TonyV

Sweetness, guys. I know I've been hard on NCsoft for some of the decisions that have been made lately. It's nice, though, when they get it right. As someone earlier in the thread said, UBB really does suck, and I'm glad to see that we're going with a more reliable and robust system. I can't wait to dig in.

While we're discussing it, I've got a quick question/suggestion. We've been waiting for quite a while for developments on the City Vault front. Since "the driving factor (among many) was the integration with vBulletin to our auth system and security," any chance that maybe it can be integrated with the player/character database as well to do stuff like optionally show our online status?

At any rate, good luck on the migration, I hope all goes well.

Very cool contest. I'm not much of a pirate, except that I have been known to yell, "Aaaaarrr, matey!" as strangely inappropriate times at work...

Can't wait to see the entries!

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I just used the self destruct power.
It failed to actually kill me and bring up the "go to hospital or base" prompt, but it did make my body vanish. I still had hp, and it was regenerating but I could not move, or use wakies, or do any actions whatsoever.

Anyone else have this problem?

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I suggest putting in a support ticket to address this, and maybe also posting it over in the Technical Issues forum.

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These booster packs just have little perks in them with a few emotes thrown in. Nothing game breaking...

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Does anyone here besides me remember that when folks complained about the Valentine's Day add-on wedding pack was released, one of the big justifications for it being okay was that it didn't affect gameplay? That if you didn't want to buy it, you weren't missing out on anything, because emotes and costume pieces don't give you any advantage?

Now, we have add-ons being sold that do affect gameplay. Subpar or not, there's no denying that characters with the jetpack and self-destruction powers can do things--non-screen candy things that do make a difference in the game--that characters without them can't.

I remember a time not too long ago when even selling costume parts would have been thought way beyond the line. I remember a time when someone would have been called crazy for even suggesting that it could lead to selling powers. Yet here we are.

I'm genuinely curious, now that we've moved the line from gameplay-affecting to game-breaking, where is your limit of tolerance? Is everything fair game? What if they start selling access to new zones? Selling access to new archetypes? Selling access to task force/trial rewards? Straight out selling influence/infamy/prestige for cash?

I know, "Wow, that sure is melodramatic, Tony, that would never happen." That's what I thought about selling powers, too, but here we are.

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I would highly, HIGHLY reccomend you do NOT zone while the self-destruct power is counting down. There is currently a bit of an issue with the FX script that can cause the camera shake to not stop and increase over time...indefinitely. If this happens, the only fix is to completely shut down the game and restart it.

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In other words: "Please, immediately go try to zone while the self-destruct power is counting down. If you do, something very cool that you've never seen before will happen, and you don't want to miss this, since it will probably go away in the next patch."



Seriously, if I had the Cyborg add-on, this would now be the first thing I did when I got home this evening. I'd also use Fraps to screencap it and post it to YouTube.

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10 second count-down, and you die every time you use it...

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Yes, gameplay advantage. If you play a tank, it's trivially easy to go into a large group, pop a red or two and maybe a yellow, and dole out a sweet purchased Nova to your enemies, probably defeating most of them, and making it really easy for the rest of the team to mop up. Pop a wakie, or even better, have someone with Resuscitate or Resurrect on hand, and you're good to go.

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PHEAR MY L33T CYBORG POWERS, ALL YOU WARBERG CRETINS!!!

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Yes, we're all impressed by your sarcasm, but I don't think it will be quite as funny when $15 a month just plain isn't enough to play any more.

There seems to be the mistaken impression that I think that having the jet pack purchasable via the game cards was a good idea. No matter how it's sold, it still boils down to $$$ = gameplay advantage.

Also, I found out a little while ago (missed this in the announcement) that the Cyborg pack includes the self-destruction power that does extreme damage. Yes, it has a self-kill component, but incurs no debt, so it's basically a purchasable modified nova power. Yet another gameplay-affecting advantage for people willing to shell out the $$$. It won't take many more of these add-on packs before a player with money has characters with an insurmountable advantage over those who don't.

Well, that's the other thing. I'm four years old in the game also, and I remember when we used to get all sorts of cool stuff like VEATs for free. Really! We got Kheldians for free, capes and auras for free, respecification trials, flypose emotes (among many, many others), at least three or four cool new costume pieces, the list goes on.

Yes, we still get some stuff for free, and thank goodness we do. But now, we're having to pay for a lot of the stuff that we also used to get for free, and that's even after they've rolled out in-game advertising to raise more money, the subscriber base is still quite large, and they're not having to split the take with Cryptic.

What are we getting for all of that extra money that we weren't getting before? I know I for one wish we could go back to the old days of not having to pay out the wazoo for everything, even if it means that we "only" get as much cool free stuff as we did back in the days when Arenas were free, the badge system was free, epic power pools were free, ...

