the last nine months or so, it would seem they're not ready to throw in the towel just yet. (It doesn't make sense to, among other things, do so much work on quality of life and UI changes if they're not trying to get new people in.) Assuming NCSoft will be trying to increase subscriptions -- or at the very least want to keep that strategy open as a possibility -- it doesn't make any sense for them, at all, to consolidate any servers at this time.

And, honestly, what would the potential gain be? The main reason why the game appear emptier and why it might be harder to find PUGs is not because of the fairly undramatic decrease in subscribers, but because of changes to the game itself: the players that are online are spread across many more zones, modes of play and established groups of players than there were when the game was new.

The reason why it's gotten harder to find teams is not so much that there's now only 300 players online when there used to be 400[1]. It's because that out of of those 300, 50 are playing villains, another 25 are heroes but in PvP zones, 30 are farming loot with their level 50s, 20 are doing Orobourous, another 20 are busy working the market and making inventions, some are off doing Mothership Raids, some are doing story archs and taskforces for the merits, and quite a few are doing half-[censored] soloing while they're chattering with their friends on a channel or supergroup broadcast. That doesn't leave a lot of characters to hunt Trolls in the Hollows.

[1] Or whichever numbers one might find representative.

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Cacophony

[/ QUOTE ]Already an in-game NPC hero.

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So make a lookalike of the NPC and name it "Caco Phony"?

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It wont, it would probably do the opposite, what it would do though is consolidate the players that are in the EU, and produce 1 well populated server.

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At the cost of an expensive transfer job, a large brouhaha amongst the players, the apperance of a game in decline and making it a lot harder to expand the European playerbase beyond what will comfortably fit on a single server anytime in the future.

The costs exceeds the benefits.

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But what do you rather want?

2 low populated servers, just so you can create more ALT's.

or:

1 good populated server, but sacrifice on available character slots.

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Oh, I'd go for the slots without hesitation.

But, really, this issue has been debated to death here, it is very divisive and the guys in the red suits have alredy said a server merge is not on the table. There is no point in bringing this up yet again.

As far as I can tell, the only reason is that at the time of introduction of bases the developers were overly paranoid about the in-game economy running away and becoming hyper-inflated, so they tried to introduce safety valves that bleeds off inf from the market. For base rents they really misjudged how to do it.

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So you're telling me there were doom threads in 2004-2005?

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Yes.

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Also, another note, tbh DOOM threads doesnt put people off the game, because how many people read the forum anyway?

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I'd expect most people who actually pay for a subscription will browse the forum every now and then. I certainly don't see any reason to assume that less players read the forums than don't.

The contents and tone of the forum can certainly play a part in whether a player sticks with a game or not; the low quality of the game's forum played a large part in me losing interest in Eve Online after a few months of playing.

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If the doom threads had an effect we would've have less players than we do now.

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... Honestly, that's an inane argument.

*shrugs* It either is or it isn't. Yes, there are probably less people about now than at some points in the past, but there's still enough active players to make it worth NCSoft's while to keep developing and running the game.

In the short to mid term the game isn't going away. In the long term, that depends on a lot of factors: NCSoft's business handling, design and development choices that has yet to be made, other MMORPGs and what happens to them, changes in Internet fashion and a thousand other factors.

No game lasts forever (one day, even WoW will turn off its last server) so, yes, at some point CoH will die. It's not going to be tomorrow and it's not going to be next year, so just sit back and releaxe and enjoy the game that's here today.

In short, some nice bits in it, but nothing that really grabs my interest.

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Now someone's gonna shout "GR SAID NOT TO DISCUSS IT!" but this is a why it's low,

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I blame the incessant, pointless and badly argued doom threads giving the impression that the EU servers are dead and barren.

Some shield-themed ones:


Golden Aegis
Swash the Buckler
The Testudo
Testudo Singularis[o]
Scuta Immobile[o]
The Primary Targe [sic]
Ishlangu
Scyld Scefing


and, of course, Brook Shields

[o] I offer on guarantees as to the veracity or correctness of the latin. User accepts the name as-is and agrees to lay no blame on suggestor for ridicule, emotional distress or bodily harm that might arise from imprecisions or downright errors in grammar or orthography.

