Samuel_Tow

I'd say it comes down to a few things.

1. City of Heroes is fiercely uncompetitive. Not only is there very little official competition through PvP, but the game's system is designed in such a way as to limit your interaction with other people in all ways but to help. You can't gank people, you can't take their loot, there are no specific enemies needed for missions out in the overworld so you can't rob a player of that and most of the game takes place in instances where only those specifically invited can come along. Also, there is no "loot rolling" or "loot distribution rules." Every player has his own chance for drop, and whenever a drop can only happen for one person on the team, the decision is handled by the system and the handover happens covertly so no-one can ever even know.

2. This is a fairly easy game with very few "high stakes" situations. Yes, cooperation is at the heart of it, but LACK of cooperation is not severely punished. There's no "holy trinity," there's no "gear rating," there's no stress over builds and such. Aside from specific and clearly marked "more difficulty" challenges, the game really doesn't expect its players to play like professionals, which leaves team rules lax and team requirements generally optional. What this means is people either team for the company (as I do) or just team for the sake of being on a team, but clashes over who does what and plays how are rare and usually uncalled for. The game gives you pretty much no reason to see others as anything but unambiguous help.

3. The player mentality in this game is actually quite healthy. Many of us here are long-term veterans that have made this game our home, so we care about what goes on in it. Enough of the community is like that to enact a sort of social pressure on people to behave, at least somewhat. It's easy to be a complete dick in a community of ********, but do that here and you'll see people pretty much everyone give you a hard time. We tend to hold ourselves with some dignity, and it's pervasive enough to set a basic standard. Most of us who lived through the "Surviving 15" phase of the game have learned that you don't want to create a bad community that chases people away, because that makes your game dead. Most of us who've been around as long have also learned to deal with disruptive people in positive ways.

4. I'm unaware of another game with such extensive player-to-developer dialogue that's not a two-man show indie title. Even for new players, but especially for veterans of the game, there's a distinct feeling that this "our" game and we need to take care of it and make sure it prospers. The developers have continued dialogue with us, asking for feedback and implementing suggestions to a degree that I don't think another game has done. Sure, we bust their balls probably more often than it should, but at the end of the day, they're still part of our community, rather than minions of the Corporate Commander. This tends to make the community a lot more conscious of the success of the game as a whole, as opposed to their own little niche fun, and let the game burn around them if need be.

City of Heroes is something of a unique experience, and I'd attribute this to a type of player-friendly game design that happened to develop a pretty positive community.

I have what feels like a simple request - can we please have a collection of all or at least most hats enabled for Full Helmet -> Detail 1? You know, where the head fins are? The hats would obviously not come with hair, but come on, now - wouldn't it be cool to have a suit of power around with a cowboy hat or a robot with a top hat? And no, you can't really "fake" that because most hats always come with hair on the outside of any Robotic face you pick.

I have a self-serving reason to ask for this, of course. My own Nathanel was supposed to have a Colonen Kroenen look to him, but that's impossible to do since the military hat always has to have hair with it.

I'm actually kind of glad Anti-Matter is still alive. For as much as Positron (the character) has gotten a bad rap for being a favourite and having everything handed to him, Anti-Matter was sort of the butt monkey of Praetoria, and yet he seemed to be almost the only one of the lot who was actually competent and not criminally insane at the same time. AND he got the short end of the stick for trying to be a nice guy with Duncan, who promptly used him to get away with murder.

Honestly, this guy, for all he does, just seems like he's trying to do a good job and have someone appreciate him. If anyone should be making a heel-face turn, it should be him, since he comes off as pretty much a good guy in Praetoria. Granted, I don't know what he's like in the Quays Island Trial, but he can't be that bad.

*edit*

I know it's probably the low-brow simpleton thing to do, but how would you guys feel if I went with something simpler and more direct, like TechnoMagic or MagiTech or some such? I can still use a lot of the Latin names for the various devices he's working on, but go with a simpler name for the actual character. Would that be taking the least intelligent option, or?

There really are only two powers (or power types) I'd ever want to put that enhancement in - Hand Clap/Thunderclap and Shockwave. I'm pretty sure I can't put them in a non-damage control power, and Shockwave isn't that bad.

Bizarrely enough, I came up with a name that I like, I can't really use. Figured I might still share it here, just in case someone wanted to use it.

"Nulla Arcana" seems to translate over Google as "No Secrets," which is interesting as a character motto for Majik, but not really as an actual name. I did come up with a new specification that should narrow things down greatly, however.

When I went to name the Steel Rook once upon a time, I named the super hero persona of the otherwise very unpowered scientist after the power armour suit he wears, which itself was named after an autonomous robot that he and his late wife were working on. I highly suspect that I can do the same here. Faultline has his Faultbreaker suit, so I figure I can do something similar for Magic, as well. I actually want to share his new Bio which might give you a slight idea of how I'm going about it.

[QUOTE=Megajoule;4292240]In hindsight, I really wish I'd known that wasn't going to be a requirement forever, so I could have kept that character ... pure? Faithful? But we go with what we know at the time, and live with it as best we can, even as the game changes around us.[quote]

That's how I feel about Patron Pools on heroes, actually. I'm not going to make my heroes into villains just for the sake of a power pool, because the missions and morality associated with them would corrupt everything most of my heroes stand for. If they're ever proliferated in an easier way, sure, I'll use them. Again, I don't see the process of swapping sides to get them as an achievement, I see it as a cost gating what I actually want.

I'm actually making some progress. I decided to go with a name in Latin since it seems to fit Majik the most. With my full respect for Latin, it's a dead language that isn't used actively by a people today, so it's mostly an academic tool and that of hardline tradition, it's not widely known and it sounds mysterious. Unlike most other ancient languages, however, it's the predecessor to the modern Western world. It's the perfect candidate for an arrogant Westerner out to prove the world wrong and change the course of science for ever.

The question is what, exactly, to pick out of the Latin language. I don't speak Latin, as you know, and I don't hold high hopes of finding someone here on the boards who does. I'd love to, mind you, but I just doubt it. Finding people who spoke Japanese was a beast and finding people who spoke Chinese was only marginally easier since I got lucky, but Latin might just be impossible. I do have the benefit of online translators such as Goodle Translate, but I'm not sure how far I can trust them, and I don't want to make a fool of myself. I've seen a number of people with embarrassingly bad Russian "meaningful" names that came out of the likes of Bablefils.

I guess the translation can be considerer mostly covered, but I still don't know what exactly I want to translate. I actually stole a bit of inspiration from Warhammer 40 000: Space Marine and tried going for "The Machine God," but the translation I got ("apparatus deus") doesn't work for me, plus I realise it's a bit too close to "god in/of the machine," aka Deus Ex Machina. I need to think about it some more and try to come up with something concrete in English first, then go from there, but I don't know what that might be yet.