New efforts!

[MM3squints]

Also, some studies indicate that a certain percentage of people find this kind of thing very difficult to resist.

Haha actually South Park actually explained this pretty well. It was about freemium games, but it's the same concept:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAEfeNLKwd0

[Noyjitat]

Basically they are random rewards that drop and expires in X amount of days. The only way to get the reward in the lock boxes is to buy a key (DCUO calls them prometheus keys) The problem with this system the items are not always that great and usually crappy fillers. I pay $2.49 (that is the cost of 250 points) and get a crappy item I probably  have because it is a duplicate of from the last time I paid $2.49. In a part you are paying to have a chance to get the item that you want, but more than likely won't get, however, you will never know unless you buy a key to open it within the X amount of days. It is in a sense like gambling, but unlike gambling where a person feel bad from loosing due to a miscalculated risk, lock boxes are something that makes that person feel worse by just playing with a person's head unless they open it and when they do open it, they feel crappier for opening it and wasting money. Of course the player can just not open them and play the game.

If you're subscribed you can open lockboxes for free in DCUO and really it isn't worth buying keys for them in dcuo if you don't have a subscription because they put a limit on how often they drop per character. And once you reach whatever that limit is they stop dropping for awhile. I don't know what the limit is but a thread somewhere explained it. I can say that during my time leveling up characters I was lucky to get 3 - 4 on some characters while leveling. They tend to drop auras more than anything.

[MM3squints]

If you're subscribed you can open lockboxes for free in DCUO and really it isn't worth buying keys for them in dcuo if you don't have a subscription because they put a limit on how often they drop per character. And once you reach whatever that limit is they stop dropping for awhile. I don't know what the limit is but a thread somewhere explained it. I can say that during my time leveling up characters I was lucky to get 3 - 4 on some characters while leveling. They tend to drop auras more than anything.

Your lucky every time I got a box, it was a costume piece I never used.

[Aggelakis]

Yes, but I seem to recall some controversy that they were gimped or something compared to the "real" ones.  It made me leery of them and so I just gave my friend / personal farmer some cash to get them for me.  I called that option "my other cash shop."  ;D

The Paragon Market purples were exactly the same as the Invention System purples, even to the point of them counting for set bonuses if you had a mixture (a Paragon purple and an Invention purple meant you got a set bonus, two Paragons and an Invention meant you got two bonuses, five Inventions and a Paragon meant you had five set bonuses, etc.)

[Vee]

Yeah all the grousing about market vs. regular IOs was about the ones like the performance shifter proc that were unintentionally buffed for a while in the market version then fixed. Whining ensued even though anyone who'd played coh for a while should have known it was unintentional and people who were new to the game should have been used to market item nerfs from other games.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Arcana, I just way to say that I appreciate and respect your knowledge-slamming in this thread, because every time I see someone saying something as hilariously wrong as "we don't really know that relativity is correct" I just want to slam my head against my desk until I lose consciousness; even without severe self-inflicted cranial trauma, I couldn't hope to respond to something like that with the eloquence you do.

This. So very much this. Arcana has the patience and eloquence when rebutting those posts that i can only wish i had.

[Arcana]

One thing I still haven't understood about Freedom, why is it that even though I paid a sub fee I did not have access to all of the power sets? I hated having to spend my monthly pp on powers, it was such a kick in the teeth. I get forcing f2p players into buying power sets but if I'm paying a sub aren't I paying for the privilege to access this stuff, including costumes?

It just seemed very poorly thought out and as if NCsoft was just experimenting with overly greedy systems to see if we'd bite based on our dedication to the game. That is entirely just a theory however and holds no weight when it comes to the reality of this conversation as it's absolutely speculative.

Hopefully if/when CoH is relaunched, they stick to subscription fee's. I'd much rather pay a small amount per month if it gave me access to everything.

It was actually fairly well thought out in my opinion.  The idea was that subscribers get an automatic stipend that would allow them to decide for themselves what content their subscription "automatically" included.  That way, for example, the devs could release a bunch of powersets for sale and if you wanted them you could simply save your stipend to buy them; contrawise if you didn't want them (not everyone wanted to play everything) you could instead burn those monthly paragon points on something else you wanted instead.

So rather than say "all this is what subscribers get, and all of this is what everyone has to pay for, period" you had a more nuanced system in which subscribers got a bunch of stuff automatically plus they could choose a small amount of stuff on top that everyone else normally had to pay for.  You could argue with the price of things or the stipend value, but the principle itself is actually one I think is a good idea.

