SlickRiptide

Yeah, this is where I get mixed feelings. I liked the feel of Galaxy City and the story of Galaxy Girl. However, I've been harping for years about the static nature of the world and the lack of any dynamic story. Now, the world is changing and we're getting the Signature Story Arcs and combat phasing and all kinds of neat new stuff. It seems a little ungrateful of me to gripe about it costing me my favorite city zone. Heh.

It WAS interesting to me that when I did Twinshot's meteor arc and saw how much of the zone was NOT destroyed in that mission instance that my first thought was that it was not nearly devestated enough. *laugh*

I'm saying that insulting your opponent casts you in a poor light, not your opponent.

If you expect to profit off of an original character or otherwise keep sole ownership of it, then it's best if you don't introduce it into City of Heroes. That's been the rule of thumb since day one.

That said, the clause in question primarily is there so that NCSoft doesn't have to pay you a license if you've published the character in another medium and they decide to use it in a story or promotional material or something. Remember how Ascendent showed up in an issue of the Top Cow comic and Amberleigh(?) and the others in the Blue King comics? I'm sure that those players were thrilled to get a guest shot and had no ideas about profiting from their appearances in the CoH comics, but that EULA clause insured that NCSoft didn't have to worry about it.

Basically, if you want to keep all possible rights to your character then keep it out of the game.

Insults really don't advance your argument at all.

Movies teach us that ALL webcams have motors to rotate them and backdoors that allow hackers and shadowy government agencies to turn them on at will, even when the computer is off. You'd better just unplug the damn thing.

Matt said that the victim's existing content would be "dealt with" without specifying exactly what that meant.

I understand it perfectly. I object to people claiming this supposed unenforcability as a reason to squelch discussion of it, whether outright (STFU) or through ridicule of the people engaging in the discussion.

There are points of the EULA, like property rights, that are new ground for NCSoft and that are uncertain ground for the industry as a whole. These have nothing to do with this assumed unenforcability of whatever aspects some individual thinks are unenforcable.

For instance - If you buy five enhancement unslotters, do you know for certain whether you "own" those enhancement unslotters? Can they be taken from you? Can they even be said to be "things" that you are capable of losing?

The EULA is where you find the answers to those questions and people who intend to buy stuff from the Paragon Market ought to be a little bit interested in what NCSoft thinks those answers are.

I'll give you a hint - You won't find those answers by saying "All EULAs are unenforceable; it's axiomatic" and then ignoring the issue.

Oh, please. I opened the first thread on the subject of the EULA. I assure you that I'm well acquainted with it.

The fact is that they list a bunch of prohibited activities.

The fact is that they required you to agree that you have no expectation of privacy at all, anywhere. Not in NCSoft message board. Not in a third-party message board. Not in your own personal computer.

" SUCH MONITORING MAY ALSO INCLUDE, BUT IS NOT LIMITED TO, MONITORING FOR THE PURPOSES OF DETECTING SOFTWARE UNDER SECTION 8(c) or 8(e)."

"Is Not Limited To". NCSoft can monitor for those prohibited programs but that's just the stuff they feel like listing. They can monitor for anything they please and you agree that they have the right to do it.

" YOU CONSENT TO THE FOREGOING MONITORING AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT NCSOFT MAY, AT ANY TIME, AND IN ANY MANNER, COMMUNICATE ANY INFORMATION BETWEEN HARDWARE YOU USE WITH THE GAME AND ANY MECHANISM NCSOFT MAY CHOOSE FOR SUCH COMMUNICATIONS. "

Any activity on your computer is fair game for NCSoft to monitor and record and communicate back to their servers. Your porn collection? Fair game. Your IM's to your girlfriend or you mom? Fair game. Your spreadsheets of the merger that your company is proposing with a competitor? Fair game. It's all fair game.

Because you agree that there are no limits to what they can monitor.

And, please - Don't assume that a discussion of the EULA is some sort of emotional panic attack about it. I don't give a rat's *** about it. I find parts of it interesting and I find the entirety just a bit brazen in the way it grants a ton of rights to NCSoft and expresses in a dozen different ways that the end-user has no rights at all.

Since you're so familiar with the EULA, I'm sure that you're aware of section 11 - a - (ii) in which " You warrant and represent that You will not use any Service, Content or Software to provide any information that could be used, directly or indirectly, by another user of the Game to identify You in the real world. You warrant and represent that You will not use any Service, Content or Software to obtain any information that could be used, directly or indirectly, to identify another user of the Game in the real world."

If you need that explained, it says that you aren't allowed to exchange information with any other player that would allow them to identify you or you to identify them. Did that supergroup member give you his email address? You BOTH violated the EULA. Did you see someone's real face on CoHFaces? You violated the EULA. Did you go to the City of Heroes facebook page and leave a comment? You violated the EULA!

There's no point in getting pissy with me about it. I didn't write the damned thing.

Pssst. I live in Seattle. Woops! I guess I just violated the EULA.

Here is some kind of promise that these and other events are not intended to be VIP-only. It's a "grand opening celebration" for Exalted, at least right now.

