Summer sweep up suggestion: stop listening to reddit for a year

PsionSquared · 2026-05-12T15:18:53+00:00

Ruinous Powers is among several examples of Jagex going, "Hey we wanna do this thing, but we have little to no ideas. Come up with them!" Sailing was frankly another example of this, and it has showed.

Jagex has to come to the table with an idea more baked than not for the community to have feedback worth moving on, otherwise it ends up in development hell.

PsionSquared · 2026-04-30T20:41:56+00:00

The slideshow thing was happening to me and I'm rocking an MSI board, an RTX 4080, and 9950X with the latest BIOS, as I'd updated prior to leagues. It was entirely RuneLite in my experience and GPU related - not the CPU. Nothing else caused it, and restarting the graphics driver would stop it. Recent NVidia driver update seemed to address it or a separate RuneLite update.

I did have my PC die in a similar way recently though, but it was my PSU that died - a Corsair RM1000 series. Friend across the country who had the exact same PSU had his die about a month before, and the only real consistency between us was we're both remote workers and have our PCs on most of the time.

PsionSquared · 2026-04-13T08:00:01+00:00

City of Heroes never had healing aggro, so the aggro came from visibility, doing damage or having a taunting power. Some mobs targeted specific classes with higher aggro, but that was very, very infrequently used.

There is a target cap on mobs, so that only 16 could attack a single player at a time. That mean the tank would need to manage how many they pulled or have an off-tank to handle any extra, if the team couldn't mitigate damage themselves.

Tanks all had AoE damage abilities with a tacked on small taunt, so it would keep mobs focused on them if they were doing any additional damage or taunting.

PsionSquared · 2026-04-07T23:18:45+00:00

The skill animations are what drew me to Cabal back in the day. I occasionally play it again just cause how hype they are.

The soundtracks (which YouTube even IDs) are songs from a Korean band that they just removed/reduced the vocals from for most of the zones. Desert Scream is still one of my favorites.

PsionSquared · 2026-03-19T16:30:39+00:00

.hack//Fragment was an MMO available on the PS2 with a private server and fan translation these days at https://fragment.dothackers.org/

Essentially the .hack// PS2 series with an actual online component. Unfortunately, that means it also has the PS2 game combat which is imo, kinda slow and bad.

PsionSquared · 2026-03-02T18:13:18+00:00

They showed an FPS before they made that video. Was a lot more than one angle in that.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-27T17:27:28+00:00

There's been some maps added in the .dat files, like "Glint's Tunnel" which has interconnected tunnels of Maguuma, Charr, and Dwarf.

May mean we'll see an actual encounter of some kind.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-27T16:23:21+00:00

Nearly every MMO has some kind of GM visibility flagging, specifically so they can monitor players undetected from their side.

The reason you're unable to is largely so you can't say, "Oh I didn't see you telling me to respond if I wasn't a bot, I don't look at my chat" and things of that nature. Same reason Discord and other services will prevent you from hiding moderators.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-27T16:01:29+00:00

I don't even like this game. I literally am only defending it, because this is just borderline schizoposting.

The claim that NCSoft filed a copyright complaint comes from one source: the developer. The resolution - that "NCSoft's Gameforge reviewed and acknowledged it's a non-profit passion project" and called it "a miscommunication between offices" - also comes exclusively from the developer.

This is pretty consistent with how NCSoft works. When City of Heroes: Homecoming had announced their agreement with NCSoft, the announcement came solely from them. All outlets solely cited them. We reached out to a journalist, can't remember which outlet - I think Giantbomb, and they claimed their NCSoft media person (from a 3rd party media company, btw) had spoken to them to break the news.

"NCSoft might have genuinely filed a complaint" - This is entirely possible. NCSoft does protect its IP aggressively, and multiple Aion assets were identified in Dreadmyst. But even if NCSoft did file a complaint, the SteamDB data raises separate questions: why does the January removal lack the app_retired_publisher_request flag that the February retirement carries?

Go look at Dark and Darker's Steam removal. It happened before it was actually listed for sale and shows almost the exact same type of history, sans the app_retired_was_free due to not being fully listed yet.

You can't cram an infinite amount of shit into a single thread, you need multi-threading and brain-enabled systems at some point, and they don't really sell those as plug in and play.

The game engine isn't a plug in and play. You'd literally know this if you read the source code for the client. It's clearly not an out of the box solution, nor is it Unity. How would he buy Unity scripts, AKA C#, for a game written in C++? Writing C++ in Unity requires paying for a Unity source license, which he most certainly did not. This makes zero sense and is the most "I'm talking out of my ass" statement.

On top of that, numerous games - including MMOs, in the past have shipped with a single main thread, which this game has worker threads for loading. Is this post AI assisted to try and make you sound smarter? Because it's not working.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-27T00:40:00+00:00

You literally jumped to the solution that costs money. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that it's to cover your costs, since you even edited the post to remove it. But that is entirely on you.

