Lothic

While this line of thinking is interesting I can't really imagine the Devs ever telling us directly, "Well we would have liked to have given you guys some super new costume items but you forced us to lower the costume change timer from 30 to 15 seconds so now we can't do it."

Yes that's a good point about the possibility of swapping not only costume items but the full body models (male, female and huge) adding to the system burden.

But I would counter that with the point I mentioned earlier: the Devs always overcompensate for these things. The average computer people are using to play this game today has to be better than the average was 6 years ago. The choice of 30 seconds was probably a very conservative concession to the slowest computers of 6 years ago. Can the Devs continue to reasonably hold this game to that standard for this situation?

I find it very hard to believe that resetting that timer to 10-15 seconds would not be adequate for its purpose in the later half of 2010.

From that point of view this accolade power might as well be an unlockable emote.
Somehow I have to hope the Devs intended it to be more than that.

I suppose I keep arguing with you on this because you keep standing against this idea every time it comes up here in the forums. Maybe it just seems weird to me that you bother to offer points against something you claim to have "no problem" with.

From a strict "QoL Improvement" point of view I'm quite sure there are many things that various people could decide don't bring "particular benefit" to the game but are still generally liked or appreciated by others.

From a quantitative point of view I think the potential benefit of the game getting more money from sales of costume slots and players actually staying subscribed to the game longer because of this feature seems pretty self-evident.

And as far as the "save/load" feature for costumes goes that's still (at its very best) a terribly poor workaround for what additional costume slots would provide. Trying to claim that's sufficient for this situation is like trying to claim it should be good enough to cut down a fully-grown Redwood tree with a hacksaw. Sure you could probably do it eventually but it's far from the ideal solution. I'll point out that the "other" MMO in question has a costume save/load feature AND the ability to buy more costume slots. If that game can have both features why can't we?

Obviously it would take some work for the Devs to make it happen here.
It just seems to me the pros outweigh the cons on this by a pretty wide margin.

How much would a "burden of proof" token cost?

I'm of the opinion that I'd like to have our Devs be as unrestricted as possible to develop new and interesting content for this game. If the difference between developing some new optional QoL feature I want in this game relies on me spending an extra $9.99 every couple of months and not spending that money, I'll choose to spend the money.

Sure I'd love to have everything like this given to me for free.
But the people who run this game run it as a business, not a charity.
If they want to charge a few extra bucks for giving me extra content it's incredibly hard to claim that isn't fair.

We've been spoiled into getting lots of new features for free over the years.
But nothing in the $15/month we pay for subscriptions REQUIRES the Devs to give us anything extra for free and never did. *shrugs*

These kinds of "definitional" problems are exactly the type of thing I was talking about earlier when you attempt to cut the current Origins down into more specific sub-categories. People will have different ideas about what fits with what and no one would ever be completely satisfied with whichever subdivisions the Devs came up with.

Having five broadly defined Origins may not make everyone happy.
But I can assure you that's a more acceptable solution for most people than the alternative.

I agree completely. Its current recharge rate makes it so pointless I haven't even tried to use it in years.

A "matter of pride" is apparently what happened with the original requirement for the Empath badge.
It was originally set at 1 billion(!?!?) HP healed. It's now set at 10 million - a reduction by a factor of 100.

People made the case for YEARS that it was virtually impossible to earn a 1 billion HP Empath without farming for it. Eventually with Issue 13 the Devs made some kind of off-handed excuse that it was "always" supposed to be 100 million and that the whole thing was just a "decimal point" error. So they corrected that "decimal point" error (a bug that apparently took around 3 years to find) only to lower the requirement down again to 10 million just a few Issues later.

It still amazes me it took several years to get over their "pride" with that one.

I think it would be interesting to know just how much money that "other" MMO has made by selling extra costume slots...

I no longer play that other game but I'll be perfectly honest about it: just about the only thing that kept me playing around with that game as long as I did was the ability to have around a dozen (or more) costume slots per character. If that one feature alone kept me interested in that game as long as it did I imagine it could have the same effect for players of this game.

