New efforts!

[slickriptide]

It's a little ironic that if Dungeonrunner was to be launched today as a tablet app in our post-Torchlight/post-Diablo-3 freemium-oriented world that it would probably be reasonably successful.

There has been more than one occasion where I felt that NCSoft's problem was less that they were making unpopular games than that they were making games that were 5-10 years ahead of their time.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Did I wander onto some parallel earth's internet?

That depends.......are their Shrimp Memes instead of Cat Memes

[LateNights]

As for hanging around here, I don't see any conflict between nostalgia for City of Heroes and being realistic about how the MMORPG industry operates and how the general online games industry operates.

But why is this so different from what anyone else is doing?

Because you're going along with the status quo?

Awesome, hope that works out for you...

Although, I'd point you towards Kickstarter if you wanted an idea of how things might pan out in the next decade or so.

Anyway, granted it's a long shot, but I'm sure I've already heard the case for "abandon ware" and it's "fair use" being made elsewhere - in fact I think it's even been mentioned in this very thread.

As far as making an offline mode a feature - what about the efforts toward CoH 1.5?
- Is it not worth asking the people involved whether it's a feature they might consider?

Or what if Paragon Chat is a raging success and leads to a combat ready version?
- I know something along those lines has been either hinted at or straight up suggested as the next evolution / project for the Titan team involved with PC.

But claiming that no one has any right to query what is or isn't "fair" out of hand really isn't helping anything, and never will.

[Arcana]

Or what if Paragon Chat is a raging success and leads to a combat ready version?
- I know something along those lines has been either hinted at or straight up suggested as the next evolution / project for the Titan team involved with PC.

I don't think anyone has directly implied that (that knows anything).  What I do know is that:

1.  Paragon Chat is extremely unlikely to add combat or general gameplay features.  Those are technically and conceptually incompatible with what I believe Codewalker sees Paragon Chat as being.

2.  The Paragon Chat "team"** could theoretically attempt to reverse engineer a completely separate application that did act as a game server, but that would be contingent on Codewalker (or someone else) figuring out how to reverse engineer and implement a specific set of things as a necessary prerequisite.  I would expect to see the subset of those things that are logically compatible with Paragon Chat actually happen in Paragon Chat first.  If I had to guess, I'd say we're at least a year away from seeing that prerequisite list of features appearing in Paragon Chat, if not more.

I have a lot of respect for Codewalker's capabilities, but I wouldn't expect Paragon Chat's development to lead to a playable game in any shape or form on a timescale less than years.

As far as making an offline mode a feature - what about the efforts toward CoH 1.5?
- Is it not worth asking the people involved whether it's a feature they might consider?

Its probably a question best directed at those development teams specifically, but it is also not likely to be a fruitful one for the simple reason that as I mentioned previously, technically speaking all of those efforts have a theoretical offline mode if they choose to release their server-side development work to the community.  Conversely, actually engineering an offline mode on a more game theoretical contextual level is probably something they'd all consider a distraction to the general desire to make a playable game at all.  So there's an easy way for them to avoid the "offline/shutdown" problem that they could easily do, and a very challenging way to innovate an entirely new solution to that problem that, if I'm being candid here, if it was within their ability to do we'd already have playable games by now.


** I know Codewalker doesn't develop in a vacuum, but I also don't have the exact details of who does what.  Given that the people I think are most qualified and likely to be assisting are conspicuously silent, I always refer to Codewalker solely whether that's strictly accurate or not, unless and until they express a desire to be the subject of discussion.

[slickriptide]

But claiming that no one has any right to query what is or isn't "fair"

Did I say that? I think you'd have some difficulty quoting me as saying anything like that.

 I did say that everyone who paid for City of Heroes got what they paid for. To quote William Munney, "Fair ain't got nothin' to do with it."

.

[slickriptide]

I have a lot of respect for Codewalker's capabilities, but I wouldn't expect Paragon Chat's development to lead to a playable game in any shape or form on a timescale less than years.

