Ridiculous Question

[Remaugen]

I am so bored with other games now. I hope we hear soon.

Me too brother, me too. . .

[Arcana]

You're forgetting the golden rule of the internet, Toasty.  If someone disagrees with you, then no matter how politely or reasonably they promote their point of view, they're actively hostile and aggressive, trolling, and probably lots of other derogatory things.

Which is why, whenever someone calls me something like that, they get tossed into the moron box.

The problem is that box is full, and they keep bouncing back out.

[Wyrm]

I am so bored with other games now. I hope we hear soon.

This.  Our core group of 4, who played together probably 7-8 years in CoH, has yet to find a suitable home.  And our fifth hasn't done an MMO since City closed, I think.

Really want our City back...

[InOnePiece]

I don't know why people are dancing around what I consider kind of obvious, but to answer the question of, "Why hasn't Nate come out and said the deal is dead?", it's entirely possible that he is holding out hope that it's still alive even after NCsoft has made it clear, likely through simple non-communication, that it's not.  Or it could be a simple matter of someone he knows telling him, "We need to wait for the right time to approach the executives..." and then there just never seems to be a right time.  I don't know--and it's important to me that you understand that--but in my humble opinion, if it hasn't happened after over a year and a half, it's almost certainly not going to happen this time around.

Couldn't the terms of the NDA extend beyond the negotiating period, as well? I know this isn't reality TV we're talking about here, but I've heard if you're on a show like that you generally can't talk about production for several years after the fact. It makes me wonder if the NDA had a clause that said you can't discuss these negotiations until "X".

[Ultimate15]

I am so bored with other games now. I hope we hear soon.

Ugh. I know, right? I literally log onto Champions Online to keep in touch with the COH community members whom have migrated over there since shutdown...and that's pretty much the sole reason, lol. Trying to play that game only makes me pine for COH even more.

[LaughingAlex]

Ugh. I know, right? I literally log onto Champions Online to keep in touch with the COH community members whom have migrated over there since shutdown...and that's pretty much the sole reason, lol. Trying to play that game only makes me pine for COH even more.

I pretty much only play CO to keep in touch with the friends I have there to.  It gets old spamming arc lightning/concussor beam on everything, or using claw melee, or only two gun.

Likewise while the fun lasts a lot longer I am sure i'll be bored of using explosives in new vegas before long.  I could mess with the robco certified character some more, get to a higher level so I could get a tesla upgrade for a certain robot I got. 

I know I've been bored of skyrim recently due to just running out of ideas or a character and whatnot, I'd need to throw some new mods into it.  I have been messing with diablo 3 periodically, and plan to start a new seasonal character(probably a demon hunter, i tend to enjoy that class far more than the others).  But that has a few days to go yet before I can start the next season, and even then I'll probably hit 70 very very quickly.  At least that game every playthrough will be different due to the randomness of the bosses and levels in the adventure mode.

So back to CO, tried the mechanon arch, and hated the last mission so much I don't think I want to complete it.  It's full of bullcrap zero g but it's the no-control-at-all type.  I had to retcon my character build to a "Proper" build, that is, defensive passive, again, cause the end boss was not scaled or anything.  It just was not fun though, it was a slow-paced slog leading up to said boss and I just decided "screw this".  Like, there was no testing.

All that just makes me want CoX back even more.

[Arcana]

I keep trying to get into CO, it would be to my advantage given I'm a lifer, but for complex reasons CO doesn't hold my attention like CoH did.  In fact, I'm currently playing STO (also a lifer) because it has a significantly better hold on my attention span than CO does.

Also, you know, Star Trek, pew pew.  And they are dumping so much stuff on Delta recruits its like Christmas. 

[Rejolt]

I keep trying to get into CO, it would be to my advantage given I'm a lifer, but for complex reasons CO doesn't hold my attention like CoH did.  In fact, I'm currently playing STO (also a lifer) because it has a significantly better hold on my attention span than CO does.

Also, you know, Star Trek, pew pew.  And they are dumping so much stuff on Delta recruits its like Christmas.

I'm trying to get back into CO (a lifer as well) but it has all the depth of an iOS arena battler with the heavy emphasis on Alerts and Rampages for the good gear. CO does enough right I can't take DCUO seriously and DCUO's lore, team content and active development makes me hate zombie-mode CO that much more.

Arcana, if I gave you 5-10 million and a staff of 20 could you "fix" CO or is it best to burn down and start over?

[duane]

Arcana, if I gave you 5-10 million and a staff of 20 could you "fix" CO or is it best to burn down and start over?

Hey!  Today is the day I have the magic wand that grants unlimited cash, hours and resources.  Make Arcana put that to COH2. :-)

[Arcana]

Arcana, if I gave you 5-10 million and a staff of 20 could you "fix" CO or is it best to burn down and start over?

