New efforts!

[Arcana]

I vehemently disagree with this for the following reasons:
1.  Does the player trust the team leader or themselves more?  If someone has never played with a particular leader then why would that player trust a stranger: the assumption that the leader has ever played that trial before successfully is a flawed assumption.  A leader has to earn trust.  (and vice versa)
2.  How does one learn the best: by following or trying?  Following someone's lead is easier, but to really learn how to go about something a person has to try, test, experiment, and think for themselves.

That's good in theory, but the question is can you cash the checks you're writing, or are you learning on someone else's unwilling dime.  I'm reminded of that idiot girl in the Liberty Mutual commercial that says she can't believe that even though she pays her insurance premiums on time her insurance company raised her rates because she "tapped" the bumper of a station wagon.  She "tapped" it hard enough to do actual damage to the car, and doesn't seem remotely concerned about the other guy.  "No one's perfect."  Sure.  That doesn't mean its excusable to hit other people's cars.  When you do, and its your fault, there are consequences.

Try, learn, and experiment all you want.  I obviously didn't get to where I was without doing all three.  Just don't presume other people should have to pay for your experiments.  I never needed to cause anyone to pay for my experiments.  If I didn't need to do it to learn all I did, its unlikely anyone needed to do it to learn anything they might have wanted to.

[Arcana]

Interesting question. If the new CoX is in maintenance mode, then there really won't be a need for that badge

If its in maintenance mode, they also won't really be able to remove the badge.

[Arcana]

IN GENERAL: I accidentally screwed up an attempt for the bomb badge during an UG run once. It was VERY late, I was VERY tired and it was VERY easy to do, especially when the attempt was a last-minute thing and not planned from the start, so I would have been keeping it in mind the whole trial. I was freakin' tired. Not gonna lie.

Most were philosophical, [or also exhausted, or didn't care] but a few were so vituperative that I ended up /gignoring them and then I logged out of the trial. I apologized, it was a stupid mistake but I am not going to eat crow unlimited over a mistake. I did not ragequit, but I did leave. If you cannot accept my apology, I am gonna let you rage - but you'll also be doing it without my presence.

My point here being, if you see the same global doing this stuff more than once, then yes blacklist or ban or whatever. But try not to lose your mind over someone's goof up. It probably wasn't malice, and the whole thing ends up doing more harm than good as you alienate people who - surprise! - might turn out to be good friends or players later if you give them the benefit of the doubt.

Mistakes happen, and you have to be able to walk it off.  I did repeatedly.  However, I can tell you that I can understand the frustration, because Master of Underground often came down to the one badge that was very easy to acquire in theory, but insanely and inexplicably difficult in practice.  Its a trivial task, and it only ever fails if the raid leader is horrible, or someone fails to follow simple directions.  And it failed a lot.  I tried well over twenty times to get that badge, and in over a dozen of those failures it failed on the bombs**.  I never chewed out a player because of it, although some of my rants directed at Positron (sorry, Matt) were epic on Triumph.


** I say over a dozen: it could have been several dozen.  I stopped counting at some point and started toasting the failures like the 1972 Miami Dolphins.

[MGLZadok]

I feel you. Almost 3 years, and the loss still hits me. Dreamed I was doing a BAF last night... not sure what I was doing there at level 34, but still :P

I don't dream about City.  I'm much dumber about it.  You see, my wife often watches videos of people playing WoW even though she chooses to not play it anymore.  She enjoys that sort of thing.  So I thought, Surely, there are videos of City out there that I could watch and relive the glory, so I found a YouTube video of some channel showing the City of Heroes Freedom trailer and some gameplay afterward.  This is surely recent enough for me to enjoy, I thought.

When I saw the familiar graphics, a flood of emotions washed over me.
When I heard him get an enhancement when he defeated an enemy, I choked up.
When I heard the character level up, I cried steeled myself like a man and turned the video off.

So, word to the wise: cherish your memories.  Watching videos to reminisce will just kill you...

[Ryo Kinsaru]

I've damn near run the gamut of CoH videos on YouTube, and I believe that I even saw myself in one with a Mother Ship raid. I'm not 100% because it was recorded with a slice of cheddar cheese, but it looked like me jumping to be the first to the next pylon. I love watching the videos and soaking in the sights an sounds. Yeah, it's painful, but I guess it's like looking at pictures of lost family. I don't think it's a good idea to forget them just because they're gone. I'm still playing the state lottery in the off chance that winning a big chunk maybe I can bribe the right people at NCSoft to speed this stuff up. Yep, I'd part with a few easy-come millions to get it back for everybody, no doubt. I wouldn't even ask for that big a statue in Cap in return. :P

[Auroxis]

Like over half the views for my CoH videos are me just re-living the memories. Glad I made those.

