Friday with Means - March 20th, 2009

[Ashram]

You asked us to ask questions:

First: Mech PVE combat. Are there any plans to have any?

Perhaps six man PVE mech/foot instance, where it is expected three to be in a mech and three on foot. and have the mechs take out mostly other mechs, but a few apts, and have the foot people take out some anti vehicle rocket users. The inability to repair a mech, means that the party will have to switch in and out of their mechs, making it a dynamic and changing party.


Second: VP at levels where BS doesn't run.

Outside of two level ranges, BS simply doesn't run. Alien missions are laughable VP. Is anything being done to resolve this? Perhaps if you got VP for being in the queue for BS (and take away the option to decline an invite, if you are in the queue, you ARE going, don't want to go? leave the queue). This will encourage people to sign up, as right now, there is no reason to, as you will never get to BS. Now that people have a reason to sign up, there might actually be BS occasionally.

[Moldark]

Hope you remember to put the fix for pelisse drop in there means...while your at it would ya look at the cure for baldness drop as well....seems borked as well.

Couldn't care less about the apartments or the club unless you put something to kill in there.

[afthartos]

Here's a thought to Means.
Why don't you guys turn that original orbital lobby into a museum, which can be accessed from that
orbital station the nightclub and appartments are going to be.
Or even better. Have them both on the same station.
It would be really great to have some sort of access into that Lobby.

[shadowgod]

Here's a thought to Means.
Why don't you guys turn that original orbital lobby into a museum, which can be accessed from that
orbital station the nightclub and appartments are going to be.
Or even better. Have them both on the same station.
It would be really great to have some sort of access into that Lobby.

they could replace what were entrances to RK, SL as the entrances to the apartments and the night club.

theres two other doors there, they could come up with new stuff... maybe an uber new clothing shop.. and a new furniture shop maybe...

[erozc]

Another idea I just had for the SpaceAPT, is let us spawn a boss in it :P but make it a huge cred sink.

100m Mercs
300m TNH
500m Beast
900m Artillery Commander

Just make a shop in there with an "Essence of" the mob. You buy the essence of item and use it in a small machine that spawns them, kind of like an incarn.

Idea is hardly original, it was brought up already by the mighty Alex11 in his visionary Apartment Boss thread.

[Rktim]

I do like the opifex head. However, something has been bugging me about it since Means first posted it last week. I always thought that the original head was supposed to be a black opifex female. Unfortunately, the updated head still looks too much like a white solitus female, in my opinion. In order to maintain the characteristics of both race (opifex) and skin color (black) I think the hair needs to be shorter on top, the lips need to be a little fuller, and the skin tone needs to be a modified grayish brown as opposed to a grayish pink as it looks now.

I'm not expecting the art guys to beat a dead horse to get this one head to look perfect, but it's just something to consider for future head alterations.

I dont want to be that guy but, erm what have you been smoking and can i have some of it?

Im sorry but theres no "black opifexes" or nano mages, or troxes... no really, see erm.. The reason that theres black and white and asian etc etc Humans today (aka Solitus) is that we have developed in to different races over the last hundred of thousand of years or so, perfectly natural and its just the way it is, now the other 3 however have been genetically enhanced striving for perfection in what they are supposed to do, and with financial gain as a driving force as that, theres absolutely no reason for OT to actually sit down and make all those genetic changes to there template, just to be politically correct 20.000 years from now threw a slight minimal tone change in skin colour on there workmonkeys

Now dont get me wrong, Opis aint white ether, there Opifexes, and thats it, i think your just seeing things hat aint there...


Disclamer (always sem to need one of these for some stupid reason):
When i say race above i mean it in a biological definition such as:
"In biology, a race is any inbreeding group, including taxonomic subgroups such as subspecies, taxonomically subordinate to a species and superordinate to a subrace and marked by a pre-determined profile of latent factors of hereditary traits." - Wikipedia

And not in some bad nazi "master race" kind of way...

[Tazalanche]

Synch Issues:
We have for some time been working on a more permanent solution to the "synch/lag" issues that seems to be randomly affecting players for some time. Within the next month we should have test dimensions up and running at another provider that will hopefully perform better during peak hours. Setting the game up itself isn't difficult, as we publish new servers etc all the time, it is the arcane art of monitoring/error reporting/billing/support tools for AO that is difficult. Either way I am very much looking forward to examining results from this new server/network environment. If all looks well we will move to the new environment as soon as humanly possible. Of course I will let you know when.

Instanced Cities:
Macrosun has taken it upon himself to create the instanced cities that have been long requested by the player base. This will be difficult...but he feels he is making good progress. The instanced nature of these playfields will make it impossible to have player owned shops...but the city bonuses and alien attacks should now be available to everyone. This is a long way from completion but at least work has begun on this issue that has been with us for a long time. "Normal" cities will still retain value due to their size and their player shops...but more AI content will now be available to all. I'm hoping we can also grant fr00b access to the org HQ's at the same time.

For example I didn't fully realize how much people were affected by the spammers in game...work has already been done to make this problem easier to deal with (something not easy in a game that offers free accounts..) and we look forward to having better ways (less player driven) in the near future to deal with this issue.

Updates on these please!

[Gastastic]

Newer head is looking better.

[erozc]

This isn't a graphical advancement. However making the game threaded to take advantage of multi core systems would be nice. I'm not sure how much of an improvement it would make however (other than splitting the load) once the graphics are off loaded onto the GPU.

1) AO is threaded already, you will find probably about ~10 new threads popping up when starting AO.
2) Multithreading doesn't actually mean that you can automatically take advantage of several physical cores. Also, taking advantage of them to their full potential in a single application is hardly trivial and requires informed use of a good API, particularly in applications that don't just process chunks of data.

