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What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Release Notes 6/7/2018
kaiserin
Posts: 3,196 Cryptic Developer
Nightmare Event
ZEN Store
Nemesis
- Added Viral Horns and Talons costume pieces to the store and as possible drops from the open missions.
ZEN Store
- The single costume slot and 2 account wide costume slot items have been retired from the ZEN store.
- Added 2 and 5 character costume slot items to the ZEN store.
- Some notes: There is a limit of 40 costume slots per character, this has been the limit since the game launched. The 2 account wide slots bypassed this limit. Individual characters who have more than 40 won't lose access to any of their costume slots, but they will not be able to purchase any new ones.
Nemesis
- Added Destabilizer Blaster weapon skin to the store.
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Comments
What? Why? This makes no sense. If it worked since release and was one of the best features for people who make a lot of characters/costumes, why remove it now? Why is the game being put down bit by bit?
Once again I've long since scooted past a supposed limit in the game >.>
I swear the original coders where absolute incompetent monekys
Here we are now going to the West Side
Weapons in hand as we go for a ride
Some may come and some may stay
Watching out for a sunny day
Where there's love and darkness and my sidearm
In game as @forgemccain
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
The weird thing is that it would seem like CO is leaving money on the table with this. If someone who has 50 costume slots on their toon wants to buy more, why would CO want to turn away that potential income?
Sure, I get that there may be potential problems in the code here, but it seems like the most lucrative fix would be to increase the cap. As it is, some of the most devoted players get frustrated and and won't be able to give CO more money for something they obviously enjoy. Not a great way to encourage people to continue to play or to buy other things in the game.
(As an aside here, I have nowhere near that many costume slots. I recognize that there may not be a lot of players with that many costumes, but the point still stands. It's demoralizing.)
Information has to be stored somewhere, and server space isn't infinite.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I'm not in a position to actually answer this, but I can speculate on why this and other changes are being considered for CO.
I believe this may be a needed move to potentially port Champions to consoles. While CO has been "like this" more or less since launch, it's entirely possible that any attempt to port the current version of CO to consoles would cause some MAJOR headaches. So, by eliminating these instances where certain limits in the game could be bent, if not outright broken, they set the game up to be in a better position for consoles.
Afterall, Sony and/or Microsoft would have a say in how the game would run on their systems, and they'd want to make as much money as they could as well.
I could be entirely off base here, but it does make a sort of sense.
It's not possible to fix the account-wide unlock so it conforms to the supposed 40 slot limit? Just like the character slot limit, this seems like an odd decision that only serves to turn away people who have their wallets out.
1. As you probably know, locally-saved costume data is saved in the metadata of the jpg preview images. These images are about 70-80 kb in size, however most of that is the image itself which would be pointless to store server-side. The portion of the file that contains your actual costume data is only about 7 kb.
2. Unless the game servers are from 1990/2000 era, digital storage is long past the days where storage space is an issue.
3. Assuming everyone is an extreme case and has 200 characters on their account, and each character uses all 200 costume slots, you're looking at 7 * 200 * 200 = 280,000 kb, or 273.43 mb. While that might seem like a lot, let's pretend cryptic has our data on a 1 tb drive, which is actually pretty small by today's standards. That's 1,048,576 mb, and your 273.43 mb of costume data only takes up about 0.00026076316% of the drive's total storage capacity.
