New efforts!

[Noyjitat]

SWG is still out there and all three versions. NGE, pre cu and cu.

As for coh my wallet is ready to donate for anyone out there that really gives a damn and wants to do more than wait and gamble on the ncsoft stalemate. I'll even donate hardware for a test server or take out a loan to buy better hardware and host for the developers test server myself.

I'll be the one to go down in flames since I'd be the one hosting and I seriously don't give a shit at this point.

[LaughingAlex]

It's always easy to gamble with somebody else's time, money, and responsibility.

On a fairly tangentially related note: You know what makes me feel old? Today I received this in my email:

Free Realms has been gone for at least two years now. At this point, my gaming career is marked as much or more by the games I've lost than by the games I play.

City of Heroes - Gone.
Free Realms - Gone.
Matrix Online - Gone.
Tabula Rasa - Gone.
Earth and Beyond - Gone.
Sims Online - Gone.
Everquest Next - Canceled. Landmark may or may not make it to status of "published game".
Everquest Online Adventures - Gone.
Star Wars Galaxies - Gone
Auto Assault - Gone
Dungeon Runners - Gone
Fable Legends - Canceled
Warhammer Age of Reckoning - Gone

Meanwhile Age of Conan inexplicably continues to survive...

One thing that most of these games have in common is player base that still fondly remembers them. A handful have working emulators created by a few dedicated fans but most are simply gone and their remaining communities are not too different from this community. The organization of Titan and the dangling hope that NCSoft has unintentionally held out all these years is what makes the difference compared to the communities that simply reminisce about walking uphill both ways in the snow. Those that have some sort of community forum have their own visitors who drop by looking for an emu or offer to applaud someone else to do the work of making one but few involve someone with skill and drive offering to take the risk and the burden of responsibility.

I'm not going to categorically say we'll never have City of Heroes again, but I don't have any personal expectations of that ever happening.

You know what my birthday wish would be? Not that people attached to City of Heroes would give up that attachment, but that they pick one of the games out there that IS alive and that needs some life and some support and give it a try. You can't bring back CoH and you can't affect the process, if it ever happens, of NCSoft releasing the IP. What you can do is help a Pirates of the Burning Sea or a LOTRO or a Secret World or even a Dark Age of Camelot or an Age of Conan to stay alive for another day.

The death of the MMORPG is on the horizon, at least in the form that we've all known it. There are a lot of reasons for that, and while there will probably always be some coelacanth of a game out there somewhere, we are approaching the day when you may look back and say, "I wish I'd tried some of those games while there were still some games to try."

This is kind of the reason on the 12th anniversary party I ended up kind of ranting about mmorpgs being a slowly out-dated genre that'll die purely due to not keeping up with the times.  It feels like mmorpgs don't try to keep up with technology so we end up with games overly dependent on single client/server in a way that prevents the games from standing the test of time.  The lack of modding cuts them short even further.  Modding can easily extend a games lifespan to practically forever, as even newer hardware and operating systems can be overcome by bringing the game up to modern standards of supported hardware.  MMORPG genre, if it wishes to survive, needs to catch up;

Stop repeating the same game over and over again.  Raids and holy trinity are old and players don't like them anymore except for those types who never play anything else and treat games as second jobs.
Let players make content and find ways to allow for balancing that content.  Stop giving up.
Treat players the meaning of content fun and whatnot.  MMORPG players themselves are partially to blame for mmorpg stagnation as they tend to only care about winning, they need to learn or more relearn how to have fun.
Start picking up the better modern trends of games.

Ultimately, they need to innovate.  They continue making holy trinity grindfests and they continue to use out-dated design practices imo.  It's killing the genre.

[TimtheEnchanter]

Ultimately, they need to innovate.  They continue making holy trinity grindfests and they continue to use out-dated design practices imo.  It's killing the genre.

If nothing else, VR will probably bring them back. Though that may not be the kind of MMO a lot of us want.

Again, as I said pages ago, this is all the fault of idiots trying to force a repeat of WoW's success. We need some PRIVATE companies who are satisfied with just doing as well as Everquest did at its peak.

[Remaugen]

Maybe its been mentioned but the reason I never thought lightsabers or laser pistols would work is because wouldn't they just cauterize the wounds right away?