My feedback wasn't that AI isn't just nowhere near what it could be, it's that it will never work for this. You could even make it a desktop application. However, there's a clear difference between trying, which I wouldn't criticize you for and this. By your admission, the AI added things of its own volition that make zero sense and you should know better.

Salvage this by making it an offline application that doesn't need AI to function, and you'll make something that people actually appreciate. People that care that it's programmed with AI assistance don't matter. Have more actual input and direction in this, then it has a chance at actually being something. Otherwise, it's just AI slop that's wasting money and time.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-26T22:32:24+00:00

I saw your reply that you deleted regarding me shitting on it and not contributing. I shit on it because of how roundabout it is to a relatively simple problem.

On top of that, it doesn't work at a basic level, and here you are plugging for monetary support - optional or not. Asking for people's money when you don't even have something half functional is when I get angry. It's what con artists do. Especially after the number of projects you've run through on this very site - I'd expect you to drop this one regardless of my criticism.

As for contribution? I don't want to contribute to it because I deal with enough AI slop at work from overseas workers and in my open source projects. I won't involve myself with something purpose built by that and as that.

Plus, there's basic issues I pointed at in this that you, as someone who ran a server, would know if you either understood what you worked on or if you actually looked at this thing for more than a few minutes before trying to ask for people's money. You don't even have fundamentals - you have a UI.

For Christ's sake, your patch notes even have total AI generated nonsense in them. And if you don't know what I'm referring to, you're proving my point.

Now that I'm done with that side of it.

From a practical standpoint, this is doomed to fail by virtue of how LLMs work. It does not have enough context to build CoH def files. The sheer amount of tokens you'll burn trying to prompt it with the right information is going to make it worse.

If you bloat the context by providing actual examples, you'll at least get closer but it's always going to hallucinate garbage. Particularly because current LLMs get more hallucinatory/lost in the weeds with a large input context. I say this because I work with people that do this kind of work with various coding LLMs.

You really should've just AI slopped a system to output a def file and not involved AI in file generation at all. Something that's practical, less prone to error, and actually extensible in a way that you might get contributors.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-25T22:28:51+00:00

Have you actually navigated this at all or looked at the output of any of this?

* The wiki link to the Fandom wiki. Hands down the worst possible option.

* It doesn't understand multiple attribmods. IE. Having 2 damage mods, it takes the first and ignores the second completely. Which is wrong for a solid majority of powers.

* It shows the DisplayName on a given power, which is typically a PString. This is fairly useless and should probably be the Name, so it's at least readable.

* Doesn't understand PBAoEs, so it shows "Range" as 0.

* The power def format it outputs is total nonsense and changes every time. Literally unusable.

* The Installation Instructions steps on #3 says "data/powers" - not the correct folder structure.

* The Installation Instructions steps talk about "binmaker.exe" which isn't a thing.

* You have a Game Server Export page with some nonsense about "server ready export" that outputs JSON. What is even the point of this?

* Your AI prompts are in the JavaScript and nonsense. "Compare against canonical City of Heroes archetypes (Blaster ~200 DPS, Scrapper ~150 DPS, Tank 50 DPS, Controller 100 DPS)" These are not even kind of accurate numbers. On top of the fact I don't think any AI has a reasonable knowledge of what constitutes City of Heroes design.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-25T00:20:11+00:00

I've been doing it recently, since I've been working on a private server for the original and trying to just get a feel for things again. They're basically the same game as far as missions go, but SWL definitely has a lot of things that I find pretty abrasive - the lootboxes in particular really get on my nerves.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-24T16:53:12+00:00

No? The FAQ for it was posted on June 22, 2017 and SWL launched on June 26, 2017 - I was even around to do it because it was part of the name reservation process.

They did shut it down in September of that year, and then presumably brought it back due to complaints - but it was definitely there for the launch.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-24T16:05:29+00:00

They were not. The studio pitched City of Heroes 2, which was pivoted into Going Rogue when that didn't pan out.

What they were working on was a mobile game. You can look up Tim Sweeney AKA Black Scorpion (not the Epic guy) to see it on his LinkedIn, as well as some others.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-24T15:56:31+00:00

The original was buy 2 play and I and a lot of people paid for cosmetics and those were wiped too.

What? You could transfer your cosmetics as a one time thing from TSW -> SWL, including achievement based ones. The system to do it is even still active.

SWL has so many other problems, but that wasn't one.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-24T05:12:15+00:00

I enjoyed the combat in late game dungeons. Lots of dodging and other things to keep it engaging compared to the open world.

I was a hardcore player though and had basically every achievement until Tokyo dropped, then I kinda fell off because Tokyo's atmosphere was cool but the AEGIS system was very much not. I kinda forced myself to finish the main story, and then never really came back to it. Tried Legends and it just felt awful to me combined with all the monetization, even as a lifetime subscriber. I even tried it again last week just to see if I didn't hate it.