If you want my honest answer, its both.  I would burn down CO and then fix it.

What I mean is, CO the game is fixable.  Few MMOs are irreparably broken, and there's nothing critically wrong with the engine and infrastructure that I can see.  I would spend that money adding more and better content: more and better content (powersets, powers, power effects, missions, loot, etc, all count as "content") is really what most players want out of their MMOs.  Within that content, I would probably steer the game in the design direction I felt was best, and my design sensibilities are on record (something for everyone, not everything for someone is my golden rule).

The problem is that its often difficult to "fix" things in an MMO because whether something is broken or not is not an objective thing, but a subjective thing based on the prejudices of the most vocal players.  There are many elements of CO, as in most MMOs, where the players and the developers are locked in an adversarial relationship, making graceful change difficult or impossible.

If I'm being honest, I wouldn't pour your 10 million into CO directly: I'd just be setting a lot of it on fire.  I'd take CO, hand it to my developers, and go stealth for about six months to a year building a reboot of CO.  Meanwhile I would put CO into maintenance mode (some would say it already is: see "adversarial relationship" above).  Then I'd pop out of stealth mode, offer players a chance to convert and import their characters into CO 2.0, and try to start fresh.  CO 2.0 would not be a start from scratch game; its relationship to CO would be like CoH Freedom to CoH Issue 8.  But I would get the benefit of a clean slate in terms of player expectations, which is something I feel would be necessary to not waste all that cash.

Incidentally, I can also tell you where I would spend most of that cash.  It wouldn't be on content itself: it would be on content development tools.  The problem with most MMOs is that content creation is ludicrously difficult to make.  In fact, most MMO developers probably work with tools that are worse than a lot of the modding tools out there to mod other games.  And those suck to begin with.  I think game developers have never seen anything but, so they just get used to it.  But the truth is that if it takes an entire team of developers six months to make something like the content in Going Rogue, if the dev team for CO can only release whatever it is they are releasing now, I don't think that's because those developers are bad or slow, I think its because the tools they have to work with are the game dev equivalent of having JK Rowling try to publish the Harry Potter novels using a chisel and stone tablets.

I believe that a quantum leap in tool capabilities is possible, and it could increase developer productivity by literally large multiples.  Not just 20% or 50%; I'd be disappointed if I couldn't get 300% or 500% better output out of better tools, particularly by bringing rapid prototyping to the game.  An MMO that can crank out content at that pace can at least do a better of job not going stale, and it has more time to work on infrastructure improvements.  If you aren't spending all your time and money just trying to get a package of mission content out the door, you might have more time and resources to spend on improving map servers to reduce lag and allow for more things going on, for example, opening the door to wider possibilities for content.

While playing through Star Trek Online featured mission ("Uneasy Allies") when it first released, players ran into a critical bug: at a crucial point in the mission a critical

[Twisted Toon]

While playing through Star Trek Online featured mission ("Uneasy Allies") when it first released, players ran into a critical bug: at a crucial point in the mission a critical

Did I miss the rest of this post?  ???

[Stealth Dart]

"I'm sorry you have used up all available text space for this post.  If you would like to increase your text you will need to deposit one million influence.  All available agents are busy at the moment.  Please stay on the line and an agent will be with you as soon as possible.  There are currently 2,042 customers in the que.  Your business is important to us."  *cue muzak*

[Triplash]

Did I miss the rest of this post?  ???

I'm betting she made a *really* witty joke about how the mission critically failed, by having the sentence critically fail.

That or she did math to it, and now the missing portion can only be seen with a Lucky Charms decoder wheel.

Could go either way with Arcana, honestly.

[Stealth Dart]

There always after me Lucky Charms™ decoder wheel.   ;D

[Arcana]

Did I miss the rest of this post?  ???

Actually, while writing that post I got pulled into a tech support thingy, and forgot I had stopped in the middle of a sentence.  Then I pushed post and went home, because I was in a rush.

What I was going to say was that while playing through Star Trek Online featured mission ("Uneasy Allies") when it first released, players ran into a critical bug: at a crucial point in the mission a critical NPC didn't spawn at all, and thus the mission was impossible to complete (without using a workaround experienced MMO players might guess at, but 99.99% of your playerbase wouldn't).  The reason stupid stuff like that makes it into the game isn't just because QA is retarded.  Its mostly because the way content is created in most MMOs and I presume STO is that the creator doesn't actually "see" what they are creating as they are creating it.  One typo, one untested regression, and stuff breaks or doesn't even work right in the first place.  If content was created with tools that showed the creator what was going to happen as they were writing it, errors like that would happen far less often (its also stupid and careless, but if we eliminate all the stupid careless people from software development we wouldn't get any more software).