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I have no problem with paying for a "temp power" that frees up two powers (fly and hover). You may see it as a waste of money but I see it as adding two more damage dealing powers to my tanker.

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Thank you for exactly illustrating my point. I fully realize that there are probably some players who would delight in having the game turned into one in which in order to have the best characters, you have to pay the most money each month. I'm not one of them. This is exactly the kind of game that City of Heroes has rallied to not be in the past.

Guys, I know this isn't a popular opinion, but this is well on the way down a slippery slope. While we're all celebrating how cool this is, please remember to also see it for what it is. The jet pack temporary power is exactly that: a power, i.e. something that directly alters the gameplay experience and capabilities of the player. This isn't merely a cosmetic change like extra costumes. This is not merely screen candy like extra emotes.

It directly gives an advantage, a gameplay benefit, to a person based on their willingness to fork over an extra $4.99 a month. It takes a power, Fly, which normally requires at least two specific power choices (Air Superiority or Hover and Fly itself), and gives it to someone who would rather not take them for something else.

Having set the precedent now, I see no reason whatsoever NCsoft wouldn't decide to take any other power and do this to it. Why wouldn't they start offering 30-day Invisibility for $4.99? Or 30-day Super Speed? A 30-day regenration power? All of the above? If I'm willing to pay enough money, how long will it be before I simply buy the pool powers and not have to bother taking them, freeing up those power slots for making my characters more über? Before you convince yourself that it could never happen, please keep in mind that 1) I never thought that I'd see the day when they'd sell a gameplay-affecting power, and 2) All of the other powers I mentioned are 3rd-level pool powers, just like Fly.

To summarize, those who pay extra are now getting gameplay advantages over those who don't. This isn't even the first time those who pay extra get a gameplay perk; that precedent was set by offering respecifications for sale. (Money = infinite unearned respecifiations.)

While this may seem cool, and as a long-time player, I might even snag it, once the novelty of it wears off, it is a direction for the game that I think is so totally wrong. If I were a new player to the game, I seriously doubt I would keep playing it today. Once I realized how much it would cost to get the cool costumes, emotes, and now gameplay advantages that other players have, I'd look for some other less expensive diversion.

I'm going to ask the devs and powers-that-be at NCsoft one last time. Please stop nickle-and-diming your loyal players, and especially, never again offer a gameplay advantage to those who are willing to pay extra. I highly urge you to err on the side of not extracting as much money as you might be able to, because once you cross that threshold, once you finally go too far and lose the loyal players you've built up over the years, you won't be able to go back to the way it was before.

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So I respond to a "Guest Writers for the Scoop Wanted" classified, confirm I'm writing a guest article, and then my article gets shunted into Classifieds itself. What a waste of my time.

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For what it's worth, we love you on Infinity, Tex.

No, just no issue this week. It will presumably return to its regularly scheduled programming next week.

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The black font on blue background is difficult to read.

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Please, please, please change the color of the headings to yellow. Black text works neither on the darkish blue nor the darkish red background.

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...however I will now think twice about any pre-ordering incentives given in the future. I mean what is the point of ordering early just to have your bonus taken away at a future date?

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How was your bonus taken away?

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<Devil's Advocate>

One could argue that the bonus is the fact that the items are limited. It's kind of like if you get a baseball autographed by Derek Jeter, it might be worth a lot. But if they build a machine that can exactly duplicate Derek Jeter's signature on a ball and started dumping them on the market, your baseball would suddenly become worthless. The value of what you own lies in its rarity, and it would suddenly plummet, effectively taking it away from you. There are real-world non-hypothetical examples of this in other places as well.

</Devil's Advocate>

However, an alternative viewpoint, one I subscribe to, is that the bonus wasn't necessarily CoV pre-orders having the helmets, it's was in CoV pre-orders having the helmets for over two and a half years when no one else could get them.

Plus, as has been pointed out, unlike the CoV pre-order, I can finally get a helmet that I'd actually want to use. I have the CoV pre-order, and that eraser head helmet is butt-ugly. I want the Wolf Spider helmet, and I'm thrilled that some of my characters can now use it.

So put me squarely in the column of people saying, "Finally!" I'm surprised they didn't do this a lot earlier.

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I foresee much rejoicing.

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Yay.

(Seriously. This is a great thing.)

Suggestion: Get two people to write the Point / Counterpoint article. As it is, the counterpoint usually comes off sounding a bit like, "here are some objections I've heard, but they obviously don't outweigh the original argument made in the Point section."

In this week's Counterpoint, for example, I don't think enough was made of the fact that players on a trial account won't be able to experience the game as most players do. They'll barely be able to use the market at all, and they'll have to depend on the kindness of complete strangers to even see a base.