My hope for Paragon Chat is that it will lead to a kind of a "sandbox" where people with some drive and a bit of tenacity can make their own game-like activities using the client functions as building blocks, figuratively speaking.

On the other hand, I'm also interested in just how far you can push it under the right circumstances.

Assuming I get off my butt and finish adding player tracking and scripted "walking around" activity for a bot, I want to find out just how much traffic a hundred bots in a zone will actually generate. It's not that I doubt you or Codewalker when you talk about exponential cascading of metadata traffic. I just want to see it for myself.

I also have a pretty good server at my disposal, at least for the near term, so I'm curious what it can handle. Ejabberd and Openfire both claim that they've been able to handle upwards of 200,000 simultaneous active connections on a single server. They're probably blowing smoke to a great extent, for marketing purposes, but if they can actually handle that volume of traffic then it seems to me that the metadata traffic of a couple of hundred CoH players should be manageable even if it is massive in comparison to the ordinary chat traffic of  those same 200 players.

You know that scene in _Armageddon_ where Ben Afflek, the hot-shot young guy, is swearing that NASA is just playing it safe and that the drill can handle being pushed past its specs, even though the fate of the world is in the balance if he fails? I'm interested in pushing through the gas pocket, heh.

.

[LateNights]

Did I say that? I think you'd have some difficulty quoting me as saying anything like that.

That might have been the time, though, for anyone who felt that it was a bad thing to spend money on a game and lose it, for that person to take stock of what they were spending their money on.

Pretty sure this is as close as you can get without using the words.

Again, that makes precious little sense when you're using what amounts to illegal software in Paragon Chat...

So, which stance is actually your stance?

Or do you really not understand the choice you made when you decided to use PC?

As long as you got $15 worth of entertainment in a month, you got your money's worth. That's all you're entitled to. If you buy digital goods, and you lose them when the server closes, them's the breaks. You knew what you were signing up for when you made the purchase.

When you pay the fee, you know going in that you're paying for something that has a limited shelf life. If you don't like that, spend your money on something that doesn't have a limited shelf life. Don't buy digital goods and services.

Because you seem to...

[slickriptide]

Because you seem to...

I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion.

It should be abundantly clear that despite the statements you referenced, that I've continued to purchase digital goods and services.

That should lead you to conclude that I, personally, don't have a problem with the limited shelf life of such things. It's a cost of doing business, so to speak.

In any case, does it matter what I think? I'm one person. I don't think my opinion is all that weighty. It's just my opinion. It's not any better or worse than anyone else's opinion. If it conflicts with anyone else's opinion, I'm okay with that. I'm open to hearing a rebuttal of anything I happen to say. Maybe I'm wrong about something. Codewalker and Arcana will confirm that I don't mind being wrong about something. ;-)

***EDIT***

Actually, @LateNight, I'm pretty confused about what point you think I've been making. What does Paragon Chat or its status as "illegal" software (debatable, but your choice of words) have to do with anything? What stance is it that you think I "seem to" be espousing? The quote you hilighted in bold could be re-worded like this:

Anyone who saw Tabula Rasa and the other games being shut down should have taken stock of their usage of City of Heroes, as similar sort of subscription game and realized that CoH could eventually be shut down as well. If spending money on something that could be taken away from that person was something abhorrent, then the person should have considered spending their money elsewhere instead of on a superhero game that could be (and eventually was) shut down.

[Arcana]

Assuming I get off my butt and finish adding player tracking and scripted "walking around" activity for a bot, I want to find out just how much traffic a hundred bots in a zone will actually generate. It's not that I doubt you or Codewalker when you talk about exponential cascading of metadata traffic. I just want to see it for myself.