Of course some people argued that subscribers should just get everything, but that isn't without compromises as well.  In a dev model in which all subscribers get everything they make, everything they make is of practical necessity less than in a model where subscribers have the option to buy extras.  That money funds additional development that ultimately benefits everyone, at least in the sense of having more diverse content.

I think the balance point in CoH Freedom was not bad.  It was such that subscribers that did not want to buy or could not afford to buy everything they wanted immediately could save stipend points for it, and content development was subsidized by the players that could afford and were willing to pay for stuff immediately.  And non-subscribers could ala carte their way to most things in a way that they still had a very functional game that wasn't in my opinion significantly crippled at all.  That's not bad for being one of the early F2P conversions.

[Arcana]

Basically they are random rewards that drop and expires in X amount of days.

Or, in the case of STO, never expire and just fill up your inventory slots indefinitely unless you deliberately throw them away.

Lockboxes are a psychological gimmick that takes advantage of the fact that human beings underestimate opportunity costs and overinflate negative opportunity costs.  In other words, if I say if you spend X you'll have a chance to get Y, you'll tend to underestimate the value of that trade.  And that means you're less likely to spend X than you would if you calculated that value correctly.  However, if I *give* you Y and then say you have to spend X to prevent me from taking it back from you, you'll tend to overestimate the value of that trade.  That means its far more likely you'll spend X than if you calculated that value correctly.

As a result, handing you lock boxes basically for nothing and then making you spend to open them is far more likely to induce a player to buy the key than they would have been to just buy the lock box in the first place and let them open it for nothing.  Basically, players treat the lockbox as a bird in the hand, and are psychologically pressured to open it.  Its actually one of the few F2P strategies that I think is genuinely offensive, and I don't mean in the sense of being personally offended by it but rather more literally I believe it is an offensive strategy designed explicitly to attack players psychologically to get them separated from their money.  Its not just good marketing, its literal psychological warfare, and to me its not a line they should have crossed.

People say that about lots of F2P strategies, but the difference here is that the other strategies have alternate interpretations.  You could argue that randomized drops are designed to get people addicted to the gambling aspect of it, but there are legitimate reasons for having randomized drops that have nothing to do with that.  Lockboxes have no alternate reason for existing other than the one mentioned above.

[JanessaVR]

The Paragon Market purples were exactly the same as the Invention System purples, even to the point of them counting for set bonuses if you had a mixture (a Paragon purple and an Invention purple meant you got a set bonus, two Paragons and an Invention meant you got two bonuses, five Inventions and a Paragon meant you had five set bonuses, etc.)

Huh.  Ok, thanks, I wasn't sure of the specifics.  I just heard rumors that they were nerfed compared to the straight IO versions.  If and when we get CoH back, I can just purchase them outright for my L50s.

[MM3squints]

Huh.  Ok, thanks, I wasn't sure of the specifics.  I just heard rumors that they were nerfed compared to the straight IO versions.  If and when we get CoH back, I can just purchase them outright for my L50s.

Only "nerf" if I remember they were character bound (not even account bound) so the that toon you bought them for can use it.

[Codewalker]

As far as store-bought IOs, initially the Performance Shifter proc was considerably more powerful than the crafted version. It got nerfed to approximately the same level of performance (when slotted in Stamina, anyway) as the crafted one, resulting in some minor howling on the forums.

The enhancements themselves were exactly the same, with the exception of the procs.

Crafted procs used a flat % chance to fire, whereas the newer store-bought attuned procs used the badly-named PPM system to adjust the proc rate based on the cycle time of what you slotted it into. In general, the PPM-based procs were far superior for most uses, but in small number of edge cases, slotting them a few handful of powers like the radiation blast Tier 1, Brawl, and a few fast recharging AoEs resulted in a worse proc rate.

It was going to be a moot issue once I24 hit, as all IO procs, including crafted ones, were being changed to the PPM system. Once that had happened, the RMT enhancements would have been identical to the ones earned in-game.

Only "nerf" if I remember they were character bound (not even account bound) so the that toon you bought them for can use it.

The ones bought in the store were account bound.

[Arcana]

As far as store-bought IOs, initially the Performance Shifter proc was considerably more powerful than the crafted version. It got nerfed to approximately the same level of performance (when slotted in Stamina, anyway) was the crafted one, resulting in some minor howling on the forums.

The enhancements themselves were exactly the same, with the exception of the procs.

Crafted procs used a flat % chance to fire, whereas the newer store-bought attuned procs used the badly-named PPM system to adjust the proc rate based on the cycle time of what you slotted it into. In general, the PPM-based procs were far superior for most uses, but in small number of edge cases, slotting them a few handful of powers like the radiation blast Tier 1, Brawl, and a few fast recharging AoEs resulted in a worse proc rate.