Also, I think the most glaring problem with the trial account nerfs was completely left out: the fact that when a trial account player does make a friend, the lack of tells means that they have to literally hunt them down in order to initiate a conversation with them. Try to hunt someone down sometime that has no clue that you're looking for them. Don't use any travel powers; trial accounts are capped at 13, so they won't have them. You might get lucky and run across them in one of the usual places. If the person you're looking for is in their base or a mission, you're SOL. Also, the Draconian way that the change was implemented with virtual assets being deleted of people who had already been playing on trial accounts wasn't mentioned.

I mean, come on, is "This can be a strong incentive to start a full access account" really supposed to be a Counterpoint? Shoot, that sounds more like it belongs in the Point section.

I'm not saying that the things I mentioned outweigh the benefits of the changes, but I think the article would be orders of magnitude better if it's written from two genuinely independent points of view.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

How can you have a list of top ten spoilers without: HE is Keyser Soze!

I guess "He was dead all along" refers to Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, but when I first saw it, I thought of Tim Robbins in another of my favorite movies, Jacob's Ladder. It applies equally well.

Fun filler article, though; nice job.

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<ul type="square">[*] Global Chat Handle reset
All accounts initially start with the ability to change their global chat handle one time. This grant will reset that and allow accounts who had previously changed their global chat handle to do so again. This is a one time chat handle change, so please use it wisely.[/list]
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So just to clarify, because I DON'T want to screw this up.

If I haven't changed my global chat handle yet and I do so BEFORE May 30, then AFTER May 30 if I change my mind, I'll be able to change it again?

Also, if I do change my global chat handle, is it released for another account to take it? And if so, how long after I change it does it take to release it?

I ask because I'm considering finally getting Belle set up with her own global chat channel, but if I do, then I'd like for another account to pick up the @TonyV handle that I'm using now. The main thing I'm worried about is that if I change the handle for one account from @TonyV to something like @Belle, would I be able to change the handle for the other account from whatever it is now to @TonyV, or would that handle remain locked for some period of time (or even permanently)?

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Sorry gang, no answers to those questions are available at this time. This announcement is more for the business side of things, with the actual goods to come later as the tech is put to use and made ready for consumption by users.

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So what I'm curious about is whether or not the game launcher will be changing as well. Right now, the updater just loads a web site (specifically, this one) and calls home to check for updates.

When Tabula Rasa was released, it looked like NCsoft was going for a "universal" launcher for all of their games, a launcher that would display news and info like the current one, but that would be used to launch any of their games that a user had installed, and that ran in the background and would download and install updates even if the player wasn't at their computer. It looked pretty neat, and I think they even had it working with City of Heroes, but they never pushed it out as the replacement launcher.

This has probably already been mentioned, but The Paragon Wiki has an article on ingame references. It's a good read, and if you find something else, please be sure to add it!

Congrats to Children of DATA for a huge and successful event on Infinity. There really were a ton of heroes. Belle was lucky enough to snag an invitation to the base to watch the final judging, and all of the contestants really did look fantastic.

She loved the base, too. She's been working some of its ideas into the Taxibots base.

As weird as it sounds, you might want to include a link to something like Amazon.com for U.S. people to order game time cards on. There are folks here who use them and have trouble finding them in their local retail outlets.

glaq

What? You said to make a new word, and it's a new word!

Oh, okay...

Um...

goad

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Duly noted and fixed on my doc!

Ex

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Fixed. You Americans and yer spellings

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I think she meant that she noted it twice before fixing it.

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So if we need to alter something, or change something we’ll have to actually go to the players knowledge-base, like ParagonWiki where they’ve pulled everything out of the game, and see “OK, we haven’t told them that” or “We have told them that”

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I've got to frame that or something.

When the spam is an e-mail, please remember to leave the e-mail in your inbox when you report it. I don't know this for sure, but the logs might not keep a record of all sent and received e-mail that's easily accessible. Every time I've reported a spam e-mail, I've left it in my inbox. The GM deletes it out for you when he or she gets to the petition, and the character that sent it goes away.

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These are the accounts that need to be suspended because these are the accounts that have all the toons who have all the inf.

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Actually, the way I understand it to work, this isn't true. The influence comes from a "money mule" to make the actual delivery, not the account that actually farmed the influence to make the transfer. With a little investigation and some poring over log files, it can be found out who gave them their money, but it would be a little needle-in-a-haystackish.

Influence spammers aren't stupid. (Well, for the most part, anyway.) But then, neither is NCsoft. Lighthouse has said repeatedly that more is in the works regarding this problem, I just don't want anyone to get the idea that it would simply be a matter of paying them $10 and *bam,* problem solved.