Its really just a basic math problem.  At a minimum, even if you eliminate echos to yourself, a hundred players would have to send messages to the other ninety-nine players every time they wanted to update position.  That's 9900 messages.  For something like moving combat to work, I think its unlikely you could get away with anything less than fifteen updates per second.  That's 148,500 messages per second.  And that's just for positional data.  A real game server doesn't need to do this because a real game server only accepts inputs from the players and sends its own authoritative output to the players.  A hundred players in a zone only requires the mapserver to process 1500 inputs per second and send 1500 outputs per second to maintain a 15/sec update frequency.  Mapserver network traffic scales as O, while Paragon Chat scales with O^2 (not exponentially).

(Mapserver *computation*, on the other hand, generally scales as something between O and O^2 because the number of possible interactions between entities scales with O^2 while the actual number is usually between the two.  It converged rapidly to O^2 in old-style Hamidon raids though, because players were so closely clustered and running area effect powers which caused the immense lag in those).

But that's not really the deal breaker, since a small eight player instance zone would require a lot less message traffic.  There are other problems much less tractable, like XMPP latency.  XMPP servers aren't designed to be low latency servers.  Distributed enforced synchronization is probably the most academically complex problem.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Anyone who saw Tabula Rasa and the other games being shut down should have taken stock of their usage of City of Heroes, as similar sort of subscription game and realized that CoH could eventually be shut down as well. If spending money on something that could be taken away from that person was something abhorrent, then the person should have considered spending their money elsewhere instead of on a superhero game that could be (and eventually was) shut down.

I'd go as far to say that if you didn't boycott NCSoft when they closed those other games, its down right hypocritical to ask other NCSoft players who weren't involved with CoH to boycott them.

I didn't go to the rescue and boycott NCSoft and CoH when Tabula Rasa was closed, I certainly don't expect GW2 or Wildstars players to do that for me.

EDIT:

And let's be honest, did anyone here boycott NSSoft when those other games got shut down?

[Arcana]

I'd go as far to say that if you didn't boycott NCSoft when they closed those other games, its down right hypocritical to ask other NCSoft players who weren't involved with CoH to boycott them.

I didn't go to the rescue and boycott NCSoft and CoH when Tabula Rasa was closed, I certainly don't expect GW2 or Wildstars players to do that for me.

EDIT:

And let's be honest, did anyone here boycott NSSoft when those other games got shut down?

Wouldn't that have meant terminating your City of Heroes subscription?

[Taceus Jiwede]

Wouldn't that have meant terminating your City of Heroes subscription?

Yes it would mean that.  And I have a feeling no one terminated their CoH sub when those games were shut down.  So at least anyone who didn't cancel their CoH sub and boycott NSCoft has no right to ask other NCSoft players to stop playing their respected game and boycott NCSoft.

Sorry if it seems like an out of left field comment, but there have been times on this board where it is implied anyone who supports NCSoft is either brainwashed or subservient to their evil doings.  The fact is most of NCSoft's player base has no reason to resent NCSoft.

[Arcana]

Yes it would mean that.  And I have a feeling no one terminated their CoH sub when those games were shut down.  So at least anyone who didn't cancel their CoH sub and boycott NSCoft has no right to ask other NCSoft players to stop playing their respected game and boycott NCSoft.

Sorry if it seems like an out of left field comment, but there have been times on this board where it is implied anyone who supports NCSoft is either brainwashed or subservient to their evil doings.  The fact is most of NCSoft's player base has no reason to resent NCSoft.

Sort of a rhetorical question, in that I asked the same question on the official forums within the same context.  Extrapolating people's motives and ethics based on their actions is an incredibly easy thing to do.  Incorrectly.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Sort of a rhetorical question, in that I asked the same question on the official forums within the same context.  Extrapolating people's motives and ethics based on their actions is an incredibly easy thing to do.  Incorrectly.

Oh..........my bad:)

[LateNights]

@LateNight, I'm pretty confused about what point you think I've been making. What does Paragon Chat or its status as "illegal" software (debatable, but your choice of words) have to do with anything?

You're using what is potentially illegal software as the service is no longer offered to you, all the while repeatedly saying how you've dealt with the reality that the service is no longer offered to you?

