New efforts!

[Ulysses Dare]

IIRC, NCsoft introduced a new account system to replace the master account sometime in late 2011 or early 2012. At the time it was shut down, COH was one of I think two games (I forget the other) that hadn't been migrated to the new system yet.

Thanks Codewalker. I thought I remembered a change with the account system but couldn't recall the details.

[Dr. Bad Guy]

Every horrifically bad repair job that comes into our shop starts with "All you need to do is...".

[Ulysses Dare]

I suppose I should have said "Both were easily solved when the game was still running". 

Maybe they could have been, I don't know. And neither do you. Declaring that the problem could have been easily solved when you don't have any first hand knowledge of the issues involved is awfully presumptuous.

[Arcana]

Both easily solved.

#1 only requires updating the EULA/TOS to include selling the user account data.  NCSoft updated the EULA a number of times.  What's one more update?  It's not doable now of course since they've suspended all accounts so there's no way to get us to "sign" the agreement through implied acceptance of continued gaming as they did with prior updates.

#2 only requires they pull one of those "We are insisting you change your password for security reasons" many companies are doing these days.  Single user id on many websites/gaming accounts is very common for most people.  In theory, forcing different passwords should be enough.  Of course, nothing stops me from setting both sites to the same password.  Didn't say it was a good idea.  Just said I can do it.

I still maintain my position that if anyone would accept the game without the user account data, NCSoft would have found another reason not to sell.

Its actually a little more complicated than that.  With regard to financial liability it would not be enough to modify the EULA to grant themselves the right to do that, at least in the US, because there are state and federal financial disclosure laws that could supercede the EULA.  California in particular has a maze of them.

There's the separate issue that both single sign on and financial information hinges on and that's trusting the third party you're giving that information to.  If you don't trust them, you'd be handing over very sensitive information that you'd potentially be liable for any misuse of.  It isn't really difficult technically to do this, but in my experience working out the logistics of who's responsible for what can get very tedious.

[LadyVamp]

Ulysses Dare, I will simply agree to disagree with you.  It really wouldn't have been that hard to secure permission from us.  Most companies today don't even ask you for permission.  They simply ram it down your throat including any financial data to 3rd parties.  Just take a look at your cell phone contract or banking or credit card agreements.  What possibly can your bank or your credit card share other than your financial health?  Purchasing habits?  that would certainly tell me about your financial health.

Arcana,  I won't disagree with you that the laws are a litigation minefield.  But I must tell you I've been down this road before.  I worked for a design firm that designed and oversaw the construction of power plants.  Two parent companies.  One who happen to be a competitor to some of the firms other customers.  When that division was shutdown, legal teams for both parents and the design firm reviewed all legal angles.  They determined it was better for the parent in the power industry to not have the financial data (indeed all project data in fact) rather than try to weed through it all and hand over what they could legally obtain or get permission from the other power companies.  They knew they wouldn't get everyone's permission so they chose to take plausible deniability.

Corporations tend to be very conservative with their financial data.  End users don't usually look at that larger picture.  It wouldn't have been hard to secure permission and possibly sidestep some of that legal "fun".  How many people here, do you think, would have said yes to such an agreement if it meant they could keep their toon data intact and get a front row seat to being invited to the new servers?  Quite a few I suspect.

No doubt someone will tell me those are different things.  They're not all that different.  Whether the product is a set of drawings for a power plant, a turnkey build plant, or an MMO, they're all just companies/corporations.  Now if NCSoft has a good legal team, they would limit their liability by placing each mmo into its own, personal LLC/LLP so that all the lawsuits in the universe against one mmo won't affect profits from another mmo unless legal can pierce the corporate veil.  The master account sign-on would be the likely path to piercing the veil.

[Tubbius]

I think that if the game should go live again that I will, on remaking the characters and names that I can, likely break my space bar from random jumping around Atlas Park.

That is all.

