The solution at that point is simple -- de-3D glasses. These look just like the 3D glasses you use to watch a 3D movie, except that both lenses have the same polarization (circular or tilted), so that both eyes see only one of the two images being projected, and you get a 2D image again.

From a comment in an interview for OnRPG with Matt "Positron" Miller and Melissa "War Witch" Bianco, lead developers on City of Heroes, going F2P increased their revenue, allowing them to put more work into development than they had originally planned, increasing the amount of content that they released to the players through the in-game store (article here):

If their experience was solely from before the addition of the archetype inherents -- Containment, Defiance, et al., then they were correct; I remember with my Fire/Rad Controller back in 2004 that solo advancement choked off in the early teens, because you didn't get the damage output you needed to defeat mobs quickly. Yes, sure, you drop Fire Cages on them to lock them in place, slap down Radiation Infection on one, and then you can stand there Brawling them to death one by one as they keep missing you, but until Veteran Rewards were instituted you didn't have a good attack until much later in the game. Of course, once you hit 32 and got your pet(s), all bets were off. Illusion Controllers had it easier; they got Phantom Army at 16, and even earlier than that could use Deceive to completely mitigate incoming damage while they ground opponents down, but the original game design had some definite gaps in solo ability between the various archetypes.

Guild Wars 2 is a bad example; that was developed by Arenanet here in the US, not by NCSoft.

There are untold hordes of Immunes Surgeons would and Rikti Guardians who would nod sagely at this if they hadn't been the first ones face-down on the ground when combat started.

$2.73M profit a quarter, not income. That's after deducting all of the support and development costs. The profit from City of Heroes was something like 40% of NCSoft's North American profits, although it was only about 2-3% of the entire company's profits.

When Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa shut down, players were offered free time in some of NCSoft's other games. No such offer was made to the City of Heroes playerbase. Although, frankly, given the stink we raised about the shutdown, I'm not really surprised that they didn't extend such an offer, although it wouldn't have been very practical -- Aion is "Completely Free", so we could already have just moved over to that game, Blade and Soul wasn't out yet to move players to, and the Lineage and Guild Wars MMOs were all 'buy the box, play free', which would have pounded their bottom line by eliminating the game purchase from their income.

NCSoft has lost face already. Their stock value has been sliding since the day of the Unity rally on the Virtue server, and their stock sank another 7.8% after the release of the Korea Times article questioning the business acumen of shuttering the game in the first place.

Without access to the reasoning behind the decision, I have no way to be sure why they decided to close the game -- particularly with it making a profit of about $2.75M a quarter -- but I believe that it was done to conceal the fact that they were already demonstrating their incompetence. NCSoft has brought to the Western market a number of MMOs rooted in the style of the games that are their bread and butter in the Asian market, with a heavy emphasis on grinding for rare drops, patronage of the in-game store, and PvP. That these games kept doing poorly and getting closed (Aion having shown "disappointing performance" in the last quarter), while City of Heroes -- almost the antithesis of the Korean style of MMORPG -- kept making a steady profit created the appearance of NCSoft not being able/willing to understand the Western market at a time when they were making an effort to become a major online gaming provider. With the ugly counterexample gone, NCSoft could rationalize that they just needed to find the right subject, rather than a different playstyle, to make an MMO popular in the Western market.

I am reminded of the line from Rick Cook's The Wizardry Compiled:

"Applications programming is a race between software engineers, who strive to produce idiot-proof programs, and the universe, which strives to produce bigger idiots. So far the Universe is winning."

That depends on your definition of the term. On 25 January 1966, Bill Weaver was flying SR-71A 61-7952 / 2003 at a speed of Mach 3.2 when he experienced a severe case of engine unstart. Before he could tell his RSO, Jim Zwayer, not to eject until he regained control of the aircraft, the SR-71 disintegrated around him, leaving him in free fall at a speed in excess of Mach 3. His drogue chute deployed, stabilizing his fall, and his main chute deployed automatically. Weaver spotted his RSO's chute during his parachute descent; unfortunately, Zwayer had suffered a broken neck during the SR-71's disintegration and was dead before he landed. Weaver was uninjured.