Something like the Swift environment Apple released recently would be practically a revolution in MMO content implementation, at least as far as I've seen.  If the prevalent dev tool for MMO developers is Excel, the entire industry effectively has brain damage.

There's also so much that can be done to automate content creation and checking that MMO developers clearly don't use, most of it technology and concepts from the 80s and 90s.  Its worth noting that the Paragon Studios devs primarily designed critters (the powers side, anyway) with Excel and a number 2 pencil.  When players used Mids to play around with player builds, for all the flaws Mids had they were working in an environment so far advanced from what the actual developers of the game were using it was comparable to the difference between someone trying to do all of their business accounting with scraps of paper and a shoebox compared to someone using Quickbooks.  True story: when I worked on the custom critter system I was given access to the devs spreadsheets for critters (among other things).  Although I did use that information to double check a few things and to get a few bits of data I couldn't get any other way, for the most part I did most of my work with my own version of the data that I extracted from the client piggs.

Let that sink in a bit.  The version of the data for powers I yanked out of the client was better than the actual native data the devs actually used to build the game.  With that I could do in minutes what the devs often took days or weeks to do (if at all).  Just because my cobbled together scripting tools were better than their stone knives and bear skins.  That's how much improvement can be achieved with better tools.  Better tools would unlock so much productivity and creativity for MMO devs.  Think of what Paragon could have done if at least on the non-art side of the house everything happened five times faster. How about ten times faster.  How about QA spending more time on complex and subtle problems, and less on stupid regressions.  Designers spending more time thinking about what they wanted to create, and less time performing the drudge work of creating it.  Content designers getting instant feedback about how their content worked that was true to the actual game engine.  That's all achievable with no significant improvements in the current state of the art.  Its actually technology other industries already have.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

Snipped due to Epic Size. Nobody can post a Wall O' Text like Arcana.
Although, I typically want to actually read through hers.
-Me, Just now.

Archaic, painful tools is part of why when the deal is signed the focus of development will be on Revival, and not Legacy. (That and not having the source for Legacy. Or the tools Paragon used. But that's besides my point. ...Moving on.)
Better tools make life so, so much simpler. They can make a 10 hour job into a 15 minute job in some cases. Sometimes it's just a tiny little thing, that only saves you 5 minutes of work...but it saves you 5 minutes of work for EVERY asset you add to the game.

This isn't exactly related to what Arcana is talking about, but it's a nice example of how better tools save time and headache.
Every object in Revival actually has several different "Meshes". One of those is a collision mesh, it's a hidden object that tells the game the physical shape of the object for collision.
One of the nice things added to Unreal Engine 4 is a process that will automatically built a collision mesh when an object is imported into the editor. Now, it doesn't work for all things...I've still got to build some collision meshes by hand for more complex, or large things like the Statue of Atlas. But for a lot of things like Walls, trash cans, newspaper boxes, fences, plaques, cones, cars, some small buildings, and a plethora of other things... The auto generated collision mesh works just fine. Saving me 5-10 minutes per object.
That adds up when you realize that Revival's currently got 2-300 objects.

[Codewalker]

Archaic, painful tools is part of why when the deal is signed the focus of development will be on Revival, and not Legacy. (That and not having the source for Legacy. Or the tools Paragon used. But that's besides my point. ...Moving on.)

Correction, the focus of your development. Important distinction.

[FloatingFatMan]

Correction, the focus of your development. Important distinction.

If we get the legacy game back, I have a suspicion that "certain unnamed persons" will, in fact, be able to bring us some new content...

[Arcana]

If we get the legacy game back, I have a suspicion that "certain unnamed persons" will, in fact, be able to bring us some new content...

If the legacy game comes back legitimately, its not a question of "able" but "willing."  If we do get a legal version of the game servers running, there exist people capable of writing content for it.  I'm sure many of the former Paragon devs still remember how to do that, for example, and some would be willing to pass that knowledge along.

The question would rest more with whether the game operators were willing to set up the infrastructure necessary to propagate game client updates (necessary for new content) and whether there exists a pool of people both willing and able to create new content for the original game engine, as opposed to any other project that might or might not be competing for that time.  And I suspect that if the original game returned intact, there would be people willing to spend the time necessary to come up to speed on how to do that.

[FloatingFatMan]

The question would rest more with whether the game operators were willing to set up the infrastructure necessary to propagate game client updates (necessary for new content) and whether there exists a pool of people both willing and able to create new content for the original game engine, as opposed to any other project that might or might not be competing for that time.  And I suspect that if the original game returned intact, there would be people willing to spend the time necessary to come up to speed on how to do that.

These days, the cheapest option there would be use one of the many cloud based CDN's available at quite affordable rates. No need to build your own expensive distribution method.