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Did you just stop reading after that?

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No, of course not. The paragraph you quoted is misworded, but from the context it's in its clear it's actually referring only to those gamers who do have a problem and not gamers in general. The article repeatedly makes that distinction -- both in the title, ingress and several times in the body of the text.

With the exception of the cloying and entirely irrelevant reference to Columbine, I'd say it's a balanced, well reported article that is quite clear it's discussing people who have a problem with gaming and not all gamers.

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Try again.

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"Ninety per cent of the young people who seek treatment for compulsive computer gaming are not addicted." It's the bloody ingress.

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Try this one on for size: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7746471.stm

Apparently, I'm a gaming addict.

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Umm... That article actually says you're not an addict.

Here's an attempt at a new travel power that would play different from any of the existing ones.

Hoverboard is basically assisted but limited flight. Flying squirrels rather than birds. Think The Silver Surfer's surfboard, the Green Goblin's glider, a flying carpet or a wing suit.

Take a ground speed (speed across the xy plane) that's about midway between superjump and superspeed. You'll be hovering, so while you can't ascend you'll always stay at least a couple of feet above ground. If you run off a cliff or a building, though, you won't automatically fall to the ground but remain at the same height (perhaps with a slow descent thrown in for good measure). It's basically flying without the ability to ascend but with more speed.

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Ok any one got a list of what the Devs have flat out declared to be impossible in the game?

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In addition to power customisation, I know they've said it about web-slinging. I also vaguely seem to recall something about thrown shields having been mentioned as impossible, but I'm not certain of that.

The two numbers we have, highest concurrent and monthly accesses, are only useful as upper bounds when talking about how well populated the servers are. We don't know the lower bounds.

All the highest concurrent number can tell us is that the busiest the servers ever was during September was 13,443 users. It might have been 13,443 users for the enture period or it might have been 13,443 for five seconds and less than 50 for the rest of the month. The number would be the same in either case.

The most the monthly accesses can tell us is that during September 124,939 different accounts logged in at least once. They might all have logged in for sixteen hours every day, or they might all have logged in one single time for five minutes. The number would be the same in either case.

So, the numbers alone tell us very little about how thriving the servers are. We can make some assumptions and postulate that the monthly access number might be a good indicator of server thrift, so we could say that "as the monthly accesses went down from June 2008 to September 2008, the server thrift probably did the same", but as we don't have a good model for how server thrift relates to monthly accesses and max concurrent users (it's certainly not going to be a linear relationship) we can't make any quantitative statements at all.

(Well, we know that the server thrift can't be 0, and we know that it can't be more than the limit given by the max concurrent users, but we can't say where it is lying between those two endpoints.)

So, in short (no, really!) these numbers do not show that the servers are empty and they do not show that the servers are not empty. There is limited[1] point in trying to analyze them further.

[1] x for lim x -> 0 point, or thereabouts.

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Warning warning people misreading interviews warning warning

Dont you think that what he means is that the MA is so big that comparing the size of it to past issues it could easily be classed as a single issue ?

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No, not really. It was a very straightforward question. It's quite possible, of course, that Posi was mentally going "Well, we hope to be able to include animated loincloths, dual-fun scrappers, walk/don't-walk emotes and spicestations too, but it's possible we won't get those finished in time so I better hedge my bets and waffle a bit on the answer." It's possible, but I rather doubt it as Positron -- and NCSoft in general -- hasn't exactly been shy of pulling the old "Oh, we've got great things planned. We can't wait to see your faces when you find out" routine.

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Also remember they plan whats in issues well before, do you honestly think they had NOTHING planned for i14 and that it was just lucky (in their favour) that MA had to get pushed back?

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I suspect they had I14 planned for early- to mid Q2 2009 originally. Then they decided to not include the mission architect with I13, so they divided I13 in two, and I13.5 became the new I14, scheduled for Q1 2009. The old I14, now I15, gets rescheduled to, at a guess, late Q2, early Q3.

That's just my guess, of course, and I could be wrong. *shrugs* Don't think I am, though. Software projects tends towards that kind of shuffling.