Obsidius

Case in point: Richard Garriot vs. NCSoft The press release they put out for his departure got NCSoft in a lot of (legal) hot water. I'm sure the whole stocks thing didn't help either though

I argree.

Sounds like a name created by Overly Complicated Japanese Toilet (which, coincidentally, describes the Transformers movie franchise.

The problem is that many people consider the word "layoff" in a negative bias. BAB's departure from Paragon Studios may not have been negatively biased. Some people get advanced notice of these things, even months ahead of time. As others have mentioned, it could have even been reciprocal or positive. Without further detail that most of us will never receive, anything beyond the drab Marketing quip delivered by TheOcho is purely conjuncture.

I must give Avatea higher marks than her American counterparts. Certainly, as Coin explains, she's not had the easiest job with CoH. Not only did she have to take up the slack of her laid-off compatriots, but she also had to move all the way from England to Mountain View to do so. That's some chops right there.

Speaking of lay-offs, je-saits sums up my feelings on the latest hot topic concisely. I understand that TheOcho really can't say much in terms of the leaving of one Christopher Bruce, but obvious Marketing quips are obvious.

Rumors are one thing. We had our fill of rumor-mongering when Jack Emmert would drop hints about Avilains and such - things that ended up being purely conceptual with little to no development (except perhaps wing tech). Certainly, we don't need that sort of thing happening again, because it builds in some players unreal expectations of what really ends up coming down the pipe later.

However, certain player concerns should justify a red name response. Even if a unified front needs to be observed, there would be nothing wrong in responding to a discussion thread about a contested feature or pack with "Nothing will change, but we've definitely noted your feedback for future consideration." Certainly, to most players, that would be a better response than no response at all.

The main point of my OP, in retrospect, is that players on the forums don't like stonewall responses to valid questions and concerns.

OTOH:

There are certainly plenty of loaded questions on the forums too, such as the example above. IMPO, one I see all the time is "When are you going to fix PvP?" which would imply that PvP is broken. Certainly, the devs may not feel that PvP is broken at all, and responding to such a question would infer that the devs were admitting that PvP is broken.

On the flip side, a valid thread about problems with the current PvP system, along with constructive criticism and suggestions for solutions, should merit a red name response. The same thing could be said about the Base system. However, it's been some time since such threads had any red name feedback or responses. Even if such things are being worked on and cannot be completely discussed, a response such as "these issues are being considered for future address" would be OK.

There again, some players might think that the red names are simply stringing them along, especially if "problems" go "unfixed" for years on end, so in the end, it depends entirely on the context and the history of the subject. However, I'd rather not go off onto a tangent about either PvP or Bases.

He simply wanted to keep it not only off of the Community Digest, but also an searches for all posts by Moderator8 or TheOcho. And although I appreciate the response, I do sort of wish I could have received a legitimate reply instead.

That being said, there is a marked increase in OCR activity, due to holiday announcements and the I19 feature page going up. There's even been some more idle chit chat and, amazingly, replies to posts. I'll be cautiously hoping that the red names can make my OP eat crow.

That's good to know. For a guy like me who started off w/ the Complete Collection, it's harder to keep track of what we got "with the issue" and what we got with the Complete Collection.

Heck, I can count on one hand the purps I've had drop, and I'm way to lazy to make Influence or play the market, so sue me

Incorrect. If you plan to run a CoP trial, you'll need a raid teleporter. However, Vaults, IoP bases, and Dimensional Anchors are not currently necessary since the "IoP' is currently granted as a per-player temp power.

Edit: You also need a Mission Computer or an Oracle to run the CoP.

The idea of instancing the raid has been around since it was introduced. Unfortunately, there is no sort of raid mechanic to support it (selecting a raid leader, tagging characters for entry into a certain instance, etc.). I'm not sure if some CoP mechanic could be applied to it, but it would be cool if it could (one instance with multiple 8-man teams).

The maximum for any zone is 200 player characters, AFAIK. To get back on topic, there's a good reason for this:

Take an average player character, especially on that uses fancy costume pieces with a lot of polygons, or a back option like wings. Multiply the number of polygons on a player character. Add in any FX like capes and auras. Now, multiply that by the number of player characters in a given field of vision, and then add in polygons and rendering any NPCs in the area, and then finally the environment itself.

It's even worse in combat. While rendering 50 characters (like in a Hami raid), the game also has to render their powers (extra geometry, FX, etc.) in addition to the Hamidon, any mitos, and the Hive /Abyss geometry. Rikti Raids are even worse when one considers the sheer amount of NPCs that need to be rendered, as opposed to one Hami and some groups of mitos.

Ultimately, one of the key reasons why the player limit is lower, especially in the Hive/ Abyss, is to reduce lag and rendering issues. Pre-I9, when the zone cap in the HIve was 200, at a certain point (due to all the powers and FX going off) one's computer would just stop rendering player characters and GMs, the latter making it easier for someone to grief the raid (before the encounter was changed to remove GMs once the Hami appeared). To make rendering and lag more manageable, the amount of players required for the encounter was reduced when the encounter was revamped.

And although the game's recommended system requirements have increased since Ultra Mode, its minimum requirements are still the same, making increasing the player cap because of improvements to the game improbable.

...

... as loathe as I am to admit it, I'm at the same exact point with CoX. Certainly, other factors are contributing to this, such as my wife's inactivity in the game, my vacant SG (which all but disbanded long before GR), and other games coming out this fall and winter on other platforms (which I am, but current forum rules, unable to discuss by name). However, the current colder shoulder by the OCR staff certainly hasn't kept my opinion of the game as warm as it has been in the past. And that's hard to admit with friends still in the game and a 6.5 year investment.

Damn it, that's my line!