That's a widely held belief but it is really just not the case. At least not with today's lasers, though in theory they could be made powerful enough to simply vaporize their target. Modern lasers create wound cavities that are very difficult to tell apart from bullet wounds as they both create wound cavities exactly the same way. It's called "Hyrdrostatic Shock".

When a bullet impacts a body, it causes fluids (which do not compress) to rush away from the point of impact, these rapidly moving fluids rip through everything in their path, creating massive wound cavities far larger than the projectile. When a laser impacts a body, it super heats the fluids near the point of impact, as they expand and rush away, it causes a wound cavity in exactly the same manner as the bullet. The resulting wounds are difficult to tell apart initially by eye, though forensics will show signs of the lasers heat and lack of projectile fragments or bullet path. 

[Noyjitat]

I like holy trinities and raids myself and I also liked the way coh did it. Group based combat works better when everyone has a task and sticks to it: You're either the tank, one of the many dpsers or support, buffs/heals. This also worked much better in CoX in hard content if you built a balanced team instead of nothing but damage. AVs died faster if you had debuffs and and squishies died slower with a tank on the team or a good buffer.

[slickriptide]

SWG is still out there and all three versions. NGE, pre cu and cu.

The Earth and Beyond effect applies to Star Wars Galaxies. Emulators exist because the people with a vested interest in preventing them don't care.

Daybreak doesn't care because, unlike NCSoft, they have historically taken a "blind eye" approach to emulators, and Galaxies wasn't really their game. It belonged to Lucasarts. Once Lucasarts shut Galaxies down, SOE/Daybreak ceased to have any interest in it. They're concerned with staying in business these days, not with people recreating acdead game.

Lucaaarts might have cared if it was impacting KOTOR  but the people playing a Galaxies emu are self-selected to be people who wouldn't play KOTOR. Now Lucasarts is gone and emus for a dead game are not even on Disney's radar.

NCSoft, conversely, has demonstrated multiple times that they care about people exploiting their games, alive or dead.

[Noyjitat]

Lucaaarts might have cared if it was impacting KOTOR  but the people playing a Galaxies emu are self-selected to be people who wouldn't play KOTOR.

And the consensus among coh players is that they won't play any of ncsofts games so this applies to us

Now Lucasarts is gone and emus for a dead game are not even on Disney's radar.

So are you more likely to believe that the deal to sell coh is really on ncsofts radar when they've been in "negotiations" and "talks" for over 2 years now" You really think ncsoft is doing more than holding a carrot on a stick at this point?

NCSoft, conversely, has demonstrated multiple times that they care about people exploiting their games, alive or dead.

You don't scare me, work on it

[Arcana]

Actually, guys.  I seem to remember an episode of junk yard wars where they had to build machines that would take the force that 2 rams put on each other when they headbutt.  Part of the show covered why 2 rams can headbutt hard and yet walk away without any apparent head trauma.   If I remember right, the upper skull and horns are honey combed in some fashion so that the pockets could absorb the impact and provide a way for the brain not to experience a hard stop.  Could have been bighorn sheep.

Human heels are like that as well I believe.  I do remember a guy at a construction site who fell off of a 2nd story and landed on his heels.  1 on dirt.  the other on concrete.  He was taken to the hospital where they find his heel was shattered on the inside.  They had to rake out what looked like match twigs from the inside of the heel.  I know they placed a screw in his heel to keep it together after they cleaned out the hollow space.  Of course this was the jobsite nurse telling me this.  Couldn't name the guy in question but explained the accident and what had to be done to give him relief.

Possible Iron Man's armor incorporates something like that.  In all honesty, I seriously doubt a single device, item, etc is responsible for allowing him to take such punishment.  Probably a combination of systems.

It is easy to get distracted into thinking the problem with Iron Man is to protect the suit.  If the suit survives the guy inside also does.  Or to assume the guy inside is like a solid block of wood: as long as the guy inside doesn't move around too much, it will also be fine.

The truth is that when thinking about protecting a human body against the kind of forces we're talking about, the mental model for the human body is closer to twelve eggs rolling around in a wooden box, itself inside a solid steel box.  You can move it, even shake it a little.  But if you drop it, you have scrambled eggs.  Make the box stronger, and you still have scrambled eggs.  Pad the space between the wooden box and the steel box with a couple inches of bubble wrap and drop it from twenty feet, and you still have scrambled eggs.  The problem is not the space between the wooden box and the steel box, it is the space between the eggs and the wooden box.  Similarly, the problem is not the space between the Iron Man armor and Tony Stark's skin.  It is not the space between the Iron Man helmet and Tony Stark's skull.  It is the space between Tony Stark's brain and Tony Stark's skull.  It is the space between Tony Stark's heart and Tony Stark's rib cage.  Even if the armor somehow protects Tony Stark's body from ever feeling any forces from the outside, his internal organs will still smash into his skeleton at high speed from the inside.