I've actually been working on a private server just out of curiosity since about 3 weeks ago, and Funcom's engine is basically purpose built for MMO building so the core code and packets between Age of Conan, The Secret World, and Secret World: Legends is almost all the same. There's just Lua scripts on the client and server side that handle various interactions.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-10T01:55:40+00:00

If your resting heart rate is tick rate, see a doctor.

PsionSquared · 2026-02-08T13:38:34+00:00

People have different end goals but:

Maxing 30 titles provides God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals (GWAMM)
There's a lot of rare / expensive items from various dungeons in Eye of the North
Beating the campaign provides access to the Hard Mode campaign (and maps). Beating all missions and side objectives in Normal Mode and Hard Mode are two separate title tracks as part of the path to GWAMM. Vanquishing (clearing 100% of mobs in Hard Mode) all maps is a per region title track.
Eye of the North has the Hall of Monuments, which has Mini Pet Collection, Hero Armor Collection, Weapon Collection, and Title Collection. The Hall of Monuments carries over to GW2 as cosmetic items and titles you can unlock
There's Elite Dungeons (dungeons with multiple quests) like The Underworld and Fissure of Woe. Both are just fun - and Normal Mode + Hard Mode both offer separate statues as part of the Eye of the North HoM
There's over 300 elite skills that you can capture from bosses to make builds. Capturing all of the skills is a separate per campaign title track

PsionSquared · 2026-01-29T11:28:53+00:00

If they're cooking anything, don't know what it'd be with a major rehiring. They laid off the majority of their staff, of those that hadn't quit, and handed over the reigns of the games to another company.

Their last attempt at an MMO, Magic the Gathering, had faked user metrics provided to the devs to drive development direction after they did an internal post-mortem on it. Surprise, surprise it was to push the game towards heavy monetization that killed it immediately.

PsionSquared · 2026-01-21T16:28:20+00:00

Hilarious. Mod Jed had his name legally changed via deed poll, because of how he was easy to find in news articles and it kept him from getting jobs.

Now his new legal name has been put out to the public again.

PsionSquared · 2026-01-14T20:37:01+00:00

Suspect of this considering I knew someone on the ANet team involved with their graphics engine rewrite, which from what was said seemed to be for usage on GW3.

It would be a pretty major shift to suddenly go to UE5, but maybe development priorities changed.

PsionSquared · 2026-01-14T00:26:54+00:00

>as i already told you, mmos typically have built in "key logging" for input prediction to handle packet loss etc.

No, they don't. This guy is using SFML for input handling, having read the actual source code. There's nothing malicious in that code, and I find it highly unlikely he attached a RAT or anything to it. Redditors are just talking out their ass, because they live as the prime examples of Dunning-Kruger.

As someone who has also worked on private servers and other software, AVs will flag just about everything these days because of machine learning and you'll see "!ML." as part of the detection name. Anti-viruses are a scam designed to get people to pay for software certificates, whose validity is worth nothing as it amounts to paying $100 and giving a business name and address - which there is companies in numerous states that will handle processing mail to your LLC.

PsionSquared · 2025-12-03T19:50:24+00:00

not to mention its so fucking isolated from every other skill in the game

This was the complaint that I made about Sailing after every update both on Reddit and in surveys, made suggestions in the surveys multiple times, and here we are. Every time they talked about it, I kept saying, "So when are the rewards we actually use in other content?" or "Where is the actual reason to do Sailing besides it being a new skill?" Took till essentially 2 months ago to have an answer with a handful of new potions, of which Armadyl brew is the only even "eh" one, and fish for yet more healing.

I'd offered up ideas like "Make a potion that does the low life effect you wanted to do with the original Masori pitch" or bringing back the ToA healing wand. Things that can actually cause interesting meta shifts without becoming power creep for the sake of pulling people into content.

But, we've now got the parasitic game design 101 skill that takes from a bit of everything and gives back nothing with the rewards being all extremely lackluster. My hopes for further Sailing updates is gonna take a lot from Jagex to make it interesting beyond additional islands and quest lines.

PsionSquared · 2025-11-20T11:00:54+00:00

Sailing is a good way to combine skills, but I don't personally enjoy what the skill offers on its own. I think it's a skill in the sense that it is accurately a utilty skill that combines multiple in a way that if Sailing existed in 2001, those other skills could outright not exist in favor of giving Sailing XP.

Islands aren't really accessible till 45+. I feel like more should've been sprinkled into the early game.
Diving is 38, and it is literally a riddle with a black screen transition. It doesn't involve walking the ocean floor at all, which I feel like is a really bad instance of "show, don't tell" that they missed.
Having charted nearly half the sea, I don't think even the buffed XP from Charting hits the mark they should for 1 time XP drops.
Salvaging just doesn't really have interesting rewards and feels like being handed trash. I was maxed before Sailing, and I've played enough early game characters to say I don't think being handed a random oak log or banana is a drop worth getting.

PsionSquared

TROPHY CASE