TonyV

You know, I did just this kind of analysis about three months ago, and my conclusion was that really, it's not suffering that badly. Funny how two different people can look at exactly the same numbers and come to different conclusions.

You're neglecting that in the past year, the U.S. has been in one of the most crushing recessions in our collective history. You're also completely neglecting the fact that there were a few pretty big-name releases of other games, including one centering around a 40-year-old major franchise (Star Trek Online) and one that competes directly with City of Heroes in the superhero genre (Champions Online). To be honest, against such stiff new competition, I think that 40% is actually pretty damn good, and that now that they're over that first year "hump" of those games being released, this year will be much better. You're also completely forgetting something I did in the thread I posted a few months ago, that sales and revenue are reported in Korean Won (by NCsoft, a Korean company), not U.S. dollars, and there's an exchange rate that can be a huge factor there.

If you really do this for a living, you should know these things.

Duh. Let's make a wager. I'll bet a large sum of money that around the end of July and for a few months after, there are going to be tons of people crammed in Praetoria. I'll further bet a large sum of money that a year from July, there will be a lot fewer people in Praetoria. I'll even go out on a limb and say that there are going to be a bunch of posts at that time about how Praetoria is a "ghost town," and that it's because of some nerf of the month that folks like you just can't stand.

These games had a lot more wrong with them than just nerfs. They were already almost dead as they were. In the case of SWG, it was a last-ditch effort to try to reinvent the game. In the case of Tabula Rasa, they never had a large player base, plus they had an internal management implosion that I don't think we'll soon see here.

It depends. Again, if you really do this for a living, you should know this. Have you compared these numbers to how other games are doing? Maybe average games on the market, especially games over five years old, lost 50% of sales revenue. Maybe this past year, they have been working on, you know, a large expansion to boost the numbers in the coming year. Maybe they're aware that they had a really good year the year before, and the revenue from this past year is actually in line with expectations. Of course, all of those explanations don't neatly fall in line with the more simplistic DOOOOOM! explanation.

Once again, you completely neglect the fact that a lot of people, myself included, still have active subscriptions to this game precisely because of the conservative approach the devs take.

Let me state it more clearly. The more developers leave known exploits in a game, the more people are able to take advantage of such exploits, the less likely I am to continue to play it. Every time I see one of these nerfs, it encourages me a bit more because unlike a lot of games that cave to player pressure and compromise their game, these developers have been known to make some hard choices, sacrifice short-term sentiment, and most importantly, protect the long-term integrity and playability of the game.

In short, they understand that it's better to lose 2% of your players now than to lose 20% in six months because your game has been taken over by farmers and isn't any fun for normal people to play any more.

I almost am staring in disbelief at that statement. It's 180 degrees opposite of short-sighted and. The short-sighted thing to do would be to give people everything they want. Billions of influence? Insta-50s? Storage bins of purples? Sure! Here they all are, everyone be happy! It would be like telling a drug addict that he can have all of the cocaine he wants. Oh, he'll be plenty happy in the short term, believe me. It's also grossly irresponsible. And so would be leaving in a known exploit that is actively being used to degrade the quality of this game. I see absolutely nothing irrational about their decision, and I fully support it 100%.

Actually, you really have no clue how City of Heros is performing relative to expectation, and apparently you're wrong. I see absolutely no indication that NCsoft is pulling support from City of Heroes. In fact, it seems to me quite the opposite. City of Heroes represents a huge foothold in the lucrative North American MMORPG market for the company, and I can't imagine that it's going to be willing to give that up anytime soon, especially with, as you pointed out, Tabula Rasa gone.

Well, there you go, folks. I said as much in the other thread about this. It's just plain brain dead to leave an exploit in a game instead of taking it out and dealing with any side issues that come up. I mean, really. Duh.

For all the rage and fury, the developers prove once again that they actually are smarter than a crapton of people here give them credit for. (Not to mention, smarter than a crapton of people here, period.)

I really do love reading all the DOOOOOM!-criers posting their diatribes, the obligatory "I'm leaving!" posts, and all the other hoopla that surrounds issues like this, only to see the game still going strong years after so many other games have gone belly-up.

On with the show...

Yeah, but now that they're out there on Photobucket, just log into your Photobucket account and edit them. I think that the web site has a built-in rotate edit function.

/tangent

This is not a bad thing. That's the problem with clearly defining rules, you'll run into the "rules lawyers" who do whatever they can to find whatever loophole there might be. "But you said...!!!"

It ain't rocket science, people. If you can level up to 50 in less than a day, it's hideously broken. Truth be known, if you can level up to 50 in less than a week, I am of the opinion that it is still hideously broken. And by "hideously," I mean broken to the point where you need to take whatever measures are necessary right now to fix it. Even if that means nerfing the game to be almost unplayable. Fortunately in this circumstance, it only affected one of many aspects of the game.