Here's my problem with the wording of the EULA: None of what you write above is what it says. You're projecting a motivation onto NCSoft and then using that made-up motivation to justify the wording.

Please understand that I am not necessarily disagreeing with your summation or disputing the correctness of it. The EULA, taken strictly on its own and judged on strictly what it says, is not nearly that benign, though.

As gamers we let this kind of thing slide because most of us feel that our personal risk is so miniscule that it does not matter. We can safely ignore the fact that we are agreeing to let NCSoft do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, for any reason that they want or, conversely, for them to decide to do nothing at all or to even be inconsistent in their actions if they choose to and to do so without having to justify any of their actions or inaction. We tell ourselves that it doesn't apply to good citizens and that "we" are good citizens. Accessing the game service is more important than worrying about how the publisher of the game service might potentially misbehave.

I'm waiting for the first ragequit over the clause specifying that you're mentally competent to play the game, myself.

That section and one or two others are written into the EULA that way. It was a copy and paste, not Westley raging. I filed a bug report about it as deliberate obfuscation of the content, given that most of the EULA is written in ordinary mixed-case and paragraphs. Probably some lawyer just copied some boilerplate and didn't bother formatting it, but it's annoying, regardless.

It was a brand new EULA, dated September 1. Given that Freedom is a re-launch of the game, I'd say the person who did not read it or at least find a way to learn what is in it is the foolish one.

Okay, that's the second time that Commie Penguin has been told that it's his fault that his friends "don't understand" or some such.

The game should sell itself. If it's complicated enough that people are put off by it then that's a problem. It may not be a problem that anyone cares to address but it's still a problem; or a "challenge" if "problem" is some sort of loaded word.

It's not his fault that his friends don't like the idea of being unable to communicate, or of being restricted from having full access to their characters in the case of the other poster. That's not some shortcoming of a player inadequately describing the game. It's a shortcoming of the game itself, at least in relation to the expectations of those people that were turned off. There were approaches that the dev staff could have taken that they purposely did not take. It's THEIR fault that these friends of the Penguin decided that it was not worth their time to even give it a try.

This is a marketing challenge for Paragon Studios that they are not investing a whole lot of visible effort into meeting, so far. Whether they ought to put more effort into it, I can't say - I don't know their goals. Maybe they truly just don't care and are focused on new member sales.

If they really want those old players back, then they ought to be implementing a plan to explain the new system in glowing, positive terms and to offer some kind of incentive to come back and try it out.

However you slice it, a lost sale is the fault of the salesman, not the customer who's doing his best to recruit other customers.

Okay, but here's the thing - Your friends are past subscribers and have some veteran rewards. That means that at least some of the restrictions may not apply to them. They should at least login and see how many paragon reward tokens they have, and what that gets them. They may find that it's not so bad as they imagined.

Wow - 2004
Anarchy Online - 2001
FFXI - 2002
EQ2 - 2004
Star Wars Galaxies - 2000
City of Heroes - 2004
Eve Online - 2003

And those are just off of the top of my head. I've no doubt I could come up with more with some research. This idea that the short lifespan of a few poorly funded and/or poorly designed games is somehow proof that all games have a short lifespan is a load of peanut butter.

If you want to quibble, Star Wars Galaxies is, in fact, closing down this year but the reasons aren't about the profitability of the game, they're about LucasArts wanting no direct competition for KOTOR. If KOTOR wasn't coming out then Galaxies would be running merrily along making money for SOE.

If your point is that vet rewards take a long time to "earn", well, I won't argue with that. The thing is, that I've never known a single person who enrolled in a MMO because of some vet reward that was multiple years down the road. I'm going to wager that you don't know anyone like that either. Vet rewards aren't intended to spur sales. They're intended to spur retention.

In any case, when Freedom launches we won't have "vet rewards" any more. Paragon Rewards can be earned very quickly if someone is so gung ho about it that he or she is willing to buy thousands of Paragon Points. There's actual choice involved as opposed to a situation where "I have to wait two years for IO's, why bother even subcribing?"

As to those IO's - there's also the choice of taking out a license for the cost of a Slurpee or a king-size candy bar. If unable to part with a candy bar, the player also has the option to buy the scaling IO's from the market.

I sympathize with your view on this up to a point, but realistically it's a pretty short point. I'd like to see purchasable vouchers for individual characters. Otherwise, I have to say that the current system is not only a good deal; it's way better a deal than any other company that's done this kind of conversion would have given you. Most others would have simply solved the problem by saying "You want inventions? VIP is that way --->".

You or our theoretical returning player may not be 100% happy with the choices but having a choice is way better than having no choice.

These kinds of pronouncements always make me chuckle. Guess what? People still subscribe to Ultima Online(1997) and Everquest(1999). Heck, people still play Meridian 59(1996).

As long as there's a core group of players willing to subscribe to the game and NCSoft can make enough money to maintain a profit margin on it, it will be here for them to play.

No, that isn't true. The consumables you're referring to are "repeatable". You don't need to fill them all in before you're qualified to claim something from the VIP exclusive Tier-9's.