I looked up the NHTSA numbers for acceleration injuries and it seems the guideline is 75 gees is the acceleration which will likely cause serious or fatal injuries in 50% of average age/height/weight men (aka Tony Stark) and 15 milliseconds is the average impact time for a human body.  That's the result of an impact at 11 m/s or about 25mph.  Probably a lot lower than people think**.  Things like crumple zones and seat belts increase the deceleration time from 15 ms impacts to longer sustained decelerations which increase the survivable speed.  If we guestimate that the Iron Man armor has about 3 cm to play around with (the distance Tony Stark could decelerate while inside the armor before striking something) we can estimate the maximum velocity Tony Stark could strike an object (like the ground) that doesn't deform on collision much such that the armor decelerates Tony at the maximum 75gees throughout the 3cm distance and then Tony hits the inside of the armor.  D = 0.5aT^2, so 0.03 = 0.5(735m/s^2)(T^2); t = 0.009 or about 9 ms.  That translates to an initial velocity of about 6.615 m/s or about 15 mph.  So the maximum "safe" impact velocity for the Iron Man suit striking a non-yielding object is about 17.6 m/s or 39 mph.  That's about the impact velocity from falling about 16 meters or 52 feet starting from zero.

So if the Iron Man armor had perfect shock absorbing technology you could expect to survive a fall from about fifty feet in the armor (assuming you landed reasonably flat) or a crash at about 40 mph with minimal injury.  At least half the time.  Anything higher or faster than that and you'd be lucky to walk away from the landing.  This assumes the armor is infinitely strong and doesn't break ever, and whatever absorbs the deceleration of impacts works with 100% efficiency, and the armor isn't too much larger than Tony's body on the inside.


** I recently had the opportunity to analyze the effects of impacts at comparable velocities when I was struck by a car while in a marked crosswalk.  Based on an analysis I did of the accident - because of course I did - I guestimate the impact velocity at between 10 and 15 mph.  That relatively low velocity impact was enough to send me to the emergency room, and a surprising amount of the injuries sustained were due not to the impact of the car on me, but me hitting the ground after the point of impact.  It turns out 10 mph is slow when you're driving but very fast when it is something hitting you, or you hitting something else.

[TimtheEnchanter]

Lucaaarts might have cared if it was impacting KOTOR  but the people playing a Galaxies emu are self-selected to be people who wouldn't play KOTOR. Now Lucasarts is gone and emus for a dead game are not even on Disney's radar.

NCSoft, conversely, has demonstrated multiple times that they care about people exploiting their games, alive or dead.

I worry that the Mouse might declare war on fan projects soon though.

[Codewalker]

So are you more likely to believe that the deal to sell coh is really on ncsofts radar when they've been in "negotiations" and "talks" for over 2 years now"

I'm not really sure who you're making that argument to. Of the people I know who have the technical skills to even think about attempting what you're advocating, not a single one of them have ever believed there was more than a snowball's chance in hell of NCSoft agreeing to sell, not today, not 2 years ago...

[LaughingAlex]

I like holy trinities and raids myself and I also liked the way coh did it. Group based combat works better when everyone has a task and sticks to it: You're either the tank, one of the many dpsers or support, buffs/heals. This also worked much better in CoX in hard content if you built a balanced team instead of nothing but damage. AVs died faster if you had debuffs and and squishies died slower with a tank on the team or a good buffer.

Healers weren't necessary in CoH, in fact they were the least useful person in a team.  It's better to think of CoH as a game in which you had "muscle" and "backbone".  Characters with muscle were those whos raw stats were higher on there own, tankers/blasters/brutes ect, backbone characters made themselves and everyone stronger with buffs, weakened enemies with debuffs and protected the team with crowd control(even tankers could be seen somewhat as crowd control).