How in good conscience can you do that if you say that you got what you paid for?

That's absurd...

Sorry, theft.

And hypocritical...

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

You're using what is potentially illegal software as the service is no longer offered to you, all the while repeatedly saying how you've dealt with the reality that the service is no longer offered to you?

How in good conscience can you do that if you say that you got what you paid for?

That's absurd...

Sorry, theft.

And hypocritical...

At best using the game client is copyright infringement, and the legal theories for it probably not being so have been covered more extensively in the Paragon Chat section of the forums, so i won't bother repeating them here. But, just in case you were trying to assert that copyright infringement is theft, which seems like what you'd mean since any other interpretation is odd, to say the least... No, copyright infringement is not theft. It is, oddly enough, copyright infringement.

[LateNights]

At best using the game client is copyright infringement, and the legal theories for it probably not being so have been covered more extensively in the Paragon Chat section of the forums, so i won't bother repeating them here. But, just in case you were trying to assert that copyright infringement is theft, which seems like what you'd mean since any other interpretation is odd, to say the least... No, copyright infringement is not theft. It is, oddly enough, copyright infringement.

What moral dilemma is associated with copyright infringement?

[Arcana]

You're using what is potentially illegal software as the service is no longer offered to you, all the while repeatedly saying how you've dealt with the reality that the service is no longer offered to you?

How in good conscience can you do that if you say that you got what you paid for?

That's absurd...

Sorry, theft.

And hypocritical...

The key word in your statement is "potential."  This would be tricky ground even for someone well versed in the law, but for our purposes here first of all using the CoH game client with Paragon Chat isn't necessarily theft.  First of all, not all jurisdictions would allow for the enforcement of all of the EULA's terms.  In some, while you still cannot do things like copy and distribute the software, you can still use the software that you acquired when you purchased the game.  Here in the US where I am, that's not true but the only thing unambiguously true is that NCSoft would be within its legal rights to revoke its license to me to use the game client.  It is not clear that they have done so.  You cannot argue that shutting down the game servers ought to implicitly revoke that license to use on the basis that there is no longer any legal use case, because there is one.  City of Heroes allowed players to make offline demorecords of the game, and the game client is the only way to play them back.  As that was a legal use case, and that use case still exists, it is not automatically true that NCSoft wanted to revoke all use cases for the software automatically.  It is therefore not definitively true that using the game client with Paragon Chat violates the license agreement.  Even if it did, it wouldn't be theft it would be a violation of the terms of a contract.

[LateNights]

The key word in your statement is "potential."  This would be tricky ground even for someone well versed in the law, but for our purposes here first of all using the CoH game client with Paragon Chat isn't necessarily theft.  First of all, not all jurisdictions would allow for the enforcement of all of the EULA's terms.  In some, while you still cannot do things like copy and distribute the software, you can still use the software that you acquired when you purchased the game.  Here in the US where I am, that's not true but the only thing unambiguously true is that NCSoft would be within its legal rights to revoke its license to me to use the game client.  It is not clear that they have done so.  You cannot argue that shutting down the game servers ought to implicitly revoke that license to use on the basis that there is no longer any legal use case, because there is one.  City of Heroes allowed players to make offline demorecords of the game, and the game client is the only way to play them back.  As that was a legal use case, and that use case still exists, it is not automatically true that NCSoft wanted to revoke all use cases for the software automatically.  It is therefore not definitively true that using the game client with Paragon Chat violates the license agreement.  Even if it did, it wouldn't be theft it would be a violation of the terms of a contract.

What moral dilemma is associated with a violation of terms of contract?

[Arcana]

What moral dilemma is associated with a violation of terms of contract?

That's a weird question.  Generally speaking, the moral dilemma associated with any contract is whether there exists a higher moral purpose to violating a contractual term that overrides the moral obligation to enter into any agreement honestly and with integrity.  I'm not sure what the relevance of that to this discussion is.  I don't appear to be alone in my search for forensic consonance.