Lothic

It's funny but you'd think that if they wanted to encourage people to actually stay subscribed during this period that they'd be motivated to show us everything we'd get to, you know, get us excited about it or something.

What other kind of business can get away with telling its customers "we'll give you something if stay with us for a time but we aren't going to show you exactly what you'll get until after the period is over." Just seems weird to me somehow. *shrugs*

When will people realize that the Devs don't usually outright STOP people from doing questionable, pseudo-exploitative things. They usually just make those questionable, pseudo-exploitative things so annoying to accomplish that the overwhelming vast majority of the playerbase gets the hint and stops doing those silly things.

Yeah there are a few things still left in that boat. But to be honest I was actually talking about all the Vet Award stuff that used to be exclusive but now you can simply pay for if you want it all instantly. When you add Vet Awards to the list of all the other things that have been "de-exclusivified" then you might better understand what I was getting at.

Hey I've made a few 100 billion off the market myself over the years... but unlike using an exploit I "worked" hard for that money.

There is the Bug Hunter badge, but the bug you're describing would hardly qualify for it.

The kinds of things they reserve Bug Hunter for are things that can repeatedly crash a server or serious exploits that would let you earn billions of INF instantly or let you level from 1 to 50 by just clicking a contact dialog button a few times. All of these things have been the real life basis behind some people getting Bug Hunter awarded.

At least George Lucas only "re-imagines" his own work.
Bay seems set to molest any franchise he can get his hands on.

Right because as we all know the details and characteristics of "zombism" is clearly established scientific fact. Sure news reporters love to make leaps of logic in order to generate sensational headlines. But let's not be too critical of them, especially in this case.

And while I'd agree that known diseases like Rabies and Influenza should probably be more worrisome to us than a "zombie virus" I don't think it's totally impossible to think that there could be a new disease mutation out there that could cause people to mimic many of the "classic" behaviors of movie zombies. It's not exactly like a "real" life zombie (or even a pandemic of such a new illness) would have to act/react 100% identical to a movie zombie in the first place.

"I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters."

Maybe this is yet another case of sci-fi becoming science fact.

For what it's worth I think there's probably more of a chance of getting some form of global storage like this than there is of getting further tweaks on the aging, convoluted email system. The easiest way to do this would be to expand the current character vaults to be common to all the characters of an account. Extra space could be bought in increments from the Paragon Market.

I'd rather play in a game that annoys a few "legitimate" players over one that makes it any easier for RMTers to operate in.

The fact that every system is exploitable does not justify the removal of safeguards and never will. Just because gun control laws don't stop ALL gun related crime does not prove that we would all be better off with NO gun control laws. As an "honest" folk myself I'm willing to live in a game with -some- controls if it means the vast majority of spam is mitigated, which it is.

I tend to think it was probably more along the lines of "This issue only negatively affects a tiny portion of the playerbase at any given time and since there are far more important things to worry about we'll leave things in place as they are on the off-chance it'll actually stop a few cases of exploitation we haven't accounted for".

If you choose to see that as some kind of "failure" on the Devs' part then that's up to you. *shrugs*

You are clearly making the assumption that there would be no way to exploit what you are talking about and even if you couldn't exploit it that it would be trivial to do what you want to begin with.

Unless you are a Dev I will reserve judgment on what you deem "necessary" in terms of anti-spam considerations for this game. For what it's worth I practically NEVER bump up against these limits in my day-to-day playing of this game. I'm quite sure they annoy the heck out of some people, but they are hardly the annoyance for most people you are trying to make them out to be here.

A "dumb poor design" that only negatively affects a few players is like a tree falling in the forest - if most people aren't around to hear it is it really -that- much of a problem?

Well at least we know nature already has a "clean-up crew" ready to go when the ZA kills all the normal humans.
Once there are only zombies left on the planet these hyper-rats will chew up all the hungry zombies.

Uh, you are aware there's actually a difference between movies/games and real life don't you? Sure the "fictional idea" of these kind of zombies may be nothing new, but the fact that we can apply that fictional idea to something in real life does seem vaguely noteworthy to me.

I don't have any problem with this game getting more power pools. But the main advantage of having more temp powers available is that I could pick and choose which ones I wanted to customize my characters with without having to do any respecs to change my mind or being locked into narrowly defined subsets of powers.

