Rigel_Kent

(QR)

Well, it's happened. Didn't take long. First time getting cussed out for leaving a TF early. Guess I'll stick to Fast Katie from here on out.

Re: Tony

No.

[ QUOTE ]
*sigh...* Task Forces are not "casual" activities. Read the manual for a description of what they're supposed to be.

[/ QUOTE ]
While you're reading the manual, remember to brush up on essential game facts, like not being able to use Temp Invulnerability and (self-rooting) Unyielding at the same time, the maximum level cap of 40, and Eden, the most dangerous zone in the whole game so zomg take a team.

Need I mention Task Forces were not even working at the time of this manual's printing?

Manual thumping is bad enough, even when it's not for the purpose of alienating the even vaster majority of players who are too "casual" for the new and improved Dr. Quaterfield Task Force.

[ QUOTE ]
If you're having trouble finishing task forces as they were originally designed to work, look for better teammates. Don't ask for exploits to be reintroduced to the game.

[/ QUOTE ]
Smaller spawns on the Dr. Q TF because one defender logged and the other had a family emergency is not an exploit by any definition. Also, shenanigans on the assumption that better teammates exist, can be found in a timely manner, and are willing and able to help until the very end.

[ QUOTE ]
So, it has been well established that the [exploit fix secrecy] policy is in place.

[/ QUOTE ]
Fair enough. But valid questions remain.

How beneficial is the policy? The policy is only as useful as the devs' ability to define and discern a "secret exploit fix" as something separate and distinct from "fixes for tricks everyone already knows about", as well as from "changes that will impact legitimate play just as hard as exploits." If softloading is an exploit, what is duoing Positron when the rest of the crappy newbie PuG logs out for the day, assuming that also quits the task force? Without careful definitions and distinctions, and the ability to recognize when distinctions are too fine to be made, the policy boils down to an excuse to arbitrarily forget about patch notes for nearly any possible change.

On second thought, I better stop myself. Since the official line is "oops, we forgot," this whole tangent is a moot point. If the devs' intent was to put this in the patch notes -- that is, to open it up to player feedback -- then they should have done so before it went live and impacted TF accessibility for softloaders and non-softloaders alike.

[ QUOTE ]
1) Regardless of how big a change is, exploit fixes are not snd should not be tested without an NDA. NDAs are fairly useless for testing exploit fixes, since honest folk who would abide by an NDA don't knowingly exploit. Hence, no warning.

[/ QUOTE ]
I am very confused by the basic premise of your post. I've never heard of this "exploit fixes must be secret and NDA'd" rule before.

There were other exploits in the test server patch notes. Exploits that were, in my opinion, lesser known than mission softloading.

Which reminds me, this change does not affect mission softloading, except in the special case of task forces. This might give us an insight as to what the trigger for this change might have been.

[ QUOTE ]
(Evilanna)[ QUOTE ]
Wow, so they alter the game to work as they intended, and everyone complains?...

[/ QUOTE ]
... The game is intended to be fun. Some parts are not. Obviously not working as intended.

[/ QUOTE ]
I wasn't even going to respond Evilanna's post, hoping it would get lost in the shuffle along with all the other off-topic cruft. Since that didn't happen... well, I'll keep it short.

Intent does not equal quality. It does not equal correctness, good design, or good business practice. At best it might correlate to a little bit of consistency and continuity. At worst, it keeps us all chained to a worthless "Vision."

The "dev intent uber alles" attitude is quite possibly the most insidious invalidator of criticism, feedback, and player-driven improvement, and I have little patience for it in any thread.

==========

I'm going to fish for a little consensus here. Am I wrong in proposing the following?

* The change is significant enough to have required player feedback before going to the live servers.

* The change received little to no player feedback due to being missed in the patch notes.

* The change should therefore be rolled back off the live servers, but remain on test, until sufficient feedback is gathered there, and changes made if necessary.

[ QUOTE ]
Why do you think anyone would pull wool over your eyes? What do you think they're trying to cover up?

[/ QUOTE ]
A coverup seems a bit farfetched. A safer guess would be that the devs didn't consider this to be a significant change. Hopefully, this 41-page (so far and counting) thread is giving them some useful feedback.

[ QUOTE ]
Min = Max = 8 man isn't onerous? Losing one person puts you at a 87.5% effectiveness and there's nothing you can do to avoid that. Other than enforced raid attendance. I'm sorry, did that sound like World of Warcraft terminology?

[/ QUOTE ]
New for issue 12: Logging out or quitting a Task Force, Flashback, Raid, or Trial will incur.

[ QUOTE ]
Since this is being done because of an exploit could we not change the spawn sizes so that it can tell the difference between people that are logged off and people that have quit?

[/ QUOTE ]
Good idea, but still slightly vulnerable to griefing. Instead of quitting to screw the TF over, a griefer would logout. Adding the ability to kick logged out players would help.

Thank God, it's about time.

It's about time the devs finally listen to the constant stream of players asking for more forced teaming. I can hardly read a single page on these forums without someone complaining that there's not enough forced teaming. Heck, more forced teaming is pretty much the only topic ever discussed on the defender board. So this is a good step in the right direction.

Also, nothing tears me up more than people not playing the game the same way I want them to play it. I keep a little rag next to my laptop, so I can wring it with worry every time I think about someone, somewhere, possibly softloading a Task Force. Katie Hannon runs, softloading -- or, egad, softloading a Katie Hannon run! -- it's the end of the game as I know it, and I'm glad it's finally been stopped.

[ QUOTE ]
1. Some are waaaay to long.
2. Some require way to many people to start.
3. Some just are not fun.

[/ QUOTE ]
And I know we can all name that one very special hero side TF that manages to hit all three.

[ QUOTE ]
"TFs will be farmed as the farmers want them to be farmed"

[/ QUOTE ]
Fixed.

The effect of this change on me, as a non-farmer: Before, if I screwed up my time management and I had to quit a TF early, all I had to do was quit between missions and all was okay. Now, I've buggered the team if I do so. In fact, it's so bad, it's borderline griefable. Wanna hose the TF? Just hit the quit button. Griefer or Leeroy on your team? Kick them at your own peril.

Worse, it kills 3-man Positron dead. No player is going to join a Positron without at least 6 or so, just to ensure against droppers. I'm sure glad I've got Positron's badge already on most of my heroes, because I'm not likely to ever do it again.

Roll this puppy back.

Nine questionable trademark claims in one post. Major eyesore, couldn't even read past the first sentence. Can we get a version of the announcement in plain English?

[ QUOTE ]
Make Repulsion Bomb target a location rather than an enemy or teammate. This gives the defender the ability to control the direction of the knockback.

[/ QUOTE ]
Sorry to quote myself, but I forgot to say: This should apply to ALL "Targeted AoE" (ranged sphere) knockbacks. Repulsion Bomb, Explosive Blast, M30 Grenade, etc.

My little tweak would be:

Make Repulsion Bomb target a location rather than an enemy or teammate. This gives the defender the ability to control the direction of the knockback.

[ QUOTE ]
There is also the MMORPG.com free trials right now.

[/ QUOTE ]
= Summary =

This week's spamming problem is, in my opinion, a direct result of a security breach at MMORPG.com. As GM efforts may not be enough, NCSoft should consider suspending the free trial promotion with MMORPG.com until the security situation is rectified.

= Observations =

* MMORPG.com is giving free trials away to anyone who simply registers on their site.

* MMORPG.com displays a CAPTCHA (anti-bot image of distorted letters) in an attempt to prevent automated registration.

* The CATPCHA is the weakest I've ever seen, consisting of non-distorted #000000 black characters on a non-black background. (Example: FP6ML) Although the background makes the characters difficult for humans to read, computers see numbers, not colors, and #000000 black is easily distinguished from numbers that are not #000000 black. I see no competent attempt to defeat automatic edge recognition or segmentation.

* As an exercise, I wrote a simple program to isolate the #000000 pixels, changing all other pixels to #FFFFFF white. (Result: FP6ML) This turned out to be unnecessary, as optical character recognition programs already do this themselves, by adjusting the binarization threshold to 0%.

* The crummy open-source OCR program I use reads the unedited CAPTCHA (the one with all the colors intact, not the one I edited to black and white) as "F.PbML". When I tweak the program's filter to recognize only numerals and capital letters, the CAPTCHA is toast: "FP6ML". In total, it took me twenty minutes to defeat MMORPG.com's CAPTCHA, using only an open-source general-purpose character recognition program.

* The spammers have two accounts, hero-sideand villain-side account, simultaneously on several (and quite possibly all) live servers. The spammers appear to be creating new accounts as fast as the old accounts get banned.

= Conclusion =

The spammers are likely to have cracked the weak security of mmorpg.com, as I have demonstrated it is easy to do. The spammers are likely to be generating automated free trial requests around the clock as fast as they can be banned, so additional efforts beyond the GMs' work are needed.

= Recommendations =

My recommendation for NCSoft is to vet the security of their promotional partners more carefully to prevent automated signups. Further, NCSoft should immediately suspend any promotion whose security has been compromised, as MMORPG.com's appears to have been.

My recommendation for MMORPG.com is to switch to reCAPTCHA. The reCAPTCHA project provides strong CAPTCHA images for free, as a public service. reCAPTCHA images are composed of two challenge words: one known word, to prevent automated registrations, and one unknown word, taken from a scanned book that automated character recognition failed to read. Thus, reCAPTCHA provides security and helps to digitize classic books at the same time. reCAPTCHA is also, in my human opinion, quite a bit easier on the eyes, and easier for a human to solve, than MMORPG's current CAPTCHA.

The reCAPTCHA project's website is at recaptcha.net.

EDIT: To reflect the spammer is reportedly affecting several servers, not just Virtue.

[ QUOTE ]
The combative inhabitants in a zone will move off the streets and to safer locations when a Rikti Invasion takes place.

[/ QUOTE ]
Whew. That's a relief! I was worried I'd finally made the big jump from subclinical to certifiable.

[ QUOTE ]
Wouldn't the best way to deal with these creeps be to make their real-world company name known, show the connection between their sleazy business and their sleazy business practices, and encourage a game-wide boycott?