I keep seeing the assertion tossed about that because of this nerf, you can't put these types of missions in your AE arc. That's BS. Sure you can. If you're whining because your AE arc doesn't work now, then I can only presume that by "work," you mean "isn't conducive to farming." In which case, I have zero sympathy for you.

Look, it's harsh, but necessary. For a little while, you're going to have to make a conscious decision whether your arc is about getting stuff or about telling a story. Frankly, if it's about getting stuff, that's pretty stupid. I can get stuff in innumerable other ways in the game that are infinitely more interesting and fun than playing your arc. If it's about getting stuff faster than you would play playing other aspects of the game, then guess what. That's pretty much a classic definition of a farming arc, and it should be nerfed. If it's about telling a story, then what the hell difference does it make if experience or any other reward is nerfed?

Anyway, back to my original point. I have no problem with the devs basically saying, "You ought to know what is and isn't exploitive, and we're not going to spell it out for you." They're right, and even if they were to spell it out, you'd still have the same old whiners and complainers b****ing about how it's not fair in addition to the contingent of people moaning about how, "But you didn't explicitly say that was an exploit!!!"

Sheez. Like I said. It ain't rocket science.

I don't intend to really push an Apple or anti-Apple agenda. I really do hope that Android, the Slate, and other such technologies and platforms take off. The more, the merrier, I say! The fact of the matter, for better or worse, is that a LOT of people do have iPhones and it looks like a lot of people will have iPads. Another fact of the matter is that I have an iPhone. I don't have an iPad, and I don't really intend to get one anytime soon. If Google came out with an Android-based tablet, or if the HP Slate were available today, I assure you that I'd have one by now. Hopefully that will be soon (not Soon™) in coming.

These have been some really great ideas. Being one of the administrators of the Titan Network, I was happy to see Pocket Wiki and Pocket Mids ideas put out there. I really like the idea of a Pocket VidiotMaps, too. I can't promise that anything like that will ever happen, especially since I have a lot on my plate and, as I pointed out, any apps, even community-developed ones, would pretty much have to be signed off on by NCsoft.

I do wonder what would be involved in actually make some of these applications happen. Like I said, I've only dabbled in Xcode, Objective C, and the iPhone SDK, so I kinda feel grossly unprepared to even try to code up something like this. Steering the conversation towards the other part of my question (hopefully without nixing the topic of CoH-related app ideas), does anyone have experience in developing for the iPhone/iPad platform? If so, what has it been like for you? Have you just taken it up recently? Do you also have experience developing for the Mac? Anyone here a registered developer with actual apps out there on the Apple App Store?

Actually, that's not out of the question. It's not free, mind you. In fact, it's $400 for the cheap-o license. Still, it's out there.

Yes, it should be synced to the actual game. Here's how it works.

Technical details follow in the interest of finding flaws and in case someone wants to take the idea further

A week or so ago, just for the hell of it, I wanted to find out what the ratio is between time that passes in Paragon City and time that passes in the real world. By finding an NPC that started with the letter F, I could tell that it was around 1 game minute = 1 real second, but it was just a little bit off. I decided to take more accurate readings instead using demorecord files.

I marked the real time, waited a while, and took readings from demorecord files on how much in-game time passed to real time. That's where I came up with a number that was statistically equal to 48 in-game seconds passing for every real second. At first, that puzzled me, until I realized that it meant that 48 in-game hours also passed for every real hour. Aha! That works out to an in-game day (24 in-game hours) passing for every 30 real minutes.

So, I wondered, now that I know the scale, what is the offset? In other words, when does in-game midnight fall? A few /servertime commands later, I figured it that it was on every hour and on every half hour. (i.e. Midnight fell at 7:00pm real time, 7:30pm real time, 8:00pm real time, etc.)

So that's when I set about writing the script.

In the first iteration, I used javascript to calculate the number of milliseconds past the half hour, multiply it by 48, and convert it to a time of day. That worked like a charm, except that my computer's clock isn't in sync with the game server's clock. As a result, the difference between my computer's clock and the game server's clock was magnified by 48--if my clock is off by the server's clock by 90 seconds, for example, the game time of day will be off by an hour and twelve minutes. It's a good ballpark number, but I got to thinking about how it could be more accurate.

I first set about to calculate the difference between my computer's clock and the game server's clock. I didn't get very far, though, because the game server's clock only displays its time in resolution of minutes, making it pretty hard to accurately determine the exact time of the game server.

Then a thought hit me: I wonder, does the game server by any chance sync up with Internet time servers via NTP? I did a quick check, and it appeared that it does indeed. That triggered another thought: The Titan Network's server is synced up via NTP as well, so in theory our server and the game server should be on the same clock. I checked, and indeed they seem to be!