It wasn't so much as a trinity team game as a team game in which you had a huge variety of means to actually make things work and a wide variety of solutions to solve problems a team would face with.  Most holy trinity games from what I hear utterly fail at that.  I know for certain CO fails miserably at that.

To me, a trinity team in CoX that was boring consisted of: 1-2 tankers with the "strongest" defense set, 2-3 empathy defenders and the rest blasters.  Such teams were  not to common in the last 2-3 years I played, but I saw them frequently enough earlier on.  Teams like this couldn't take on more then one group at a time as the empathy defenders almost never used there buffs.  And in severe cases, those players would get all the credit for the teams success even if it was only due to the tankers and blasters actually being good players making up for the bad empaths.

A true CoX team however could consist of any combination of archtypes and could sport a wide variety of buffs/debuffs, you couldn't truely say who was truely making the team unstoppable.  All you could say, was the team was more than the sum of it's parts which is truely what a good team experience should amount to.  Maybe the team had no tankers/brutes, who cared though when it had three controllers and a dominator all locking everything down and a bunch of corruptors buffing everyones defenses/resistances to tanker levels of durability anyways.  Or maybe the blasters in that all blaster team had a few darkness blasters and an ice/ice blaster controlling the few dangerous enemies ect.  Maybe it was all tankers but they had one kineticist maxing the damage out.  There was variety in the game because people could synergize there powersets together into an unstoppable force.  And it was because the players in that team all understood there powersets and made them work.

[slickriptide]

And the consensus among coh players is that they won't play any of ncsofts games so this applies to us

That just is not true, despite the few vocal people who swear that NCSoft is the Devil and they'll see them bankrupt before they play any of their games.  Rather a lot of ex-CoH players moved on to Guild Wars 2 and Wildstar, as well as several non-NCSoft games.

So are you more likely to believe that the deal to sell coh is really on ncsofts radar when they've been in "negotiations" and "talks" for over 2 years now"

Nope. So, what? That's neither here nor there when it comes to NCSoft enforcing their IP rights.

More importantly, what's in it for the people who devote their time and skills to creating this emulator?

It's a bit of an odd thing. None of the people who have the skills and understanding to make an emulator are interested in making one. Maybe City of Heroes breeds people who prefer to innovate instead of iterate. Sure, the hope of a revival plays into it, as does the fear of reprisal, but neither of those things has ever stopped a really dedicated crew of emulator programmers.

If you want an emulator so badly then you need to find your own carrot. It's clearly going to take more than bombast. There's been plenty of that to go around in the past three years and it hasn't accomplished anything.

Either that or get your own crew together and have at it. I find Codewalker to be pretty open about passing on knowledge, especially when I ask the right questions (or, more frequently, the wrong questions and he's showing me what I should have been asking).  Arcana is generally willing to discuss the intricacies of the game with anyone who is able to hold up their end of the discussion.

Find your own band of smart people and get them started - but I have a feeling you'll find that the people you'll need are already occupied doing the things that interest them. Around here, those interests don't seem to include faithfully emulating a dead game.

[Paragon Avenger]

Weekly Update:

No news is good news; unofficially.

[slickriptide]

a surprising amount of the injuries sustained were due not to the impact of the car on me, but me hitting the ground after the point of impact. 

Oddly, I remember being taught that very thing as early as third grade. I think it must have been an effort by the school authorities to convince kids to avoid playing in the street around buses.

[slickriptide]

I worry that the Mouse might declare war on fan projects soon though.

Well, you never can discount that from the House of Mouse, given their track record, but I suspect that even if they know about SW:G emulators, that they'd prefer to ignore them rather than generate a lot of backlash amongst fans of the properties that they're currently selling pretty hard. An emu isn't like a mural on a wall of a daycare, that people drive by and see every day or work and play around every day. It's a very specialized interest and you have to deliberately search it out in order to find it. Especially when it's an intellectual property that was dead before they acquired the rights to it, and now that acquired rightsholder is also dead.

If someone started taking out recruitment ads on Facebook or something, then they'd have to take notice. Otherwise, I don't think they have any desire to interfere or, more likely, any real knowledge about the state of Star Wars game emulators.

***EDIT***

In fact, if someone at the House of Mouse was savvy enough to know the ins and outs of SW:G emulators, I'd expect them to also be aware of the whole Nostalrius controversy that played out with Blizzard recently, and asking themselves whether enforcing the letter of the law concerning a dead property was going to be worth the potential backlash.