DoomedLuke at Primus Data Base
And at DeviantArt
my inner snark is pretty annoyed and i'm gonna get flak for this buuuut no matter how guilty I'll feel later... and seeing the trend... is the next big announcement / change / patch note gonna read:
"There is a limit of 4 powers per character, this has been the limit since the game launched. The initial launch bypassed this limit. Individual characters who have more than 4 won't lose access to any of their powers, but they will not be able to retrain without a full retcon token. Retcon tokens will now be character bound."
i'd rather you guys remove the caps (and the free chara slot at 40) and hike up the price for stuff like chara slots and account wide costume unlocks. crank it all up, but not like 5k per obv >.> whatever that might help recoup the alleged loss or cost
maybe even allowing free access to FF but cranking up the price of a chara slot even further might work
dunno, i mean i get i'm not gonna change your mind guys, but i'm grasping for options... anything that doesn't remove options (as far as how QoL things work) from players... i have more than a handful of friends who exclusiely keep making new charas to RP with and have dozens of costumes on each... i can't do that.. i don't want to do that... but it really feels like you guys are targetting those players (before ppl start yelling at me, i know they aren't... is why i said it FEELS like)...
yeah, like me they don't really care about the endgame stuff... but they do pay, be it LTS or Sub or just buying Zen w/ real cash... and they spend way more time than i do on champs ... i poke in maybe once a week and mostly stick to the winter event oooorr if am in a good enough mood, the nightmare one... (coz i like easy peasy stuff and right now the focus is more on challenging / one-shot stuff, but anyway)
they are the ones that are gonna feel slapped by all these changes you're all working on... whatever the reason, server costs or preparing for a console launch, or just coz the higher ups said so... is there absolutely no room between all (gone) or nothing (left)?
I myself have ~57 costume slots between all my characters. I know people with 60-80, and few with max cap. We all use them actively and if we need more (unless reached the cap already) we used to buy the account-wide 2 slot unlocks. None of my friends nor me are now interested in purchasing any more slots.
So no, this isn't 'complaining for the sake of complaining'. This is complaining because one of the features that had us want to play the game is being taken away, pushing us away from playing and giving PWE money to keep the game we love alive.
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My characters
Which we also won't be able to do when the change is implemented...
30,000 users don't have 200 characters with 200 costumes each, though. That's a worst case scenario. Even If they did that would only equal roughly 8gb of stored data anyway, which isn't a lot of data for a server.
I have 403 characters (which is the most I'm aware of any user having) and on average I'd say I have three costumes per character, with a few here and there having more or less than that. So that's ~1200 costumes, which at 7kb each is a whopping total of 8mb.
So then explain why the game needs a limit on costume slots.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Alas, it's worse. I am on a new ASUS gaming rig, and while the game no longer crashes to desktop, I am now simply locking up randomly, forcing me to kill the process in the task manager, or wait over 5 minutes for the Cryptic Error Handler to finally notice that the game locked up, and do it's worthless magic.
Have the devs never explained this?
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
They have, but Aesica seems to have some sort of yet unrevealed information about the inner workings of the game and the hardware it runs on, and I'm quite interested to hear what it is and how it counters the information the devs have given.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Because "There is a limit of 40 costume slots per character, this has been the limit since the game launched."
This is the best explanation and yet, the only one.
The thing which is happening now is the following shortly:
- CO was running for years... With so much bugs
- Said bugs were horrible and unacceptable (More characters than 59... More costume slots than 40...)
- Devs decided to fix the game, get rid of the bugs
- Players got used to the buggy game
- Players don't like the corrections of the game very much
- Players are wondering "What is buggy still that needs to be fixed ? Bank slots ? Auction house slots ? Is the lvl 40 a bug too ?"
Can't wait the next fix.
FurAffinity
SoundCloud
Aw, man. I may be in the minority, but I had been looking forward to that all last week. I actually logged in before work last night with the express purpose of buying it.
Was the feedback really about the Premium Pack itself or was it a lot of angst over losing monthly sub benefits? As far as I could see, there was nothing wrong with the pack except its close association with the end of something other players have grown to love. Folks, you may love your dad, but that fact alone doesn't necessarily make your stepfather a bad person.
Backlash was because the subscription change and the removal of monthly sub would lock out ALL GOLD Characters, forcing you to buy Lifetime to reactivate them (or convert them into Archetypes)
You're not. I can't remember negative feedback about the premium pack itself.