[rkcdan]

Has the general consensus changed on the negotiation team? It may just be me, but It seem that  the conversation has shifted to the feeling that the negotiations have failed. I don't post much but I read this forum daily waiting for news, any news.
 

[Surelle]

Has the general consensus changed on the negotiation team? It may just be me, but It seem that  the conversation has shifted to the feeling that the negotiations have failed. I don't post much but I read this forum daily waiting for news, any news.

The most proactive thing to do is to sign up for the "Wake me if there's ever real news" thread that is stickied to the top of this very forum.  That was a stroke of brilliance on Titan's part.  Then you can draw your own conclusions from there.

And do check out Paragon Chat.  There is forward motion being made there, and there's a July 4th weekend celebration happening there over the July 2nd/3rd weekend.  Let's face it, although a few old, shuttered MMOs do have emus (Sony in particular seemed to look the other way at those), most displaced MMOers have nothing at all.  At least we still have ye old homestead we can fly/superjump/superspeed/ninja run across and chat in. 

The real question of the day for me is:  Will I ever make it down the entire ski chalet slopes in one run?   

[Ulysses Dare]

The real question of the day for me is:  Will I ever make it down the entire ski chalet slopes in one run?   

Keep practicing, you can do it!

Which reminds me that I haven't actually checked out the chalet in Paragon Chat.

[LateNights]

Has the general consensus changed on the negotiation team? It may just be me, but It seem that  the conversation has shifted to the feeling that the negotiations have failed. I don't post much but I read this forum daily waiting for news, any news.

I think any negotiations are very much one sided, so any progress is going to be painfully slow because "we" really don't have any cards to play with other than "we'll take that old thing if you're done with it" - while NC literally has no real incentive to want to part with something it owns that isn't costing them anything to hold onto "just in case".

Maybe once they've decided where they stand on the American market & PC gaming vs Asia & Mobile we'll finally get a result - so yeah, "failed" = no, stalled = very much so...

Bearing in mind I'm in no way connected nor aware if any of what I've said is grounded in fact.

[rkcdan]

The most proactive thing to do is to sign up for the "Wake me if there's ever real news" thread that is stickied to the top of this very forum.  That was a stroke of brilliance on Titan's part.  Then you can draw your own conclusions from there.

And do check out Paragon Chat.  There is forward motion being made there, and there's a July 4th weekend celebration happening there over the July 2nd/3rd weekend.  Let's face it, although a few old, shuttered MMOs do have emus (Sony in particular seemed to look the other way at those), most displaced MMOers have nothing at all.  At least we still have ye old homestead we can fly/superjump/superspeed/ninja run across and chat in. 

The real question of the day for me is:  Will I ever make it down the entire ski chalet slopes in one run?   

I signed up a long time ago, but still look here everyday. I do have Paragon chat, but I find it very depressing.

[Twisted Toon]

I signed up a long time ago, but still look here everyday. I do have Paragon chat, but I find it very depressing.

I'm here for the off topic discussions.

The On topic discussion has pretty much had everything said...several times.

[Remaugen]

I'm still here, I check the thread daily, sometimes several times a day, mostly to read whatever Arcana and Codewalker post, I find them both informative and amusing. I am not a programmer so I probably have some unrealistic ideas of what could or could not be done, but I find the topic discussion to be fascinating.

I just don't have much to contribute aside from a drunk post now and then, which at the time seems amusing, but when read sober often causes me to wonder what the hell I was thinking.

I remain convinced that WE WILL get our game back, or at least an acceptable substitute, but the longer we wait the more frustrating it gets for lack of "City" game play time. . .

[slickriptide]

  There are other problems much less tractable, like XMPP latency.  XMPP servers aren't designed to be low latency servers.  Distributed enforced synchronization is probably the most academically complex problem.

This is the real dealbreaker, I agree. I have some ideas how a XMPP service could be used to mitigate the problem here though I'm not sure I'd ever have the chops to implement them. Not as if it matters at the moment, but someday it might.