In that case, I figured, what I could do is host the page on the Titan server (on which Paragon Forge is hosted), and the server could send in javascript how many milliseconds it thinks it is past the half hour, and client-side, the difference between the Titan Server's clock and the user's clock can be calculated.

If you dig into the script, you'll see a line towards the top that looks something like this:

var time_diff = 1093807 - (new Date()).getTime() % 1800000;

The server plugged the 1093807 into that line; it is the number of milliseconds past the half hour according to its NTP-synced clock. When I loaded the page just now, the 1,093,807 ms indicates that according to the server's clock, it is 18:13.807 past the half hour (as I'm typing this, specifically, it was 11:48:13.807am EDT). It then subtracts the number of milliseconds past the half hour the clock on the user's machine reads to come up with a constant time differential, assigned to the variable time_diff. (There are 1,800,000 milliseconds in a half hour.)

If your computer's clock is, say, 10 seconds behind the server's, time_diff will be 10,000. If your computer's clock is, on the other hand, 10 seconds ahead of the server's, time_diff will be -10,000.

Once that calculation is made, it kicks off an interval timer that updates every 20 milliseconds. Each time the interval function is called, it takes your computer's clock's reading of how many milliseconds have passed since the half hour, then adds the time differential back. If your computer's clock is 10 seconds behind the server's, then the reading has 10,000 milliseconds added to it. If your computer's clock is 10 seconds ahead of the server's, then the reading has 10,000 milliseconds subtracted from it. This should sync up the reading with the server's (and thus the game server's, which syncs from the same source) idea of what time it is.

Then the number of milliseconds is multiplied by 48 and converted to a time of day that is echoed to the page.

End of technical details

Still, I'll admit that it could be just a little bit off. One thing that's not accounted for is the latency it takes for the network packets to get from the Titan Network server to your machine. Also, time synchronization via the Internet always has a little bit of "drift," so the Titan Network server and the CoH game server might be just a hair off. And remember, any time difference is magnified by 48 when translated to a game time.

Still, it's pretty damn close. In following around people whose names start with F, I've only seen it maybe at most off by one game minute--which is 1.25 real seconds out of sync. That ain't so bad, and for all practical purposes, it's well within the realm of "close enough."

If someone wants to write a desktop app for this (and I haven't ruled out doing it myself), they could simply make an NTP request to get the current time, preferably UTC, and perform the calculation that way instead of depending on the Titan Network server. Heck, I even googled javascript ntp client to see if I could do it within the code itself, which would let you actually store the thing locally and not have to pull it up from the Paragon Forge, but I didn't really see one that I liked.

I'm glad you find it bookmark-worthy. I really kinda wish that they would put it somewhere on the official site, like in a side box somewhere have a running clock showing the time in Paragon City. Maybe if enough people like this page, they'll ask me to write it for them. My price is cheap--one costume code.

I haven't observed that. I figured out the scheme by taking demorecords from various places, including multiple zones and within a base. I haven't exhaustively checked every zone, but I would have thought that it's consistent from place to place. If anyone finds a discrepancy outside of an in-game minute or two (which could be caused by latency between my server and your browser), let me know.

Already taken care of. Please send the goat back when he's done.

I'm just eager to get started posting stuff on the Paragon Wiki.

This has got to be the world's easiest question.

Evil is defined by, after I ponder some action or attitude a moment or contemplate a lifetime, what I decide is bad.

Some say some of the stuff I say or do is evil. Well, they're wrong. No one has yet to ever prove that anything I've ever done is evil.

There is some stuff that isn't evil that I choose not to do anyway simply because I'm a nice guy, but I am under no moral obligation whatsoever to do all non-evil things--only to not do evil things. So just because I don't do it or don't believe it doesn't make it by definition evil; only the reverse is true, that if I do do it, it is by definition not evil.

If you do something evil, depending on the magnitude of evil, I may or may not choose to respond in some harsh way. If you don't answer me when I ask what time it is, I'll probably let it slide, because as I said before, I'm a nice guy. If you murder someone close to me just for fun, I'll likely choose a course of action more... severe.

If anyone has any question about whether something is or is not evil, please, do feel free to contact me. You can PM me here, or e-mail me at tonyv@cohtitan.com and I'll be happy to discuss. I do sincerely apologize for not being born earlier so that Hitler could have availed himself of my services, it could have avoided an awful mess and his legacy would have undoubtedly been much more kind.

Edit: And that, my friends, is my 2*2*2*2*2*2*3*5*5th post. Enjoy, as it might be quite a long time before all the factors of my post count are single digits again!

/signed, but only if we get the crazy baby logo with it. I don't want just text. I want crazy babies.