.... except for that one guy saying it should cost ten times as much
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
Capping the number of slots for costume data isn't going to affect the size of everything else. It's only going to affect the size of that small data sliver I already outlined. Everyone's perks, quests, banks, bags, etc are still going to be the same size.
While it's true that placing caps on various things in a game is important, 40 is just an arbitrary number. The fact that people have gone over that amount without any (apparent) ill effects show that there's no major reason for the cap to be 40 other the fact that somebody a long time ago was like, "hey what should I set as the costume cap?" and someone sitting nearby responded with, "uh I dunno. Does 40 sound good?"
Point being, there's a few folks how are over that cap and may even want to buy more costume slots still. Is the need for this arbitrary cap of 40 really more important than the money of people who want to buy even more?
In another game I play, there's an inventory system where you can spend the game's paid currency to unlock extra inventory space, 1 row at a time. Originally, the cap was set at 2 pages of inventory. People wanted more pages though, so at some point (despite all the bugs and other things neglected in this game) the devs were like, "ok, here's a crapload more pages for you to unlock because we'll gladly take your money!" And that is how you handle arbitrary caps when money is involved.
So unless there's some major, behind-the-scenes reason for capping costumes at 40 and character slots at 59 (or whatever it was) all I see is Cryptic saying, "lol we don't want your money that badly." And this baffles me.
Yeah, it's called a calculator. If 7KB of data per costume is putting too much of a drain on their storage, maybe they need to head on over to newegg and buy something made after 2010. Cryptic isn't exactly a starving artist game studio.
lol, I hardly think there's 30k people playing the game.
This is about costume slots.....
https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/championsonline/#/discussion/1211247/new-z-store-costume-slot-options
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
Please give us the Prenium Pack as soon as the Monthly subscribers issues get resolved
I had been waiting 5 years for this feature... I guess i can wait more
I'm sure it will be back.
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
So then what's the real number? 45? 50? 30?
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Spinny, please stop being a dork. If you've got a point get to it.
Here we are now going to the West Side
Weapons in hand as we go for a ride
Some may come and some may stay
Watching out for a sunny day
Where there's love and darkness and my sidearm
In game as @forgemccain
But also, there will be limits because that's how this sort of thing works.
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My characters
Ha! Yeah, looking back, that may have been what I was reacting to. If I could afford to throw a c-note at a video game all at once like that, I'd probably have gone that little extra stretch for the LTS when it was on sale, rendering his proposed change to the Premium Pack moot.
Believe me, I want to contribute to keeping this game afloat. And I do. But real-world obligations mean those contributions are relatively small and infrequent
So that makes me wonder what "feedback" the devs would take under such consideration to push this thing back and what changes they're going to make.
I have to admit I would need less slots if I could change my Pose without changing my Costume.
Depends: Based on actual Hardware/Software limitations or Business Model?
I had to create a second costume file and move ones I didn't use much to that one, just so that I could get the third acct costumes to load on the list
Meanwhile on the arc games list. CO is 5th on weekly top games. STO, NW PWI, Forsaken world CO.
Interesting.
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Here we are now going to the West Side
Weapons in hand as we go for a ride
Some may come and some may stay
Watching out for a sunny day
Where there's love and darkness and my sidearm
In game as @forgemccain
Well the business model wants that number as high as possible, infinite preferably. That means that any sort of limit exclusively comes from hardware/software limitations. The fact that it is determined in that way means it's not arbitrary, it only seems arbitrary to us because we don't have the relevant data that was used to decide on that amount.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I guess my point is that if FW is considered active still, I'd hate to see what PWE considers "dead." If I hadn't seen for myself that FW was sitting one rank higher than CO on the Arc main page, I wouldn't believe it. I still kinda don't.
Just in terms of general world presentation, CO appears to be far more active than FW by an absolutely massive degree.
On a related note, when you look at the Arc main page rankings, it kinda looks like this: