Ravenswing

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The morale of the story is - never trust anyone you don't know the address of just in case you need to give them a smack in the face.

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I can safely say that knowing someone's address does not mean you should trust them.

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... Well, with the exception of giving Statesman a bit more of a personality than just 'Superman meets Cyclops'

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You think he has more personality than that? Really? *shuffles off to try to find evidence of a personality in Statesman*

So, I looked it up. It's a network storage package, yeah?

Sorry, no networked storage is ever going to beat the data transfer speed of dedicated fibre datalinks. Aside from anything else, you don't have a network stack to deal with.

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There are fundamental things in all societies that are not accepted and theft is one of them.

[/ QUOTE ]The concept of theft only comes with the concept of ownership, which is hardly present in all societies. (Although admittedly does exist in most modern ones)

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At the end of the day he took something he knew he should not have, without my permission.. He KNEW it was wrong and that is why he ran (left the Sg and set me to global ignore and then later tried to deny and excuse it). If he had genuinely thought it was okay to help himself he would never have had any need to hide or do those things.. but he did bcause he knew it was a betrayal.

[/ QUOTE ]Or he might simply have severed ties with you because he had nothing further to gain.

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Just to be pedantic, it's not theft anyway. We do not own any of the items in-game, NCSoft do. The salvage has not left the game (even if it could), NCSoft have lost none of it. No theft has taken place.

I've done this kind of 'job', all-be-it on a private Neverwinter Nights server. I had way less people to deal with and it was still enormously frustrating. You can never have enough information to determine who is right and who is wrong. I seriously considered bugging all player communication to deal with conflicts between players, but the loss of trust had anyone found out, plus the sheer storage requirements made it inviable. On an MMO the problem is not loss of trust, we all know all our communication is recorded (or should), it's that there is a huge volume of data there and trawling it takes significant time. Even then, it cannot account for out-of-game communications, such as MSN. The GMs cannot know that the OP did not give him permission to do this and then changed his mind. They are caught in the cleft stick with no way to do 'the right thing.' The best they can do is to warn other people to try to reduce the chances of this happening to others. I think they chose the wrong way to do that, but hey ho.

While I agree that it does depend on how it's implemented, my programmer/system architect sense tell me it's different DB servers. Why? Because MMO servers are all about transaction speed. NAS? No way, too slow. Hardwired disc systems, maybe on fibre.

Server transfers also indicate that it's seperate servers. Batch mode data transfers, probably carried out during offline maintainance.

Seven became aware of her boot sequence scrolling across her field of vision. As it reached 'Visual Processors: initialized' the backdrop of the text changed to a view of the wall opposite her maintenance frame. 'Initialization complete' ran past her 'eyes' and her body came to life. Latches disengaged and she stepped out of the frame.

She looked slowly around the bare cubicle she called home. There was a door, a sink with a mirror over it, her frame, and nothing else. She checked in the mirror and discovered no reason to use the sink, so she began her morning ritual of scanning the newspapers. Several scrolling windows appeared in her field of vision, displaying one newspaper web site after another. She did not know what she was looking for, but she had no orders requiring immediate action, so she scanned the newspapers for signs of anything unusual. She found Malcolm Johnovich.
New windows opened, displaying driver's license, telephone records, bank details... A freelance programmer with no previous record of criminal activities suddenly goes crazy, tries to murder heroes, and then gets murdered himself. He had barely even left his house aside from trips to clients and the supermarket. This would require investigation. More windows opened showing police reports.

Malcovich had been admitted with what appeared to be a case of acquired delusional state. He had been sedated and kept under watch. At one thirty in the morning, the room had been engulfed in flame. Two nurse in a nearby aid station had been injured by flames and flying glass. It had been a common incendiary device used by any number of fire-loving members of what passed for society in Paragon City. The reports were typically lacking in detail, Seven found the rather slapdash attitude of the majority of PPD's officers annoying. She had to do everything herself.

Opening the door, she exited the room into a back corridor on the second floor of the King's Row precinct building. She engaged her camouflage system in the left down to ground level and few people even noticed her passing as she left the building, heading for Galaxy City.

(( I'll be sending out PMs to people with specific information you may have gathered while investigating tomorrow. When I'm awake. ))

As Dante says, he's specifically the afterlife god of the place sinners are sent to. Mentions of the name in biblical texts are usually translated as 'hell'. It's a nastier taunt than just 'your wife is toast', he's saying 'your wife is toast and her soul is being eternally tormented for her sins.'

Taunt is likely all it is, however.

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So's a rapier, unless my memory is likewise corrupt.

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I think you're thinking of the epee, which is stabbing only.

Yeah, I sort of see your point.

I think you may be missing the point of Ancilliaries. See above.

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Tho could add this:

[XXX] You got nudie art made of your character

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Something most of us would never consider...

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It would seem highly appropriate for Velvet, somehow.

(( Right, now I'll have to come up with some literature to reply to that. Better get my writing head on. I'll reply as soon as I've got the details worked out. ))

First, I think we could use some more Ancilliary sets, yes.

The purpose of the Ancilliaries is to extend the powers of a given class, giving them access to things they don't normally have. Since you haven't listed powers exactly, I don't know if that's what your suggestions do, but looking at Scrappers (which I know best) I don't think so.

