New efforts!

[LadyVamp]

   Yeppers.  Got a lot of Gurps Sourcebooks. I use them to pad out my Megaverse.  Its really just a matter of who's rules ya like.

Same here.  Also have d20 modern and d20 star wars as well as an army of ad&d books from 30+ years ago.

[Linuial]

I don't think Dunning-Kruger is the final word on this, because while it explains the tendency for unknowledgeable people to be less likely to acquire more knowledge, it does not explain how people transition from unknowledgeable to knowledgeable in the first place.

Ermmm....Arcana, I bow to you in all ways technological...just *reading* some of this "stuff" is head-ache inducing, and my skill set is so obsolete that I can only get the big picture of most of what you are talking about.  However, if Dunning-Kruger explains what you say, that must be new information, and is not what I was referring to.  (And I apologize profusely if I was unclear...I was trying to avoid my usual encyclopedic style of explanation.)  The last information I had on Dunning-Kruger said nothing about "the tendency for unknowledgeable people to be less likely to acquire more knowledge".  In fact, Dunning specifically asserts that most people are competent in one or more areas, and at the same time incompetent in others.  He had quite a lot to say about this.  There is an common assumption by someone who has acquired competence in one area that they *are* competent in all areas, thus they assert competence where they have none.   In his perspective, there is no division between "people who are competent" and "people who are incompetent" because we are ALL incompetent in some area...none of us is universally competent.  Those I would refer to as "wise" (yes, colloquial usage...forgive me...) have recognized the fallacy of "competence in one area leads to general competence", and like Dunning, we doubt ourselves, some of us pretty much all of the time.  (His disclaimers on his original paper are pretty funny, if you look at it from an overall perspective.) 

Discussing competence in one area...let's take the example of a businessman with an MBA running a company.  That man is very likely to suffer from the belief that that competence indicates that he is "competent" in everything he tries his hand at.  He is likely to think he is good at...singing, for example.  If he sings, and is told that he sings poorly, he is likely to reject that opinion.  However, if by some circumstance he is convinced that he does, indeed, sing poorly, he might decide to take singing lessons.  At that point, all bets are off...either he has the mental and vocal capacity to sing well, or he doesn't.  His competence in music may improve with practice, or it may not, depending on how his brain is arranged.  Dunning-Kruger, to the best of *my* knowledge, doesn't say that his original incompetence influences his *willingness* to acknowledge his inability to sing, rather, that we *all* have the tendency to avoid our own inabilities ("incompetences"). 

As Dunning puts it: people who are incompetent in a given area are "doubly handicapped", as they cannot tell they are incompetent.  If they *try* to learn something, and *fail*, because their brain is not organized to acquire that ability, they can't *tell* for themselves that they have failed, because the same brain organization (I hesitate to call it a "defect") will prevent them from acquiring the ability to judge competence in the same field. 

[Linuial]

I think cognition in general is like this.  There's thinking, and then there's thinking about thinking.

There's a nice "meta-" for you.  :-) 

What's interesting about Dunning-Kruger is that we're far more vulnerable to its effects on what we know, but less vulnerable to its effects on we're told others know.  If we don't know a lot about X, we can make mistakes about how far we can push our intuition about X.  But even though we don't know a lot about X, we tend to be, on average, more skeptical about other people who make claims about X, even though we have no way to judge their competency any better than our own. 

You reached the same conclusion about the end result that I have, even though I *think* we got there by different routes. 

And that's the secret to beating Dunning-Kruger in my opinion.  A part of you has to be skeptical about you.  You have to be able to take a step back, consciously or not, and evaluate your own thoughts as if a random stranger were trying to convince you of them. 

Dunning-Kruger is talking about brain capability.  As a brain function, you really can't "beat" it.  There is no treatment, no drug, no surgery, that can alter your brain's potential capacity in a given field.  If you are incompetent in a given field, and that incompetence is *solely* caused by a lack of education, education can "cure" it.  If that incompetence is *solely* due to a lack of practice, practice can "cure" it.  However, if you have already become educated and practiced, and you are *still* incompetent in that field (as in the case of the business with a "tin ear"), Dunning-Kruger says that you *cannot* accurately assess your own (in)competence, nor anyone else's, in that field (alone), because "the part of the brain that computes capability in a given field is the *same* part of the grain used to assess competence (yours or anyone else's)."  And if you are functionally incapable in that field, you are equally functionally incapable of assessing competence in that field, and nothing can change that. 