Edit: Fixed the link

[Angel Phoenix77]

Like over half the views for my CoH videos are me just re-living the memories. Glad I made those.

I just tried you link, it is invalid. sorry :(

[Triplash]

I just tried you link, it is invalid. sorry :(

Just a little mix-up with the tags, is all. Try this:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa8l_FTtloCsDY-O6hBXb2w

[Waffles]

The only city of heroes video that survived my hard-drive wipe :\

Horrible editing, clicking, and mouse turning, bleh.

[Angel Phoenix77]

Just a little mix-up with the tags, is all. Try this:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa8l_FTtloCsDY-O6hBXb2w

cool, ty :)

[JanessaVR]

If its in maintenance mode, they also won't really be able to remove the badge.

Given your past work with the game, they should just award it to your account as a global reward from the get-go.  ;)

[MM3squints]

Given your past work with the game, they should just award it to your account as a global reward from the get-go.  ;)

Think everyone who is making the effort (The ARP, Nate and Company who instigated this effort, People who work Titan Network and Paragon Wiki, people who did past work in the game (Arcana), etc)  should get that. That's another question I had. That badge can't be obtained except through admin means so how would that work in maintenance mode. I guess my question would be what capabilities will the new admins of CoX have with the game in  maintenance mode (what can they manipulate?)

[Brightfires]

Sitting on a shelf, not ten feet from me as I type this, are a set of little external storage drives. There are eight of them, with about a terabyte of data on each...

My screenshot collection takes up a chunk of one of them. The rest of that space? It's filled with the FRAPs videos FCM and I made over the last few months of the game. An epic ship raid, team missions, the signature arcs, iTrials and task forces, tip missions, soloing with our "nightmare" characters, duo runs with our favorites through Dark Astoria, our GM-hunting Masterminds kicking Lusca's butt, the Liberty "usual suspects" last Underground run... all kinds of things.

To me, they're not a sad thing to watch. When I pull down one of those drives, hook it up and watch the Monster Hunters Club chase some beastie around or a whole bunch of Ouphs and LBers kick Rikti butts all over that ship it's a reminder just how much fun we all had, and... with some patience and a lot of luck... how much fun we may eventually be able to have again. 

There are too many videos here to share them all... and I'm not sure how interested anyone would be to see some of them, anyway... But FCM has posted a few. (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=flyingcodemonkeytube)

Don't you dare get sniffly over them. Grin instead, and remember that one time this dude did that CRAZY THING that *should* have gotten everyone's face eaten, and then- ... You get the idea.  ;D  If you've got the choice between laughing over our memories or crying, it's okay to pick the crying sometimes. But don't forget the laughing part's there, too.

[Snickerdoodle1429]

Sitting on a shelf, not ten feet from me as I type this, are a set of little external storage drives. There are eight of them, with about a terabyte of data on each...

My screenshot collection takes up a chunk of one of them. The rest of that space? It's filled with the FRAPs videos FCM and I made over the last few months of the game. An epic ship raid, team missions, the signature arcs, iTrials and task forces, tip missions, soloing with our "nightmare" characters, duo runs with our favorites through Dark Astoria, our GM-hunting Masterminds kicking Lusca's butt, the Liberty "usual suspects" last Underground run... all kinds of things.

To me, they're not a sad thing to watch. When I pull down one of those drives, hook it up and watch the Monster Hunters Club chase some beastie around or a whole bunch of Ouphs and LBers kick Rikti butts all over that ship it's a reminder just how much fun we all had, and... with some patience and a lot of luck... how much fun we may eventually be able to have again. 

There are too many videos here to share them all... and I'm not sure how interested anyone would be to see some of them, anyway... But FCM has posted a few. (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=flyingcodemonkeytube)

Don't you dare get sniffly over them. Grin instead, and remember that one time this dude did that CRAZY THING that *should* have gotten everyone's face eaten, and then- ... You get the idea.  ;D  If you've got the choice between laughing over our memories or crying, it's okay to pick the crying sometimes. But don't forget the laughing part's there, too.