The numbers of messages are impressively large, but if a server is (supposedly) able to handle 80,000 people chatting at once then I'd at least want to see how the volume of metadata from a hundred players compares to that chat traffic.

Of course, there are ways to cheat. The client's predictive graphics mean that if you have a city zone full of cars and pedestrians whose only purpose is to be window dressing then those pedestrians don't have to generate the movement metadata of a live person. You just script them to act like this:

• Turn towards next checkpoint
• Accelerate to walking speed
• Sleep for duration of travel between point A and point B
• Wake up and initiate turning maneuvers
• Slow to turning speed
• Rotate towards next checkpoint
• Accelerate to walking speed
• Repeat, ad inifinitum

The only metadata generation would happen at the transitions in direction along the path. The zone would *look* busy, and probably no two people would see exactly the same set of pedestrians in the exact same places much of the time, and there'd be a real possibility of some kind of rubber-banding at the checkpoints but the illusion of population would be adequate for most purposes.

[Arcana]

This is the real dealbreaker, I agree. I have some ideas how a XMPP service could be used to mitigate the problem here though I'm not sure I'd ever have the chops to implement them. Not as if it matters at the moment, but someday it might.

The numbers of messages are impressively large, but if a server is (supposedly) able to handle 80,000 people chatting at once then I'd at least want to see how the volume of metadata from a hundred players compares to that chat traffic.

Those 80,000 people can only type so fast.  A human is highly unlikely to be able to send more than a couple messages per minute, even if they are chatty as hell.  Combat requires 500x the worst case human being scenario.

Of course, there are ways to cheat. The client's predictive graphics mean that if you have a city zone full of cars and pedestrians whose only purpose is to be window dressing then those pedestrians don't have to generate the movement metadata of a live person. You just script them to act like this:

• Turn towards next checkpoint
• Accelerate to walking speed
• Sleep for duration of travel between point A and point B
• Wake up and initiate turning maneuvers
• Slow to turning speed
• Rotate towards next checkpoint
• Accelerate to walking speed
• Repeat, ad inifinitum

The only metadata generation would happen at the transitions in direction along the path. The zone would *look* busy, and probably no two people would see exactly the same set of pedestrians in the exact same places much of the time, and there'd be a real possibility of some kind of rubber-banding at the checkpoints but the illusion of population would be adequate for most purposes.

*That* stuff is relatively easy to scale.  Its not just predictable in the fine-grained sense, it is predictable in the global sense: you practically don't have to send any messages at all for that kind of stuff if Paragon Chat implements it in the right way.  But we were talking about combat, and combat requires very fine time resolution and cannot predict what the players will do.  Unless we're going to stand still in the monkey cage and punch each other in the head, you're going to need to update movement rapidly in order to deal with range effects in combat. 

At this point I should point out that even City of Heroes itself, with a real mapserver and far less lag and far faster updates than we're talking about ran into problems with melee combat after release that required tweaks to the game.  There were times when melee characters couldn't hit moving targets at all because of the predictive lag built into the game - meaning, when it looked to you like you were in range it did not look to the server like you were in range, and vice versa.  Melee players actually had to sometimes lead their targets like fighter pilots to get their melee attacks to hit running targets.  And in the pre-Issue 1 days when NPCs used to run away a lot it could drive melee players insane.

[slickriptide]

Those 80,000 people can only type so fast.  A human is highly unlikely to be able to send more than a couple messages per minute, even if they are chatty as hell.  Combat requires 500x the worst case human being scenario.

Indeed. but you're the mathematician, so I shouldn't need to tell you to run the numbers.

80,000 chat users x 2 per minute = 160,000 per minute

200 players x 1000 messages per minute = 200,000 per minute

That's not a huge difference.

Now, sure, if we were supporting 150,000 paying subscribers 24 hours a day, that would be a recipe for failure. Supporting a tiny percentage of that number, spread through a series of instances, is a reasonable goal (for certain values of reasonable, heh).

Can paragon chat handle being hit by that volume of incoming messages? I have no idea. I doubt that Codewalker had that kind of wall of text in mind when he programmed it, but that doesn't mean it would necessarily choke, especially given that any individual client would only see the metadata in its environs.

Melee players actually had to sometimes lead their targets like fighter pilots to get their melee attacks to hit running targets.  And in the pre-Issue 1 days when NPCs used to run away a lot it could drive melee players insane.

Ah, the good old days. Blind was one of the best reasons in the world for being an Illusion Controller. That and the fact that Ill/Rad was nerfed three times and was still one of the best powerset combos.

[Fireheart]

Indeed. but you're the mathematician, so I shouldn't need to tell you to run the numbers.

80,000 chat users x 2 per minute = 160,000 per minute

200 players x 1000 messages per minute = 200,000 per minute

That's not a huge difference.

Right, but if I understand the issue, as Arcana is describing it, the problem is not message volume, but precise message Timing.  All of those messages have to arrive at the right time, in the right order, and the system has to calculate if the 'collisions' happen in the right places.  It's my sense that XMPP doesn't have this sort of precision, it's more concerned with message content, rather than message timing.

Be Well!
Fireheart

[Arcana]

Indeed. but you're the mathematician, so I shouldn't need to tell you to run the numbers.

Nope.

80,000 chat users x 2 per minute = 160,000 per minute

200 players x 1000 messages per minute = 200,000 per minute

That's not a huge difference.

To support something like a zone event with 200 players, you'd probably need a minimum of 15 messages per second to each other player.  That's 200 x 199 X 15 * 60 = 35,820,000 messages per minute.

A server with 80,000 chatters are generally not all broadcasting to each other.  They are in different smaller channels.  So you don't have the case where 80,000 people need to each send a message to all 79,999 other chatters.  And even if you tried, most XMPP servers implement a maximum chat room occupant limit specifically to avoid overloading the broadcast mechanism.

[LadyVamp]

Nope.

To support something like a zone event with 200 players, you'd probably need a minimum of 15 messages per second to each other player.  That's 200 x 199 X 15 * 60 = 35,820,000 messages per minute.

A server with 80,000 chatters are generally not all broadcasting to each other.  They are in different smaller channels.  So you don't have the case where 80,000 people need to each send a message to all 79,999 other chatters.  And even if you tried, most XMPP servers implement a maximum chat room occupant limit specifically to avoid overloading the broadcast mechanism.

Even more so a chat server isn't designed to do the back-end processing the client needs to present the world correctly.  Asking the chat server to handle that would be like asking a little boy with his little red wagon to haul an 18 wheel truck's load.  Just not doable.  Good chat servers have been written just about every scripting (aka interpreted) language to date.  That back end server would need to be done in a high performance compiled language like C/C++ or perhaps Java.  And it would take servers with xeon or opteron multi-core cpus, lots of ram, multiple nics, and fast raid configured scsi or sas storage, perhaps throw in fusion IO accelerators.  Figure servers that costs a much of a passenger car each.  As in figure about $20,000 to $40,000 / server.  And you'd likely need 2 as a bare minimum.  We haven't even talked switches, routers, and wan circuits.  All of which have equally impressive price tags.

And all that's so you can ram 36 million messages/min out to the clients and give you a live world.

[Paragon Avenger]

It is time once again for ...
The weakly update,

Yes, it has been another week.  Progress was made when somebody found a you tube video of a cat dancing.  It was funny and cute.  That one guy, who won't stop talking, even took a breath long enough to smile at the video.  Other than that, the THeM continue operating under an NDA and NCSoft operates under an NDA, but it isn't the same NDA for obvisous reasons.  Anyway, we love you and keep using Paragon Chat and don't forget about that July 2nd event.  And as always, we love you.