I think people we classify as "fast learners" tend to be this kind of person: someone that is able to switch back and forth between being confident enough in what they know to use it effectively without fear, and yet at other times being highly skeptical about what they know so that they can find the weaknesses in what they know and learn from those weaknesses.  It is a skill I try to teach in my profession specifically. 

This is definitely something I can speak to with confidence.  All my life I was a "fast learner"...my parents were shocked when I learned to speak (clearly) at age nine months.  ;-)  Certainly, at that age in life, I had not learned to be skeptical about myself.  My entire school "career" (which I won't bore you with) was the same.  I didn't doubt myself...I had no reason to.  Math, science, and English (literature and grammar) were my best subjects, history and geography my worst...because they were the only subjects that relied almost entirely on memorizing material, and I had almost no ability to memorize anything.  (I never even successfully memorized all of the multiplication tables...to this day, I use a series of mental tricks to multiply 7s, 8s, and 9s.)  However, when the teacher explained anything math or science related, I *got* it immediately.  (Teachers *loved* me.)  And I never lost it, and was able to use it.  Obviously, we are dealing with two different kinds of memory, here...factual vs. procedural.  Eventually I learned to encode facts as procedures.  Self-doubt was no part of the equation, neither in what I could do, nor in what I could not. 

[Arcana]

[Arcana]

Ermmm....Arcana, I bow to you in all ways technological...just *reading* some of this "stuff" is head-ache inducing, and my skill set is so obsolete that I can only get the big picture of most of what you are talking about.  However, if Dunning-Kruger explains what you say, that must be new information, and is not what I was referring to.  (And I apologize profusely if I was unclear...I was trying to avoid my usual encyclopedic style of explanation.)  The last information I had on Dunning-Kruger said nothing about "the tendency for unknowledgeable people to be less likely to acquire more knowledge".  In fact, Dunning specifically asserts that most people are competent in one or more areas, and at the same time incompetent in others.  He had quite a lot to say about this.  There is an common assumption by someone who has acquired competence in one area that they *are* competent in all areas, thus they assert competence where they have none.   In his perspective, there is no division between "people who are competent" and "people who are incompetent" because we are ALL incompetent in some area...none of us is universally competent.  Those I would refer to as "wise" (yes, colloquial usage...forgive me...) have recognized the fallacy of "competence in one area leads to general competence", and like Dunning, we doubt ourselves, some of us pretty much all of the time.  (His disclaimers on his original paper are pretty funny, if you look at it from an overall perspective.) 

The original Dunning-Kruger study was titled Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.  Here's the abstract:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Dunning and Kruger conclude that the problem with unknowledgeable people is that they are doubly handicapped: they don't know, and they can't tell they don't know.  The extrapolation I make is that if you buy the notion that self-evaluation is an important part of learning, then people who don't know are also less able to learn more and get themselves out of that situation.

If you want to read the original paper, I found a link to it here: http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf

I recommend it highly.  The study makes four predictions, I'll quote one relevant here:

Prediction 3.
Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performance of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.

I think that one way to paraphrase that loosely is "incompetent people are less able to learn by observing others (because they can't tell when someone is actually good at something)."  Some of the conclusions in the paper also directly address the question of whether lack of competence hinders learning.

Of course the real reason to read the original paper is because of the juice.  Oh, the juice.

[Felderburg]

[Twisted Toon]

   Yeppers.  Got a lot of Gurps Sourcebooks. I use them to pad out my Megaverse.  Its really just a matter of who's rules ya like.

I have a lot of GURPS source books as well. And Champions (PnP RPG 1st ed.) Unfortunately, Most of the peoplein the house have drawn the line at learning more than 5 RPG game systems. So, I don't get to play GURPS or Champions. :-(

However, I do get to play Rune Quest (3rd Ed.)

[slickriptide]

Not gonna lie, this talk of having an "official" CoH progression meter seems... ambitious.

It's highly theoretical at the moment but it shouldn't really seem all that ambitious.

At this moment, I have a XMPP server running on my laptop and a character logged into Paragon Chat on that local server. You could do the same with a half-hour of downloading and setup.

If some sort of game engine materialized around Paragon Chat, then anyone could install it onto their home computer and play it as a single player game. All of those people in fan groups on Facebook and who keep an eye on Titan forums would do that.