Now, that Archery set looks good for Scrappers. It should give some basic ranged shots and some trick arrow control powers. Scrapper sets tend to include ranged and control powers (except Body Mastery which is more ranged and buffs).

Another example: Blaster sets tend to provide protection, which Blasters lack, but the sets you have picked seem to be more about more ranged attacks and controls, which Blasters already have in spades.

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@Free_Radical

are you saying multi-server team? such as...mixed teams in RWZ or teams with people from grandville, grandville 2, grandville 3 with people coming from different servers?
would be nice!


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Yes.. thats exactly what I am suggesting. It happens when the maps get too full so the technology is there, just needs improving.

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The technology for spawning additional instances on the same server is a lot different from spawning cross-server instances. Massively different in fact.

Instead of accessing one database for character details, the server must access multiple ones. That increases the resources used by the server and slows things down.

It's not impossible, but it would be a potentially major piece of work to undertake.

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I dont think people will all leave for the us servers. As it is already stated that they are not all more populated then UNION unless we are talking about one of the three major populated ones.

Free transfers ... ? NO WAY?!

Just one list of servers... and one global.. under one account.

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Thing is that if you aren't going to move then one server list is pointless. There's no need for it.

The fact that your friends have moved to US accounts would seem to imply that people would move to the more populated US servers. US servers are also perceived (rightly or wrongly) as having better hardware.

Now, one global is another matter and I can see a point to that. The merge process would be painful, but it could be done. We have a merged auction system so it's not technically impossible, though the speed it operates at suggests that a merged global comms would be more laggy than what we have currently.

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In either case, it's still not really comparable to what seems to have happened to the OP, as that seems preplanned.

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Never underestimate the force of "crimes of opportunity", but yeah, it seems planned.

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You could only really compare the two if you let someone team, probably several times to gain their trust, and then deliberately got them multiple faceplants; or repeatedly killing the same person in PvP, not even letting them out of the zone (difficult, but possible). THEN, it could be considered griefing.

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Except, unless they've changed the policy while I was away, pretty much nothing is considered griefing in PvP Zones. If the game allows it then it's fair play.

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Can someone explain to me more clearly NC's excuse for being unable to this, I can understand the animator might not have instant access to the tools but what does 'baked in' mean exactly.

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It means that either the values are hardcoded into the power, or that the mechanism for grabbing the values is hardcoded into the power.

It isn't exactly that you would have to rewrite the entire thing to fix it, it's generally more that every colour (or whatever) would need a duplicate code block with different code/pointers to different animations or colour codes.

So, first, you have to do all that replication work, and then you have to make sure every copy has been changed correctly. And then what you end up with is a total mess, unmaintainable. A single bug in the power requires you to go through hundreds of copies, fixing the same thing in each code block.

Second, the animation effects on the power originator and any impact effects are handled by seperate code. So, in many cases it is possible to handle the originating power customisations using the same sort of method as the sword customisations. You can have fire powers that toss blue flame.

Unfortunately, the target of your blue flame has his own animation for being hit by flame powers, and you can't customise that through the costume editor, because it isn't your costume. When 'Toastie the Target' gets hit by blue flame, he bursts into normal orange flame.

Does that make it clearer?

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Okay, I just added the types with buffs as something extra, if its not turning out good I'm fine with just changing the sounds of your character.

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It was suggested a while ago (like Year 1), and I think it may even have been in the original game design, that for example, if you took fire powers, you would be more susceptible to cold. You idea is vaguely similar.

The reason given for not doing this was that it required you to make a choice without knowing anything about the game which would affect how easily you could play the game. For example: you meet a lot of Hellions early on, with fire powers. If you took cold powers and thus got beaten to a pile of cinders every time you entered a mission door, you might well decide the game sucked and quit.

So, no buffs and debuffs based on phenotype or power selection.

(It's not actually a very good argument, but it is a perfectly reasonable one.)

What have I started?

Okay...

Essential premise: I have no desire to move my characters off Union. You have to get that in order to understand the rest of the argument.

Now, let us merge the accounts such that I can have access to the US servers. What is the result?

Well, it will take a while because if NCSoft have any brain they won't give anyone free server transfers, but the population of Union will diminish as the gamers (like yourself) move their characters off Union and onto some American server.

As this continues, the economics of actually running a data centre in Europe will become unsustainable and, after a while, the EU servers will be shut down. At that point, free transfers (or forced merges) will happen and players will quit because that character name they've had for 4 years is taken on the other server.


Now, if it ever comes time that they upgrade the hardware here in the EU, it might be better that they merge the two EN servers and buy one uber box that cuts back on server lag... assuming that the hardware is responsible for any of the server lag we've been getting.

(( To clarify: This was in Monday morning's newspaper. The fire happened Sunday night/early hours of Monday morning. ))

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5) You try to encourage your wife/girlfriend to wear thigh high boots and patent leather outfits.

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Surely this isn't a sign of excessive CoX playing if the behaviour predates any MMO play?

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I was going to say... this has absolutely nothing to do with CoH.

In fact, you know you've been playing too much CoH when your girlfriend can't peel you away from it despite the fact that she's wearing the leather outfit and the thigh-high boots.

What's needed is a publicity campaign.

I propose the forming of an SG for Mace users which will proselytise Mace use and show how good it can be.

It will be called The Wack-a-Mole Club.

No, no buffs or debuffs, just the different animations.

Won't happen, because it's a roleplay suggestion.