The key point is that this game has never really been completely "anti-spam feature" free. The Devs have -always- done their best to keep spamming to a minimum.

Now one could certainly argue that the addition of newer anti-spam features over the years has made things somewhat more annoying for some legitimate uses and I would certainly like to live in a world where I didn't have to suffer living within any kinds of limits regardless. Sadly none of us live in that kind of paradise. In the real world we have to accept a certain measure of control and restriction in order to rid ourselves of the vast majority of the RMTer menace.

I tend to think that people like T_Immortalus don't seem to appreciate just how bad things would actually be if all the anti-spam features of this game were suddenly removed. It would be an absolute nightmare.

Last time I checked this was not something we could vote about one way or the other.

Obviously the current system in this game does not absolutely prevent anyone who wants to spam email for RMT purposes from doing so. There is no system on the planet that could prevent every abuse like this as long as there's any chance for money to be made - why do you think the constant war between the virus-makers and anti-virus companies is a thriving multi-billion dollar fact of life?

Sadly there is no real way to make things easier for the "honest" people of this game without opening the flood gates to the RMTers. The goal of the Devs has NEVER been to try to stop ALL spamming activities because that's a literal impossibility. Their goal instead is to make things just hard enough for the RMTers to operate so that their negative effects on this game are kept to a bare minimum. That obviously has to be balanced against doing their best to keep their anti-spam measures from impacting the "honest" people as little as possible. I happen to think they are doing a relatively good job balancing those two concerns here.

Sure it would be nice and ideal if people would just collectively "behave" and stop paying RMTers. It would also be nice if the GMs of this game could just silently "police" all the RMTers out of the game without the need for any limits that get in the way of legitimate activities. But these are both pipe-dreams that will never happen in a real MMO like this.

There will always be a need for proactive measure to prevent excesses and exploits. Now obviously there are ways that the Devs of this game can do their job better and I'm not suggesting that this game's anti-spam features are perfect. But their imperfection is NO justification for removing them completely. I would always rather this game have -some- control over spam, even if it occasionally annoys me from time-to-time, than to have NO control over it at all.

Yeah at this point like Death and Taxes I think we're guaranteed to get a trilogy of movies out of this, at the very least.

That's just pure capitalism at work. The theaters realized that their investment in the latest crop of 3D movies went bust (just like 3D fizzles out every time they trot it out) so instead of lowering the price to encourage people to keep watching 3D they'll just have all movies "meet in the middle" price-wise so that all movies will now cost more regardless. This "hides" the fact that there's any difference between any movie and will probably trick most people into thinking the theaters have "stopped" charging extra for 3D. It sucks for movie watchers but you have to admire the unmitigated gall the theaters had for foisting that upon us.

Yes I actually recall the details of the lawsuit fairly well. Suffice it to say it was a relatively frivolous lawsuit which caused this game to be a bit more vigilant about policing people and (more than likely) prevented any possibility of them releasing their standalone costume creator that they had ready-made for the Korean version of this game. The net effect of this "pointless" lawsuit was that we lost some features we might have otherwise been able to benefit from.

I'm honestly not sitting here losing sleep that this game is about to be sued again. On the other hand it's not exactly smart to give third parties (we are talking Pixar/Disney afterall) too much easy ammunition to try it again either.

Yeah the drop rates could be reduced to make them a bit more "special" and less annoying. But I think my idea of getting a larger number of newer powers would help too. If you could get a drop that chooses from a larger, more random table of choices then each time you got one might actually be more cool and exciting.

Exactly. I'm not even asking for them to come up with a huge number of "unique" powers. They could probably use the same code "numbers" and animations the Revolver uses now but come up with like 6 or 8 new skins for it so that it could look like a cowboy's six-shooter, a Colt 45 or a Glock.

Again I just think the Devs have wasted an easy opportunity to come up with a whole slew of extra options here.

I think the storage situation also simply "evolved" over time and I doubt they ever really intended for people to move large amounts of items anywhere via any method.

I know other games have implemented "global storage space" that allows their characters to more easily transfer stuff between characters. This game has always taken the position that "characters are individuals" and has only allowed things to be transferred between them as a reluctant afterthought.

There are probably many things about this game like this that could use a "total redesign" from scratch. Maybe CoH2 will provide for these things someday.