It was going to be a moot issue once I24 hit, as all IO procs, including crafted ones, were being changed to the PPM system. Once that had happened, the RMT enhancements would have been identical to the ones earned in-game.

The ones bought in the store were account bound.

This reminds me of one of my cardinal rules of MMOs: edge cases are nice to visit, but don't live there unless you know what you are doing.  Its like having beach front property in a hurricane-prone area.  It might be a great place to live, but the reality is the ocean is going to wash your house away every so often.  Don't do it unless you can afford to rebuild often.

[MM3squints]

The ones bought in the store were account bound.

Oh, I got the wrong information making me stay away from in game purchase IOs. Then again, feeling like I worked for my IO makes me feels better about my toons and my wallet would thank me too so I can spend my money on other frivolous crap I will never need xD

[Harpospoke]

It would help if you quoted legitimate scientists, rather than "staff writers."  Let me quote the very next sentence after "Everything we know about the universe may be wrong."

Cosmologists have speculated that the universe was created after a star collapsed into a black hole - a theory that helps to explain why it seems to be expanding in all directions.

Everything *they* know about the universe is probably wrong.  No astronomer thinks that.  I'm not even aware of any crackpot astronomers that think that.  The entire article starts off horribly wrong, and it doesn't get any better:

The Big Bang theory suggests that the universe was created from a single point in the universe but despite years of research, nobody yet knows what triggered the eruption.

It also fails to explain why the Universe has an "almost completely uniform temperature."

The current accepted theory of cosmology includes the concept of inflation, which specifically addresses the issue of temperature uniformity.  Also, the CMB doesn't have a perfectly uniform temperature, and the differences in temperature are even now being analyzed to determine if they are consistent with inflation theory.  The article itself remarks:

The European Space Agency recorded slight fluctuations in the temperature of the universe and found that the cosmos contained imprints of radiation that matched predictions made in the Big Bang theory. Obviously this creates a discrepancy in the astrophysicists' research.

In other words, the current model doesn't explain why the cosmos as almost completely uniform temperature, except for the fact the actual cosmos has temperature irregularities consistent with the current model.  The article characterizes this as a "discrepancy" in the research they are commenting on.  Seriously?

Its easy to find people that claim "everything we know is wrong" but that doesn't make it true.  The ideas in those articles are highly speculative, and contain about as much real science as the Wookiepedia.

Its one thing to be skeptical.  A certain amount of skepticism is necessary for Science to work.  What I don't understand is why you are skeptical about all of modern physics, but not skeptical about "staff writers" sensationalizing the scientific equivalent of water cooler speculation.  If you were as skeptical about the articles you are linking to as you apparently are about all of modern Science, you would probably be able to (correctly) shoot down the ideas in those articles without much difficulty.

I feel like you believe I subscribe to all the alternate theories I posted and that you must prove my theories wrong.

If so, I'll have to point out those were just posted as examples of debate in science.   Of course any one person on either side will completely discount the theories on the opposite side.   You put no credence in the theory presented in that article just as the scientists behind it would be just as dismissive of yours.   I don't believe I've ever seen two scientists talk about a subject and not debate it.

What other concept of life do you recommend we look for, how do you imagine it "evolved", how do you imagine we should "look" for it?
Do you think there is reason we should NOT look "Earth life"?

I have no recommendation.   I'm just pointing out that looking for earth life any place not named "Earth" seems like an enormous waste of time.   It seems pretty obvious to me that life evolved here due to the specific circumstances present on this planet.   I don't see the logic in searching for "life as we know it" in places with entirely different circumstances.   I mean...if you've got funding to do it, knock yourself out...but I wouldn't expect any actual results.   I would expect life that evolved in an environment without water to be far different than our limited definition of "life".

Science works because it involves debate.  People argue their positions, when they make proposals that don't match counter arguments, then consensus moves towards the alternatives.  Peer review means that people who have actually studied and demonstrated competence in a subject can act as noise filters to keep down the ideas that are so poorly based on evidence or are so poorly constructed that it would waste everyone's time to pursue them. 

People who don't endorse the value of consensus have their bridges collapse -- that's why we know it works.   

It has been observed that not all positions or opinions are equally valid.

Consensus has value, but it is also wrong to put it on an untouchable pedestal of "truth".    "Valid" would differ depending upon whom you ask of course.

[Arcana]

I feel like you believe I subscribe to all the alternate theories I posted and that you must prove my theories wrong.

If so, I'll have to point out those were just posted as examples of debate in science.