In 1955, George Smith was flying an F-100 Super Sabre when the aircraft pitched into a dive and ceased responding to its controls, despite reducing the engine to idle and deploying speed brakes; he ejected from the plane at a speed of Mach 1.05. During the ejection, he experienced an acceleration of 40g, losing his shoes, socks, helmet, flight gloves, wristwatch, and ring, and had several panels blow out of his chute when it deployed due to his high speed. He was lucky to splash into the water 100 yards away from a fishing boat commanded by a former Navy Rescue Specialist. He was severely injured during the ejection, and was unconscious for days, with doctors holding out little hope for his recovery. Smith did, however, make a full recovery, and returned to flight status.

Baumgartner was the first person to deliberately exceed Mach 1 without an aircraft, but he was not the first person to exceed Mach 1 in free fall.

1LT Bob Welch, his father, LTC Don Welch (ret), and his grandfather, COL Don Sprague (ret), all served in the 23rd Bomb Squadron flying B-52s, and COL Sprague commanded the unit back in the 1970s. I wasn't able to dig up evidence that 1LT Welch actually flew the same plane his grandfather flew, but as his grandfather flew all the variants of the B-52 up through the H model, I expect that the Air Force would have arranged it just for publicity value.

This. Look at the progression of engagement ranges. In WWI, you had fighters shooting at each other at ranges of perhaps a couple of hundred feet, with an attacker who had surprise often closing within fifty feet of their opponent before opening fire. In WWII, with improved guns, combat ranges increased to a few hundred yards, with some excellent shots being able to hit targets six or seven hundred yards out, but surprise attacks might be made at under a hundred yards; while it was not normally possible to recognize an opposing pilot from their features (particularly with oxygen masks and the like), the aircraft markings were still identifiable. In Korea and Vietnam, the advent of missiles pushed engagement ranges out further, with surprise attacks making the biggest jump, a rear attack with a heat-seeking missile from a mile away or more. And modern air combat pushes missile engagement ranges out even further, with missile engagements at ranges of tens of miles. But with the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, fighters still have guns, and the dramatic air-combat engagements portrayed in movies are almost always short-range 'knife fights' with guns.

And BVR (Beyond Visual Range) engagements are boring. I suppose that the 'mass wave of incoming missiles' scene, as the first round of defensive missiles take out some of the incoming ones, then the rest get closer while the launchers reload and fire again, rolling back the targets' defenses until the point-defense systems get one last shot at them, raises tension and increases drama, but only as long as you don't know the stark mathematics of the engagement. There is a scene in, IIRC, Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising that portrays such an engagement, as a large formation of Soviet bombers fire hundreds of air-to-surface missiles against an allied battle group, with a matter-of-fact account of each layer of defense knocking down its share of the incoming missiles, leaving more than enough to destroy the carrier at the center of the battle group. Useful in the abstract for establishing the conditions under which the characters have to work, but not much for displaying individual character development. So the up-close, WWI/WWII type of engagements remain the 'standard' for showing off the characters in combat.

Personnel evaluations are still going to be a manual process; training records and service reports may be automated, but someone still has to look at them and determine what, needs to be done with each crewman -- the computer can note that crewman Smith turned themselves in for sick call, so they'll need a replacement on their next watch, but the division head has to decide who pulls the extra duty to cover for them. There are always things that a ship's crewmembers do beyond simply keeping the ship running that take up their time, and the further up the chain of command you go, the fewer of those tasks are amenable to automation.

The "Lt. Leary" series is more Napoleonic-era naval combat; until Leary came up with the idea of using micro-jumps to reposition his ships in the middle of combat, it was very much a 'line up and slug at each other' sort of affair, with ships using the High Drive to escape battle, not to maneuver during battle. And he does have the advantage of having opponents largely mired in antiquated combat practices; it would be interesting to see how much of an advantage he retained if he had to face the same opponents six months or a year later, after they've had the chance to develop similar tactics on his own. But the RCN seems to be in the 'England' role, with better-trained personnel than the 'French' of the Alliance, despite their bigger and better-manned ships.

If you don't tan it, what you have is rawhide, not leather; tanning preserves the flexibility, softness, and stretchability of the material. It wouldn't be necessary to unhair the material, and since you'd be able to control what layers of the skin are grown, you would reduce or eliminate the need for fleshing it, and could control the fiber growth to reduce or eliminate the need for liming it, but you'd still have the tanning process itself, whether vegetable or mineral.