You could also play it in groups at a central server like chat.titan.com or by connecting to your friend's personal server.

If a distributed character database existed then you could freely switch servers and it wouldn't matter. It would also mean that you couldn't shut down the game. You'd have to shut down the entire network.

Look at Nostalrius. What would Blizzard do if Nostariius had been just one server in a federation of hundreds, and the user database was spread across a network intended to be as resilient as the internet itself?

Ambitious? Maybe. Successfully accomplishing it would mean you could not lose your game short of there being nobody left who was interested in playing it.

[Felderburg]

Look at Nostalrius. What would Blizzard do if Nostariius had been just one server in a federation of hundreds, and the user database was spread across a network intended to be as resilient as the internet itself?

Since they seem to care about PR, maybe they would actually create a legacy server. I suspect NCsoft would be more partial to finding every person involved and taking legal action against the owners of any part of a distributed CoH "server."

[Arcana]

Not gonna lie, this talk of having an "official" CoH progression meter seems... ambitious. I always thought that if CoH came back, it would be released as code or something, and then enterprising individuals or groups would host their own servers, and modify them (or not) as they saw fit. Each person / group could use something like Sentinel and determine what they allowed to be ported over, but the idea that something like a non-centralized database would be kept never crossed my mind. I understand the appeal, and I've seen a few posts here about people who wouldn't want to start from scratch every time a server was lost to NCsoft legalities, but I personally don't think it's... worth?... the trouble. If people are going to be able to have their own versions of CoH, either as a local thing or creating their own little server world, I'm not sure why the trouble of an official character progression is needed.

Since we're just shooting the shit anyway, the thought process is that the problem with the original City of Heroes servers is that a single authority could shut them down.  Someone thinking about that problem might want to consider whether it is possible to make a City of Heroes game that is simultaneously unified - so the community doesn't have to fragment into tiny pieces - but also resilient so that no single person can shut the game down.  There are a number of possibilities that come to mind.

1.  Distributed gameplay, unified messaging.  You could make the Fidonet equivalent of an MMO.  A lot of small community servers that worked in isolation.  When you log into your local server, your characters are there.  They are nowhere else.  You can't log into anyone else's server without making an account there.  When you do, you have to make characters there.  But if you want to chat with the community, the global chat channels cross servers.  There's limited global community interaction, but gameplay is fragmented into lots of tiny pockets of players.

2.  Portable characters.  You let people play on any server they want, but you can export and import characters from anywhere to anywhere.  This presumes there is a consensus on trusting imported and exported data.  This kind of thing also tends to make it difficult to conceive of a business model where this works.  A community might agree to allow all kinds of stuff, but a game, in the technical sense of the word, cannot simply allow unrestricted freedom of data motion and implicit data editing.

3.  Distributed servers.  You create lots of individual server shards, but they all work together in a large supercluster of game servers, much like the original City of Heroes servers did.  A single server going down is similar to a single CoH shard going down.  With better global copy and/or migration, we can make the system more or less invulnerable to a single host either dying or being taken down.  If the shards are sufficiently distributed in the jurisdictional sense, it can become impractical to take them all down.

3b.  Distributed peer to peer.  A special case of (3) is to make a design that allows an unlimited number of servers coordinate player characters and progress, and work both online connected to global servers and offline in a stand alone mode, with a way to arbitrate synchronization.  You can always just run your own server if you want to (in theory) but unless you implement (2) above, your characters are "trapped" on your single player server.  You can't sometimes play offline and sometimes play online, except with different characters.  Hypothetically speaking its possible to allow a player to play on their own server, then reconnect that server to the global clusters to play within the global servers.  But there's technical and logistical problems with doing so, in particular with offline servers the global servers cannot trivially validate that any of the data on that server was validly generated.

Thinking about what's possible is the first step to determining what's practical.  I would assume anyone thinking about making, or designing, or resurrecting an MMO ought to be at least thinking about these issues.

[Arcana]

It's highly theoretical at the moment but it shouldn't really seem all that ambitious.

It shouldn't seem ambitious because at the moment no one is volunteering to implement one just yet, myself included.  Anyone can say the words "lets turn the CoH game client into a distributed graphical interaction tool using a central messaging server and translation interface" because those are just words.  There's no ambition in them until someone actually makes one.

Brainstorming always has an air of ambition, because part of the purpose of brainstorming is to consider what is and is not possible.  But it is just musing until the compiler meets the road.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

So did steve Jackson games best known as GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System).