I don't feel the need to prove your posted theories wrong.  I feel the need to point out they aren't scientific theories, nor even scientific debate.  If you aren't sufficiently knowledgeable about the subject matter, you might have no way to know that the articles you are linking to are lunatic summaries of relatively fringe ideas.  But as examples of scientific debate, they are like attempting to assert there is significant scientific debate about whether Atlantis exists, and as proof linking to an internet debate about which version of Aquaman Jason Momoa should portray.

[Biz]

... and as proof linking to an internet debate about which version of Aquaman Jason Momoa should portray.

Everyone knows Vincent Chase is the only true Aquaman

[Aggelakis]

Jason Momoa

...I'll be in my bunk.

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.cheese-magnet.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F07%2Ffirefly-war-stories-jayne-kaylee-ill-be-in-my-bunk.jpg

...again.

[Vee]

I don't feel the need to prove your posted theories wrong.  I feel the need to point out they aren't scientific theories, nor even scientific debate.  If you aren't sufficiently knowledgeable about the subject matter, you might have no way to know that the articles you are linking to are lunatic summaries of relatively fringe ideas.  But as examples of scientific debate, they are like attempting to assert there is significant scientific debate about whether Atlantis exists, and as proof linking to an internet debate about which version of Aquaman Jason Momoa should portray.

He should make his own aquaman based on his kal drogo - not a word of english, killing people for looking at him sideways, etc. maybe a bit less rapey so they can get their coveted pg-13 though.

[Baja]

So rather than say "all this is what subscribers get, and all of this is what everyone has to pay for, period" you had a more nuanced system in which subscribers got a bunch of stuff automatically plus they could choose a small amount of stuff on top that everyone else normally had to pay for.  You could argue with the price of things or the stipend value, but the principle itself is actually one I think is a good idea.

Of course some people argued that subscribers should just get everything, but that isn't without compromises as well.  In a dev model in which all subscribers get everything they make, everything they make is of practical necessity less than in a model where subscribers have the option to buy extras.  That money funds additional development that ultimately benefits everyone, at least in the sense of having more diverse content.

I think the balance point in CoH Freedom was not bad.  It was such that subscribers that did not want to buy or could not afford to buy everything they wanted immediately could save stipend points for it, and content development was subsidized by the players that could afford and were willing to pay for stuff immediately.  And non-subscribers could ala carte their way to most things in a way that they still had a very functional game that wasn't in my opinion significantly crippled at all.  That's not bad for being one of the early F2P conversions.

I feel like disagreeing is going to start some little war you have an absolute need to win, so I'll just say this is -how I feel- about the system before continuing.

How many years did subscribers in CoH get everything? It seemed to work just fine. I don't think saying "Nobody needs all powers and costumes, so let's limit that to people who pay subscription and allow them to slowly gain access month to month." That's essentially telling me they wanted more money on top of my sub fee to play everything I wanted. Considering pp only allowed for a purchase of -one- power set a month and they were releasing content faster than ever before to entice people to pay more on top of their sub. You could argue from a business stand point "Well this brought more money in and was better for the game." But that clearly wasn't true, considering we literally have no game. This tactic was no different than a $1.00 app asking for an extra $1.00 to unlock new content. Hell it's actually worse because it's more like an app you pay $1.00 per month for asking for an extra $1.00 to unlock content everyone clearly wants.

It was a greedy move to try and suck money out of a very dedicated fan base on a game that never was played by an extremely large group of people. I'm sorry but I'm not big on trying to justify greed in gaming.

[Minotaur]

I feel like disagreeing is going to start some little war you have an absolute need to win, so I'll just say this is -how I feel- about the system before continuing.

How many years did subscribers in CoH get everything? It seemed to work just fine. I don't think saying "Nobody needs all powers and costumes, so let's limit that to people who pay subscription and allow them to slowly gain access month to month." That's essentially telling me they wanted more money on top of my sub fee to play everything I wanted. Considering pp only allowed for a purchase of -one- power set a month and they were releasing content faster than ever before to entice people to pay more on top of their sub. You could argue from a business stand point "Well this brought more money in and was better for the game." But that clearly wasn't true, considering we literally have no game. This tactic was no different than a $1.00 app asking for an extra $1.00 to unlock new content. Hell it's actually worse because it's more like an app you pay $1.00 per month for asking for an extra $1.00 to unlock content everyone clearly wants.

It was a greedy move to try and suck money out of a very dedicated fan base on a game that never was played by an extremely large group of people. I'm sorry but I'm not big on trying to justify greed in gaming.

Did it not occur to you that they were releasing stuff faster than ever BECAUSE people were buying it, and this was not new, they released some costume sets (the wedding pack is the one I remember) on a pay basis before Freedom. That we have no game is not directly CoH financial related, the game was doing OK.