Please...please upload every single piece of CoX history you have, some may get choked up but.. others such as myself will revel in it! I'd love to see everything again and again!

[Arcana]

Think everyone who is making the effort (The ARP, Nate and Company who instigated this effort, People who work Titan Network and Paragon Wiki, people who did past work in the game (Arcana), etc)  should get that. That's another question I had. That badge can't be obtained except through admin means so how would that work in maintenance mode. I guess my question would be what capabilities will the new admins of CoX have with the game in  maintenance mode (what can they manipulate?)

A player-character could be granted a specific access level for the game.  We players were normally running at access level zero (or one, I keep forgetting).  Higher levels of access - basically admin rights - would grant the player-character the ability to execute increasingly more restricted commands.  For example, at the highest levels of access, player-characters could grant XP to other players, spawn NPC critters, create influence and items, fill auction slots, teleport anywhere, grant themselves almost any power, etc.  Many of the devs had special admin-level characters they could use within the game to perform these feats, ostensibly to run events or test things on the live servers (and occasionally to punk other players although that was officially a no-no).  The operators of the game could grant this ability to anyone, so presumably they would do so for at least some of their own administrative characters so they could do things like this.

But separate from that, everything that every player has in the game is just a database entry.  A database admin could, if they knew what field to flip or adjust, grant anyone anything directly in the databases, even if there was no explicit power or command to do it.  You have to learn the database schema, but it doesn't specifically require source code.

In general, what's easy to manipulate is adding and deleting character, and altering those characters in any way within the limits of the game.  So if any character ever had it in City of Heroes, they could grant it.

What's harder is adding content.  Without the source code or at least significant elements of the build system, adding content would require decoding the pigg system in its entirety, and then figuring out how to add the raw data necessary to add content.  Content in this case being missions, critters, critter groups, and powers.  Theoretically speaking, I know enough to probably be able to hack a powerset into the game.  Maybe a critter group.  Missions, no.  And the most complicated kinds of content to add would be anything requiring art assets.  Animations, for example, require specific understanding of the animation sequence system *and* the animation skeletal system.  I was only about 80% through understanding that.  Making a new map would also require figuring out how the game represented such things.  Its all possible, but would require a very large learning curve to basically reproduce the dev content creation tools and generate the right files in the right format on both client *and* server side.  And then, on top of that, you have to figure out how to distribute client modifications.  Its not just the distribution technology.  Anyone who doesn't update will either find their clients crashing or behaving extremely weirdly and generally unplayable.  Players need to know when to update.

At the top of modification mountain is altering the game engine or the client itself.  You would need to do this to do things like add new kinds of power effects, change the way NPCs behave (beyond some limits), or change the way the game was structured.  For example, if you want eight more enhancement slots, that would require an engine change.  Even something simple like changing the names of the servers would require some engine changes (so says Codewalker).  Things like turning off auto-logout probably require engine changes.  Altering the fundamental rules of the game like travel suppression or diminishing returns all require engine changes.  To effect these, you either need the actual source code for the game, or you need to figure out how to patch the game code without it.  Unless you get very lucky, the latter without the former is incredibly difficult.  So difficult, I would be suspicious of anyone claiming to do it.  Its more likely that person is a former dev with a copy of the source that is retro-creating patches and distributing them anonymously than its someone skilled enough to patch the game servers without source and actually expending that skill on a game server.

[MM3squints]

What's harder is adding content.  Without the source code or at least significant elements of the build system, adding content would require decoding the pigg system in its entirety, and then figuring out how to add the raw data necessary to add content.  Content in this case being missions, critters, critter groups, and powers.  Theoretically speaking, I know enough to probably be able to hack a powerset into the game.  Maybe a critter group.  Missions, no.  And the most complicated kinds of content to add would be anything requiring art assets.  Animations, for example, require specific understanding of the animation sequence system *and* the animation skeletal system.  I was only about 80% through understanding that.  Making a new map would also require figuring out how the game represented such things.  Its all possible, but would require a very large learning curve to basically reproduce the dev content creation tools and generate the right files in the right format on both client *and* server side.  And then, on top of that, you have to figure out how to distribute client modifications.  Its not just the distribution technology.  Anyone who doesn't update will either find their clients crashing or behaving extremely weirdly and generally unplayable.  Players need to know when to update.