Except GURPS is less of a mess of arbitrary, inconsistent, unbalanced rules and class designs with a tendency towards DBZ levels of power creep and Munchkinning in quite that way that Palladium is.

[Surelle]

It shouldn't seem ambitious because at the moment no one is volunteering to implement one just yet, myself included.  Anyone can say the words "lets turn the CoH game client into a distributed graphical interaction tool using a central messaging server and translation interface" because those are just words.  There's no ambition in them until someone actually makes one.

Brainstorming always has an air of ambition, because part of the purpose of brainstorming is to consider what is and is not possible.  But it is just musing until the compiler meets the road.

Or until the compiler meets the code.... 

[Tahquitz]

Or until the compiler meets the code.... 

*Stops rubbing CD-R on asphalt.* (Now they tell me.)

[adarict]

Going back to some of the discussion about innate talent, etc...

I have been trying to play guitar for about 20 years or so.  Never with any structure really, for any length of time until  relatively recently.  I have zero musical talent.  I have gotten to the point where I can play songs by rote, essentially, but I have no concept of how to compose music.  Learning to play has been exceedingly frustrating to me.

I do not have the dexterity in my left hand that is necessary to play well.  However, repetition has made me capable of playing songs, and you can even recognize what I am playing.  For a long time, I felt that the only way for me to get to a point where I could play a technique, was to sit and play it, over and over.  I would start out playing it very slowly, and keep increasing the speed until I got to the point where it matched what I wanted to play.  Over the last year though, I have changed how I learn.  I pick a section I want to learn, and play it a few times, then switch to playing something I already know.  Then I come back and give the new technique a couple more tries.  Then I ignore the new technique, and either go back to something I already know, or try something else new.  I don't try the first new technique again for several days.  The difference is quite impressive to me.  Coming back days later, the technique that caused me so much trouble is almost easy.  The number of repetitions I have to do to become proficient at a technique is significantly less than when I would just doggedly practice.

What does that mean as far as talent versus training?  Not really sure.  All I know is, a slight change in my method of learning, had a dramatic effect on my results.  I still feel I have no innate talent for music, but I no longer feel like I don't even have the ability to learn it.  Maybe my talent is learning to learn?

Even if I never learned how to play anything correctly, I still find playing my guitar to be an immensely relaxing thing.  Learning how to overcome my lack of ability was also a great feeling.  My major focus of knowledge has always been computers.  For the most part, that comes easily to me.  I have never had to TRY when learning new things with networking, or hardware, or whatever.  Trying to play guitar though, sometimes made me feel like an idiot, because so many other people I knew, just seemed to pick it up.  I knew how my family and friends must have felt when they would have to keep asking me tech questions.

[Azrael]

the thought process is that the problem with the original City of Heroes servers is that a single authority could shut them down.  Someone thinking about that problem might want to consider whether it is possible to make a City of Heroes game that is simultaneously unified - so the community doesn't have to fragment into tiny pieces - but also resilient so that no single person can shut the game down.  There are a number of possibilities that come to mind.

1.  Distributed gameplay, unified messaging. You could make the Fidonet equivalent of an MMO.  A lot of small community servers that worked in isolation.  When you log into your local server, your characters are there.  They are nowhere else.  You can't log into anyone else's server without making an account there.  When you do, you have to make characters there.  But if you want to chat with the community, the global chat channels cross servers.  There's limited global community interaction, but gameplay is fragmented into lots of tiny pockets of players.

2.  Portable characters.  You let people play on any server they want, but you can export and import characters from anywhere to anywhere.  This presumes there is a consensus on trusting imported and exported data.  This kind of thing also tends to make it difficult to conceive of a business model where this works.  A community might agree to allow all kinds of stuff, but a game, in the technical sense of the word, cannot simply allow unrestricted freedom of data motion and implicit data editing.

3.  Distributed servers.  You create lots of individual server shards, but they all work together in a large supercluster of game servers, much like the original City of Heroes servers did.  A single server going down is similar to a single CoH shard going down.  With better global copy and/or migration, we can make the system more or less invulnerable to a single host either dying or being taken down.  If the shards are sufficiently distributed in the jurisdictional sense, it can become impractical to take them all down.

