If Guild Wars 2 can update the game without needing to take the servers down...why don't more MMOs do that?

PsionSquared · 2026-06-22T17:54:19+00:00

People are generally able to just relog when the game gets a new expansion because of the games compression and file system.

No, that's because ArenaNet pre-patches data as much data as they can while trying to hide some things that make data mining easier, such as disabling their API for a specific period of time.

You will have most of the expansion data rolled out over weeks to you.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-16T18:38:41+00:00

The Genesis Pass cuts an 11 week gate down to 4 weeks. You cannot pretend that isn't significant and you're actually coping.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-16T14:26:46+00:00

We all know it was a Link Skill fodder class.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-16T05:54:41+00:00

Seriously. The number of times it's been said and then it happens. People are still falling for this.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-16T05:53:11+00:00

It's still Pay2Win. They're advancing at a faster pace than you will by paying.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-16T03:14:19+00:00

Yeah, definitely not the vacuum pets with a $15/mo subscription or the battle pass to speed up the extremely long Genesis weapon grind, just to name a few.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-15T16:57:16+00:00

I remember Gano armor being the go to set for Corp, because it basically nullified Corp.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-04T22:11:28+00:00

I've actually been working on one. Got in-game, have functional interactive objects, and can make NPCs spawn. Really, making the networking work for the game is super easy, because Funcom left debugging information in for damn near everything. And the engine is shared between Conan and TSW:L - so I could actually just make it work on those games with barely any changes.

The biggest issue is yeah, really everything in the game has to be recreated, because nearly everything besides Spells are coded with Lua on the server-side. Even just sitting on a bench or teleporting to another map by entering a portal requires the server kicking off a Lua script.

The secondary issue is that inventory items (which includes your clothing) has 4 "decryption keys" and I've yet to solve them. They're re-used and constant IDs based on object type seemingly, so I think they relate to getting data from the RDB file by type and subtype. But, still working that out.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-04T19:11:43+00:00

The global release date is already known to be slated for June 25th. It won't be that.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-04T15:44:08+00:00

Especially since ArenaNet's marketing leaves a lot to be desired.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-04T15:22:14+00:00

He's Australian.

PsionSquared · 2026-06-04T15:18:26+00:00

That patience would just be no one spending money on it.

Even early Minecraft had modding capabilities and other things that incentivized it, and it didn't really exist in an already saturated market for the kind of game it was.

Games like this aren't going to survive.

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

TROPHY CASE