Crazy thought just popped in my head. The game did have the AE system (I would assume that system would be some what operational in the new CoX) Since that is already implemented, how hard would it be just to create content through AE, then link the point of contact to a dummy NPC in the world outside of AE (say place him in the middle of Perez Park) and have random door generators for the story arc for each new mission? Could something like that be convinced without the source code? Or alternativly make new content in the same fashion the SSA stories were made.

[Arcana]

Crazy thought just popped in my head. The game did have the AE system (I would assume that system would be some what operational in the new CoX) Since that is already implemented, how hard would it be just to create content through AE, then link the point of contact to a dummy NPC in the world outside of AE (say place him in the middle of Perez Park) and have random door generators for the story arc for each new mission? Could something like that be convinced without the source code? Or alternativly make new content in the same fashion the SSA stories were made.

Probably not without source code.  The AE contacts were, I believe, hardcoded to the actual AE contact entities.  The AE contacts worked by using an early prototypical version of phasing technology (where different players see different things when looking at the same entity or landscape).  That's how AE contacts changed appearance based on mission content.  Without looking at the source code, I would have to guess that there was at least some hardcoding into the game engine as part of the architect system.  Hypothetically speaking it might be possible for a pigg hacker to *relocate* the AE contacts in the game (not sure, but it seems reasonable), but there aren't enough of them to scatter throughout the game to make viable general purpose contacts.  And they are probably linked together in unentangleable ways.

And then there's the problem of actually injecting the content into players' clients.  The AE had a system for that, but it required the player to choose the mission arc, there was no general way to distribute all of the AE content to all players ahead of time.

In fact, I think it would probably be easier to just straight up create new content and inject it into the game than monkey around too much with the AE and try to directly integrate it into the main line content.  It was far easier to create AE content, but hacking around it is possibly more difficult than altering the mission piggs.  Particularly if your content doesn't require any new assets (maps, critters, etc).  Although you just never know until you dig in what you'll find in there.  My best guess says its unlikely to work, but without actually reading the implementation that guess is at best a 60/40 proposition.

[JanessaVR]

Sitting on a shelf, not ten feet from me as I type this, are a set of little external storage drives. There are eight of them, with about a terabyte of data on each...

My screenshot collection takes up a chunk of one of them. The rest of that space? It's filled with the FRAPs videos FCM and I made over the last few months of the game. An epic ship raid, team missions, the signature arcs, iTrials and task forces, tip missions, soloing with our "nightmare" characters, duo runs with our favorites through Dark Astoria, our GM-hunting Masterminds kicking Lusca's butt, the Liberty "usual suspects" last Underground run... all kinds of things.

To me, they're not a sad thing to watch. When I pull down one of those drives, hook it up and watch the Monster Hunters Club chase some beastie around or a whole bunch of Ouphs and LBers kick Rikti butts all over that ship it's a reminder just how much fun we all had, and... with some patience and a lot of luck... how much fun we may eventually be able to have again. 

There are too many videos here to share them all... and I'm not sure how interested anyone would be to see some of them, anyway... But FCM has posted a few. (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=flyingcodemonkeytube)

Don't you dare get sniffly over them. Grin instead, and remember that one time this dude did that CRAZY THING that *should* have gotten everyone's face eaten, and then- ... You get the idea.  ;D  If you've got the choice between laughing over our memories or crying, it's okay to pick the crying sometimes. But don't forget the laughing part's there, too.

I have 2.5 TBs of BandiCam recorded gaming as well.  As soon as the game announced its shutdown, I compiled an Excel spreadsheet of missions/arcs and started going through them, trying to preserve my favorite arcs.  I got most of the ones I wanted to preserve.  I still haven't had time to sort through them and upload them to YouTube.  I would need to sort them into playlists or it would just be hundreds of unlabeled, unorganized videos.  Properly arrayed, they would show character creation and progression through a carefully-plotted series of missions, designed to experience as much content as possible.

[Abraxus]

I have watched a lot of CoH videos, and what I feel lately is anticipation for its return, rather than remorse for its untimely demise.

[Arcana]

Given your past work with the game, they should just award it to your account as a global reward from the get-go.  ;)

Well, if they don't, I'm pretty sure I will be able to find a game-breaking bug that qualifies.  I've had a couple of years to think about it.  The problem is that ironically they won't be able to fix anything I find.