3b.  Distributed peer to peer.  A special case of (3) is to make a design that allows an unlimited number of servers coordinate player characters and progress, and work both online connected to global servers and offline in a stand alone mode, with a way to arbitrate synchronization.  You can always just run your own server if you want to (in theory) but unless you implement (2) above, your characters are "trapped" on your single player server.  You can't sometimes play offline and sometimes play online, except with different characters.  Hypothetically speaking its possible to allow a player to play on their own server, then reconnect that server to the global clusters to play within the global servers.  But there's technical and logistical problems with doing so, in particular with offline servers the global servers cannot trivially validate that any of the data on that server was validly generated.

Thinking about what's possible is the first step to determining what's practical. I would assume anyone thinking about making, or designing, or resurrecting an MMO ought to be at least thinking about these issues.

1.  Something like Paragon Chat?  And you can run your own server with that? 

It's highly theoretical at the moment but it shouldn't really seem all that ambitious.

At this moment, I have a XMPP server running on my laptop and a character logged into Paragon Chat on that local server. You could do the same with a half-hour of downloading and setup.

If some sort of game engine materialized around Paragon Chat, then anyone could install it onto their home computer and play it as a single player game. All of those people in fan groups on Facebook and who keep an eye on Titan forums would do that.

You could also play it in groups at a central server like chat.titan.com or by connecting to your friend's personal server.

If a distributed character database existed then you could freely switch servers and it wouldn't matter. It would also mean that you couldn't shut down the game. You'd have to shut down the entire network.

Look at Nostalrius. What would Blizzard do if Nostariius had been just one server in a federation of hundreds, and the user database was spread across a network intended to be as resilient as the internet itself?

Ie.  Play local.  Run 'CoH' 'Simulated' on your own micro server i.e. as a local single player game...  Shards that are like Dandelions.  Persistent and resistant.  As soon as that 1st distribution of CoH Simu...  Like having your private party...

I always felt this functionality should have been built into CoH.  ie.  An 'offline' mode where I am the local server.

2. Sentinel?  I never used it.  I wish I'd known about it.

But the idea of a 'Bit Coin' aspect to Characters or game progression is intriguing.  I initially think of all those different C64s EMUs that run those common 'disk' images.  While CoH becoming a similar portable EMU with portable characters and portable progression teases the mind...it's not trivial but in the sleep of death no dreams will come.  Best to dream, speculate and be ambitious...

3.  Distributed Servers.  Clusters.  A federation?

Lots of individual parts.  A network of parts that can be offline but also 'online' if so wanted. 

The above examples make me think of Unreal Tourney.  I know it wasn't an 'MMO' but I really liked that game.  You had an offline mode.  You had solo games 'with bots' with the challenge ladder of various flavours, all having their own appeal.  You had a local LAN option.  You could play over the Internet.  Very forward thinking.  Progressive.  You still had 'something' even if nobody ever wanted to play online anymore!   Or long after the company concerned had finished exploiting it.  Any CoH SIMU effort ought to think along progressive lines and wander creatively down those tracks.  Eg.  Offline modes.  Locan LAN.  Internet 'option.'  Bitcoin 'progressive' data.  'Block chains?'  Vanilla, Strawberry and chocolate flavours.  Mod packs...for mobs.  Zone editors.  Mission generators...  Even a port to a new engine...in time...

I think that MMOs missed a trick, in general, by not having a similar progressive design.  Intravenous drip mentality of dependency then rip the cord out when its hooked you...then kick you to the kerb.  You can hardly complain if the MMO base don't buy your new 'mediocre trinity' games 'made of shiny plastic' when you treat them so.  Live by the sword and all that...After all.  Consumers don't have to buy your product.  Well, unless crony capitalism lobbies to mandate that you do...

4.  Peer to Peer.

My preferred option.  Maybe with offline and Local Lan capability.  With CoH SIMU with a quiet low key release into the wild.  It's private.  For 'educational private' use only. 

I wonder if a 'bolt' on real time CoH Simu element might be added to Paragon or whether, like Icon, the 'next step' (CoH 'Next' or 'Legacy') supersedes the predecessor as a different offshoot project. 

I still have to pinch myself that we have Paragon Chat.  So the proof of concept or at least 'progressive thinking' is kind of there...

Anyone can say the words "lets turn the CoH game client into a distributed graphical interaction tool using a central messaging server and translation interface" because those are just words.  There's no ambition in them until someone actually makes one.

What, like Paragon Chat?

Azrael.