Currently, disregarding background applications, it's probable that the best use of a dual core system in AO is dual logging

[Verta]

Here's a thought to Means.
Why don't you guys turn that original orbital lobby into a museum, which can be accessed from that
orbital station the nightclub and appartments are going to be.
Or even better. Have them both on the same station.
It would be really great to have some sort of access into that Lobby.

Bump for bringing back the arrival hall to the orbital station with exits leading to the main faction cities. An occasional shuttle crush on re-entry to RK would be good too

[vadagget]

Here's a thought to Means.
Why don't you guys turn that original orbital lobby into a museum, which can be accessed from that
orbital station the nightclub and appartments are going to be.
Or even better. Have them both on the same station.
It would be really great to have some sort of access into that Lobby.

Bump!

All this could be set on the Morning Star.

could consider it the 'living quarters' section of the space station.

[Gunfytr]

Here's a thought to Means.
Why don't you guys turn that original orbital lobby into a museum, which can be accessed from that
orbital station the nightclub and appartments are going to be.
Or even better. Have them both on the same station.
It would be really great to have some sort of access into that Lobby.

big bump

would be seriously cool

[IHaveHugeNick]

Some good news. Concept art looks great, looking forward to it. Nice job on that head too, that first render was scary, but now i have confidence you will get it right.

I disagree, I use apartments as a nice quiet place without spam.

That's rather silly. You can use the chat system to make any place you want, a quiet place without spam.

Shopping missing from apartments is about the worst thing there is.

Personally i absolutely love whole the concept of housing in MMOs, and i'd like to be as customizable as possible and to have more uses then just beatiful art to stare at. The Jobe Apartments for example had lovely art, it a shame that they don't have much use other then being show off place for oldschoolers.

So to ****e it up a bit, how about adding to apartments:

- make the apartment per account, not per character
- some surgery clinic equivalent without 5 s lockout
- access to banks of all characters on account ( make it one big bank) , except the nodrops of course
- gms terminal
- fixer grid exit, charging 500k per use (should be nice money sink)
- some exits/teleporters to social night clubs
- some easy way to teleport lowbie character straight to apartment (another exit from newbie island perhaps?)
- an exit to small holo world/combat room for testing and experimenting with weapon setups, it would have one leet with 0AC, and one Heckler with Max AC, maybe one high evade mob, all with unlimited HP and not aggroing

Not to ruin the artwork with all the buttons and terminals, it could just have some sort of control room.

Just some food for thought here.

[Watermoose]

As ALL Funcom employees probably know, we are all excited about the new engine.

Can the staff make a second teaser video?

Will probably keep us preoccupied until the initial release of the engine itself.

Just throwing that out there

[Dooooooom]

More pvp content would be nice, don't care about the graphics would rather see a lot more pvp. Once your 220/30/70 and have all your gear the only thing left in the game is BS, and on RK1 bs is almost non existent. Every day there will be a round or 2 of BS then it will end for a couple hours. What is someone supposed to do then if they have nothing else to do? The lox booster was nice for about a week but after that there's nothing left to be done, once you have your full setup then there is no reason to pvm anymore. I know a few people who have quit because the lack of pvp on rk1 and im one of them. I Would like to see some pvp content added instead of some new apartments which will be worthless. Maybe some new BS maps, maybe a BS terminal for 210+ that doesnt do clan vs omni and will randomly assign people to a side in the BS. Maybe add new zones with towers that are 5% or 25% 24/7.

[egadsrk2]

I have a question.

Several weeks ago in a FWM, you invited first Perfekt, then others, to suggest 10 things they'd like changed in Anarchy Online. And while I'm certain these were all read, pondered over, and considered... have any of these changes moved from a forum post, into future changes that will happen, based purely on these posts?




... Doesn't matter which ones, how many, why, or when. I'm merely curious if those threads have already influenced AO's short term future, in ways we just haven't seen yet.

[Ebondevil]

Here's a thought to Means.
Why don't you guys turn that original orbital lobby into a museum, which can be accessed from that
orbital station the nightclub and appartments are going to be.
Or even better. Have them both on the same station.
It would be really great to have some sort of access into that Lobby.

Huge Bump, I still miss that place, and having it available in the Space station should be much less confusing as new players wont go there.

I do like the opifex head. However, something has been bugging me about it since Means first posted it last week. I always thought that the original head was supposed to be a black opifex female. Unfortunately, the updated head still looks too much like a white solitus female, in my opinion. In order to maintain the characteristics of both race (opifex) and skin color (black) I think the hair needs to be shorter on top, the lips need to be a little fuller, and the skin tone needs to be a modified grayish brown as opposed to a grayish pink as it looks now.

I personally thought all opifexes had the same skin colour, a sort of Grey with a hint of Blue, neither black nor white nor any other ethnicity found in the present day.

[macattack]

A further thing to remember: the apartments should be "outside", just like the SL apartments, so we can use our Lazyboys, dancing santas and fire camps there

hmm... don't know if I would like my neighbor having a campfire in his house... my precious valuables may go up in flames if his party gets out of control

[Chrys]

(Homo Nano is the scientific name for nanomages, it is not calling all nanomages homosexuals)

Hawhaw Klod and IHHN are HOMO NANOS HAWHAW /Nelson

[Tryqz]

/me dies of awesome overload

I personally thought all opifexes had the same skin colour, a sort of Grey with a hint of Blue, neither black nor white nor any other ethnicity found in the present day.

Yep. They're meant to be a unique race in their own right. If you want black/white/oriental features play Solitus.




As for that earlier suggestion - it would be nice to modify the old arrival hall to act as a hub for this orbital area, with exits to the factions' cities, apartments, and the nightlub.