[/ QUOTE ]
A WHOIS turns up a bunch of contact information in Changsha, China. From the looks of it, it's a work-from-home enterprise, and their physical host either doesn't know or doesn't care what's going on. Third-party hosting, third-party credit card processing (Paypal? psh, -real- professional), and looks like they even outsource their gold farmers. No wonder their prices are so obscenely high! Everyone's a middleman!

Anyway, you wouldn't buy your pet food from China; why in the world would you buy imaginary wealth? Even if I were inclined to buy influence, I'd want to make sure I'm buying from a reputable, non-anonymous company, with avenues of recourse if the seller doesn't come through.

[ QUOTE ]
I'm not really sure what you consider the "biggest MMORPG in America" but statistics would indicate WoW. There is at least one WoW person listed there. So I'm not sure what you're getting at?

[/ QUOTE ]
I stand corrected. I did mean WoW. One (and only one) of the pictures is of a WoW couple.

I'm off to the store, and it's an attention-deficit announcement thread, so it'll be a short post.

- Anshe Chung is known outside the Second Life community as a successful virtual hospitality and real estate entrepreneur. She made the cover of BusinessWeek! Are any of the other photographed people newsmakers?

- There's a significant omission here. The biggest American MMORPG doesn't appear in the slideshow, even once! Is it because of their not-so-customizable avatars? Is it because of their cutthroat IP policy and history of litigiousness? Or is this a good old fashioned press snub?

No.

Your QA guys sure play cheesy concepts.

[ QUOTE ]
Know thine enemy. Plus inspite of being the root of all evil and injustice WoW has many positive experiences that I can understand any Dev wanting to sample so as to increase his/her own personal "gaming experience" palette.

[/ QUOTE ]
Especially the folks in the art and animation department(s). Eh?

I won't pay $20 + $40 expansion + $15/month subscription to play WoW as a game--one grind is enough, thank you. But here's the paradox: I'll waste hours and hours watching WoW videos and machinima on YouTube.

Because it's purrrty.

(With one exception: "You call that a cape?")

Back on topic:

Just got back from testing on live. Level 1 newbie blaster with Power Thrust, level 1 newbie mastermind with Force Bolt. I can confirm that Power Thrust is definitely working differently from other knockback powers.

Force Bolt is still affected by the "ragdoll suppression" we all know and love. Nothing's changed since Issue 6.

Power Thrust, on the other hand, is doing some funny things. For example, with Power Thrust on auto:

Power Thrust! Hellion LT goes flying!
Six seconds later.
Power Thrust! Hellion LT just stands there and takes it.
Six seconds later.
Power Thrust! Hellion LT goes flying!
Six seconds later.
Power Thrust! Hellion LT just stands there and takes it.
etc., etc.

The pattern is completely non-random. The first and every odd-numbered Power Thrust knocks back. The second and every even-numbered Power Thrust doesn't. So random chance of knockback isn't the problem. (As Castle confirmed.)

At the same time, this isn't some form of knockback immunity as with some root and hold powers. If that were the case, targets would enjoy continued immunity after every consecutive Power Thrust.

That leaves one likely culprit: PvP-style "suppressed when knocked." This is usually used together with the "if (target = player)" modifier, as with Air Superiority, which clearly chains in PvE but does not in PvP. In fact, now that I think about it, Power Thrust is behaving exactly like it does in PvP... in PvE! Time for more testing.... this time, I add Power Blast to the mix.

Power Blast! Hellion LT takes damage.
Power Blast! Hellion LT takes damage.
Power Blast! Hellion LT goes flying!
I wait for the Hellion LT to stand all the way back up and attack.
Power Thrust! Hellion LT just stands there and takes it.

Voila. This is consistent with PvP style "suppressed when knocked" on Power Thrust being erroneously applied to both PvE and PvP (thanks to NOXiam @ Freedom for joining me in the arena today to test this). If Castle goes into the database and looks closely, I'll bet he'll find that Power Thrust's knockback is tagged "suppressed when knocked" but "if (target = player)" is missing.

Finally, checking City of Data, their Issue 7 database doesn't show "suppressed when knocked" of any sort for Power Thrust.

Conclusion:
This means that "suppressed when knocked" was probably added some time after Issue 7... and the "if (target = player)" part, to restrict the suppression to PvP, was forgotten about.

Anyway... if someone wants to PM Castle, go ahead. I'd do it myself, but I'm shy.

[ QUOTE ]
This is madness. Anyone can keep any enemy "perma knocked down" using only air superiority with minor slotting.

[/ QUOTE ]
Not to mention all the knockback (mag < 1) stuff like Earthquake and Freezing Rain. Air Superiority works the same since it's knockup (mag < 1).

That PvE knockback (mag > 1) and knockup (mag > 1) should work worse than the smaller magnitude powers, just because of ragdoll animations, was one of the worst things City of Villains and Issue 6 introduced to this game.

[ QUOTE ]
regarding EQ tactics.

(rest of the horrorshow censored for the weak at heart)

[/ QUOTE ]
Good God, man. There are children on this board! Think of the children! Won't somebody think of the children!