[Noyjitat]

Healers weren't necessary in CoH, in fact they were the least useful person in a team.  It's better to think of CoH as a game in which you had "muscle" and "backbone".  Characters with muscle were those whos raw stats were higher on there own, tankers/blasters/brutes ect, backbone characters made themselves and everyone stronger with buffs, weakened enemies with debuffs and protected the team with crowd control(even tankers could be seen somewhat as crowd control).

It wasn't so much as a trinity team game as a team game in which you had a huge variety of means to actually make things work and a wide variety of solutions to solve problems a team would face with.  Most holy trinity games from what I hear utterly fail at that.  I know for certain CO fails miserably at that.

To me, a trinity team in CoX that was boring consisted of: 1-2 tankers with the "strongest" defense set, 2-3 empathy defenders and the rest blasters.  Such teams were  not to common in the last 2-3 years I played, but I saw them frequently enough earlier on.  Teams like this couldn't take on more then one group at a time as the empathy defenders almost never used there buffs.  And in severe cases, those players would get all the credit for the teams success even if it was only due to the tankers and blasters actually being good players making up for the bad empaths.

A true CoX team however could consist of any combination of archtypes and could sport a wide variety of buffs/debuffs, you couldn't truely say who was truely making the team unstoppable.  All you could say, was the team was more than the sum of it's parts which is truely what a good team experience should amount to.  Maybe the team had no tankers/brutes, who cared though when it had three controllers and a dominator all locking everything down and a bunch of corruptors buffing everyones defenses/resistances to tanker levels of durability anyways.  Or maybe the blasters in that all blaster team had a few darkness blasters and an ice/ice blaster controlling the few dangerous enemies ect.  Maybe it was all tankers but they had one kineticist maxing the damage out.  There was variety in the game because people could synergize there powersets together into an unstoppable force.  And it was because the players in that team all understood there powersets and made them work.

Reading 101, read what you quoted.

[Noyjitat]

I'm not really sure who you're making that argument to. Of the people I know who have the technical skills to even think about attempting what you're advocating, not a single one of them have ever believed there was more than a snowball's chance in hell of NCSoft agreeing to sell, not today, not 2 years ago...

I don't need to add anything else to your statement. Now that a brain like you has made this clear.

[Noyjitat]

That just is not true, despite the few vocal people who swear that NCSoft is the Devil and they'll see them bankrupt before they play any of their games.  Rather a lot of ex-CoH players moved on to Guild Wars 2 and Wildstar, as well as several non-NCSoft games.

actually it is true and we all know just how long wildstar lasted before it went free to play due to poor ncsoft management skills and bad dev choices.

More importantly, what's in it for the people who devote their time and skills to creating this emulator?

Oh I don't know... perhaps being able to play the damn game they miss? Don't be a pin head

In fact, if someone at the House of Mouse was savvy enough to know the ins and outs of SW:G emulators, I'd expect them to also be aware of the whole Nostalrius controversy that played out with Blizzard recently, and asking themselves whether enforcing the letter of the law concerning a dead property was going to be worth the potential backlash.

The people that wrote / stole code for all project's has been spread like aids all over the internet now. If they kill one server another will popup. Also only the big wow servers ever get targeted.

[Felderburg]

...which also led to the conclusion that cross-guards were completely unnecessary because the blades NEVER slide against one another (and now you know which side of the Kylo saber debate I stand on).

Kylo Ren didn't use them to prevent sliding in the film - they had a completely different but still practical usage.

It kinda suggests that his suit when powered, has some sort of shielding system as well.
Its never said explicitly, but it kinda feels like his power systems provide structural integrity.

We do see him injecting armor homing beacons in earlier films. I see no reason to think he didn't also surgically implant protective stuff too.

In fact, if someone at the House of Mouse was savvy enough to know the ins and outs of SW:G emulators, I'd expect them to also be aware of the whole Nostalrius controversy that played out with Blizzard recently, and asking themselves whether enforcing the letter of the law concerning a dead property was going to be worth the potential backlash.

I thought they turned around and invited the nostralius developers to their HQ, and are now spinning it in a positive way.

[Noyjitat]

The community of that server was pissed and the wow / blizzard services felt the wrath of ddos attacks among other things. So Blizzard probably thought it was in their best interest to not be a dick this time. Whether anything comes of it, only time will tell.