[slickriptide]

Sorry to "butt in" to the ongoing conversations with a derail (heh) but I have a thread regarding some decisions about chat bot interactions with humans that I'd like to get some feedback on from any people interested in such things.

Thread is located here:
https://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php?topic=12080.0

Thanks! Returning you to your normal conversation in 3, 2 1...

[Brigadine]

Thanks! Returning you to your normal conversation in 3, 2 1...

You mean our regularly scheduled nonsense?

[Arcana]

Something like Paragon Chat?

Not to belittle Paragon Chat, but Paragon Chat is to a distributed MMO as the Pony Express is to the Internet.  Pretty much all of the problems you'd encounter in designing or even conceptualizing a distributed real time MMO are things Paragon Chat either punts to the future, is explicitly designed not to support, or is unlikely to be scalable to address.  The amazing thing about Paragon Chat is that it fundamentally takes normal internet chat and converts it into things that can be visualized by the City of Heroes client.  But while its full potential hasn't been realized yet, and I think it could be eventually extended to emulate many of the things the game could do visually - think turning Paragon Chat into a PnP visualization tool - I don't think there's any path from Paragon Chat directly to a real distributed MMO. 

Consider that the central problem of making a distributed MMO (a distributed anything, really) is asking how you intend to store global state and how you intend to communicate global state between distributed components.  Paragon Chat doesn't address any of that, because Paragon Chat doesn't have any sense of global state at all.  Paragon Chat has essentially coincidentally synchronized non-arbitrated state.  Fancy way of saying that every Paragon Chat contains local state, nothing contains global state, and the only reason why everyone tends to see the same thing in Paragon Chat is because they all run the same version of the app and all see approximately the same messages, but nothing really forces everyone to see the same thing.  Kind of a problem in an MMO.

Could it, though?  Could we just add hud processing and combat engines to Paragon Chat itself and have them all self-synchronize combat data like they currently do game data?  Theoretically speaking, its not impossible.  But it would be incredibly difficult to do that because the transport protocols aren't scalable to handle that much data in their present form (or any likely enhancement of them) and the lack of global synchronization would make gameplay probably glitchy to the point of being unplayable when scaled up.

You'd then run into the problem of trusted updates.  Right now every Paragon Chat instance implicitly trusts all others to send reasonable data.  For a community chat tool, that's a reasonable assumption.  That is not a reasonable assumption in a game.  Given Paragon Chat's implementation, that might be an intractable problem to solve in the general case outside of arbitrating server modules - in effect recreating CoH game servers as XMPP modules.  At that point, might as well just rewrite the CoH mapservers from scratch.

And then you'd be back to square one: having CoH servers that one person could shut down.  You'd then have to start solving the distributed game state problem.  The original problem mentioned above.

[slickriptide]

Well, there's that Catch 22 that there's no reason to worry about designing a distributed player character storage system if there's no game server to store characters for.

At some point, someone has to take the bull by the horns and say, "I/We are going to make this even if it can be shut down." When that happens, then you have incentive to make the pieces that can insure that the "server" is able to survive a nuclear attack, or a C&D.

In the meantime, pushing the envelope with external XMPP server components will be a way to explore just what Paragon Chat *IS* capable of becoming.

I'm not really convinced that there's a huge audience for a CoH EMU. It appears to me that a pretty significant number of people who say they want an EMU are in fact going to be dissatisfied with anything less than a 100% faithful reproduction of the game that runs in their memories whenever they think about "City of Heroes". I don't see any EMU becoming that, no matter who builds it or how dedicated they are.

SWG and WoW emulators are as accurate as they are because they were built while the parent game was still alive and kicking. In one or both cases, there were also code leaks of internal server code that helped the people writing the emulators to make something reasonably similar to the real game.

Most EMUs I know of that are "accurate" are the same - they're based on games that are still running today or that were alive when the EMU was developed so the developers had a reference to design to.

Those, like Earth and Beyond, that were built after the fact, tend to either be close but not perfect copies, or they tend to never achieve much more actual functionality than Codewalker & Friends have already achieved with Paragon Chat.

I don't believe that we'll ever have an "accurate" reproduction of City of Heroes. I might be wrong. I'd love to be wrong. I think I'm right, though.

So, the question is what CAN we do with the pieces we have?

Right now, Paragon Chat is what we, the non-Codewalker Crew, have. It's up to us to do something with that if we want to have something more than just a fancy chat client out of it.