P.S. And remember even if you're the type of person who couldn't care less about having more costume slots there are people out there who would be willing to pay money for that to help support YOUR game. Case in point I don't care all that much about PvP, but the more PvPers who keep playing this game the more money the Devs will have to maintain and develop features that I like to play with. It's all for the greater good.

This.
The five Origins we have are fundamentally generic on purpose.
They are vague enough that basically any character can be defined at least by one of them.

Once you start opening the door to defining more "specific" Origin types (like Alien) then there's really no end to it and there'd be no clear cut place to stop defining more specific sub-categories to make everyone happy. The only two ways you can do an Origin system is to keep it very generic (like CoH does) or allow thousands of specific sub-categories. Since this game will never be able to support the "infinite Origin" approach it's better off sticking with the current organization we have.

These are all valid questions. We humans come in all shapes, sizes and limits. All these kinds of variables are currently hard for computers/robots to adapt to. There are still many things we take for granted when we interact with other people that are still beyond the capabilities of computers to process. For instance we tend to know that a "5 year old child" shaped human usually reacts to pain in different ways than a "professional football player" shaped human does. A computer doesn't necessarily KNOW that difference or could even TELL that difference yet.

So while this experiment (in and of itself) might not be that practical it will likely help continue the basic research towards allowing computers/robots to better adapt to interacting physically with humans. Robots "understanding" pain is not really just about letting them know how to inflict pain - it'll lead to much more than that. For instance there will eventually be robots that will be able to pick up wounded soldiers off a battlefield and take them to safety. Don't you think it would be nice for them to know that if a solider has a huge wound or a broken bone that it would be better not to grab them there? A robot that "understands" pain would know how to properly adapt to that situation.

This is pretty much how that "other MMO" that was mentioned by TheMagicTramp does it. All costume slots you purchase are available to all the characters on the account (i.e. if you bought 4 extra slots every character on that account would have 4 extra slots to use).

That "other MMO" is very much less cool than CoH in most respects. But the one thing it does that I'd very much love to see here is how it handles this extra costume slot issue. Here's hoping this game "borrows" that feature from that game ASAP.

Yeah those few things are pretty much geared toward being a zombie.
It'd be nice to get a few things that looked "battle-damaged" with single rips and scorch marks instead of shredded and/or "zombified".

Yeah that was more or less the point: SyFy has become such a joke that the mere effort of a few seconds to set my TiVO to record anything from that channel was almost unbearable.

Basically if I want comedy I'll watch Comedy Central.
I don't watch anything on Comedy Central expecting it (off-hand) to be good Sci-Fi.

Every baby step towards the Technological Singularity is bad enough, even if an individual baby step doesn't matter much.

Sure, and for all we know you could be right to some degree.
I'm just not sure your idea would be the -main- reason for a signed NDA. *shrugs*

There have been things in past betas that got changed or pulled before they went live. I seriously doubt the delay of the Incarnate System prompted the need for a signed NDA for I20. If signed NDAs were going to be used as a future tool to mitigate whining why didn't I19 get one?

I know everybody assumes I20 is going to be super-wonderful because of the signed NDA, and it could very well be super-wonderful regardless. But I honestly believe the main reason I20 has a signed NDA was that our Devs wanted to try to do as much as possible to prevent the guys over at DCUO from getting any ideas.

A "normal" NDA is fine when there's no serious MMO competition just around the corner. But when everybody thought DCUO was going to happen next month it would've been perfect timing for those guys to steal our latest ideas.

If there's some generic "bad geometry in Warburg" that's getting fixed then sure, it might get a Patch Note. But if that "bad geometry" was identified as the main vector for an exploit then no, the chances of it getting mentioned is pretty much nil, regardless if the phrase "fixed bad geometry in Warburg" is reasonably vague or not.

Yeah I see a couple of other "questionable" choices in this chart, but all-in-all it's a worthy effort.
I do think it's funny that this chart came from a site named "overthinkingit".