I'm starting to think that the two sections of Tier-9 should have been placed side-by-side instead of one above the other. It seems that there's a measurable percentage of people who assume that the placement indicates precedence.

The only precedence is that one section of that tier is VIP-only.

It would be fair to say that I'm indicating my belief that the word "buy" does not apply to a subscription in the same sense as it does to "buying" permanent access to content because a subscription is a temporary license. You can certainly make the argument that a subscription is actually case of repeatedly purchasing a one-month content license and be technically correct.

I put the quotes around "buy" because the context of the original comment was permanent ownership of content rights. The assertion that $15 was the purchase price of "unlocking" incarnates was a facetious one because the $15 charge was for a license to access VIP content as a whole. It was not a "unlock" or one-time purchase price of a license to access incarnates, which was what the original poster has indicated he was interested in.

I have a suspicion that this is less of a policy decision than it is a restriction imposed by the UI. If the action of the Backspace button is any indication, then back in the misty vastness of time, an enterprising UI designer made the perfectly reasonable observation that /reply $player and /tell $player are qualitatively the same operation and so /reply is essentially nothing more than a macro that invokes /tell. It just never mattered until now.

If implementing a true /reply function with its own permissions didn't involve UI development, I suspect that the devs would have no qualms about having an unrestricted /reply command.

Maybe I just want to believe that, though. *laugh*

I chose your post to quote but I was responding to a trend, so I probably should not have done that. For that, I apologize for appearing to single you out.

My primary quibble was people saying that you can "buy" access to things by going VIP when nothing is "bought" as a VIP. It is rented. Telling people who WANT to buy permanent access to "buy" a subscription is not solving any problems (from their standpoint) or even addressing the source of their discontent. It's saying that their discontent is unwarranted and dismissible.

It's fair to say that premiums who want IO's have choices to buy SBE's or earn Paragon Rewards. It's not fair to say "you do have a purchase option - purchase a subscription". A subscription is not a purchase. When you cancel it, you have nothing and that is what the premium person is complaining about.

When someone says " This Sux0rz! I want it all and a pony and I want it for nothing!" then sure, they're being unreasonable. Many people who complain about this or that about the premium plan are treated as if they said that, when they actually said something rather different.

No plan will please everyone and many people will say "I paid before! That ought to count for something!" All you can do for those people is point at Paragon Rewards and say "That's how much it counts for." Trying to convince them that they should be satisfied with a program that doesn't satisfy them is a waste of energy, pretty much. Best to just let them vent and calm down or not as they see fit.

If someone has a legitimate discussion point, then by all means discuss it. Just discuss the game, not the person, IMO, and give anyone you respond to the benefit of the doubt. If they perceive themselves to be reasonable, then treating them as being unreasonable is not likely to sway them very far.

No. If there's a debatable issue here, it is not in playing word games with people about what "buy" means. It's in directly addressing the desire for ownership at a fixed price.

If you purchase a one-month Architect license, you are not "buying" the Architect. You are renting it. If you subscribe to the game, you are not "buying" the incarnate system. You are renting it.

It's basically belittling to treat people who dislike renting games as people who are just too stupid or too greedy to appreciate what they've been offered.

Whether any individual player cares for the available option or not, the Premium membership does offer alternatives - either rent Architect/Consignments/Inventions at a nominal monthly rate or "purchase" it it by achieving the appropriate reward level. Whether that purchase price is an appropriate one or a better deal than renting those game systems is a question subject to individual taste.

I don't really care what anyone's leanings are one way or the other but I do appreciate when people deal with the real issues instead of setting up straw men with false issues and then knocking them down and pronouncing the issue "dealt with".

Right now, there are some systems that can be purchased outright. The morality system is one such system. Signature arcs is another. There are other systems that can be rented individually, or "earned" permanently through purchases of paragon points. There is one system that can only be rented and only by VIP's - the incarnate system.

Those are the issues. If you want to address them then please be good enough to address the real issues. I've alluded to one of those issues before - some people just don't care to rent their game. Those people have some options with most systems, but not with all systems.

The program managers at Paragon/NCSoft have spent at least a year preparing for this, so they have some good ideas and what they feel are good reasons for doing things this way.

Should they offer other alternatives? Maybe. The game supports vouchers that give per-character access to features. If I have five characters who are all under level 10 and one character who is level 30 then I may not care to pay $6/month to rent global access to invention/market game systems that benefit one character, but I might be willing to pay $10 to purchase permanent access to those features for that one character.

I see the license rentals as an experiment. It's something new in this game that I've never encountered in another game. If it turns out to be a failure after six months, they can always change policy and start offering permanent licenses for sale or offering vouchers as a purchase option.

Complaining won't change it BECAUSE it's an experiment. Until the results of the experiment are known, there's no point is complaining about being one of the test subjects.

The devs have reasons for reserving incarnates to VIP. In the short term, they're probably good reasons. Over the long term, they'll adapt their policies to the trends that their sales figures indicate that they should be following.

In the end, premium players have options about almost all features. It's up to them to decide how palatable the options are. I just ask both sides that if you're going to discuss/argue about it that you make your arguments about the real issues and not about made-up issues or about the character of the people that you're arguing with.