Zortel

My ideas include (Mainly from a heroic perspective, but plenty of opportunities for villainy):

The Genre System

• Pick your genre and it tailors the kind of missions you get directed to, the enemies you face and the random occurrences that occur randomly.

That ties into:


The Contact System

• Primary Contact - Your Jim Gordon, Adam Kane, Daisuke Aramaki, divine benefactor, so on. Someone who you liaise with very closely, getting to know them over the course of your hero's career. They give you the jobs you are adept and skilled to deal with.
• Secondary Contacts - Friends, family, colleagues and individuals who your Primary Contact knows, their troubles are brought to your attention if they're along the lines of the sort of thing you usually deal with most of the time.
• Tertiary Contacts - People who your primary or secondary contacts know of and feel you may be able to assist with.
• Auxiliary Contacts - Those who direct special task forces or arcs tied to zones, enemy groups or events that everyone has access too.

Sources

• Various media and information channels that all heroes and villains have access to that provides randomly generated as well as scripted missions and encounters, from break ins and arch enemies to opportunities and community/emergency efforts.
• Choose your preferred types of sources. An ancient mage might not check the internet out, but the mystic ethernet or diviniation? A young hip and happening villain may not check the newspapers, but delve into social media looking for chances for profit or violence.
• Check to see how you appear in the media. Are you a stalwart protector, or a bit of a crazed nutjob in a costume? Your actions in missions get reflected in the word on the street, online or incriminating front page spreads.

Mini-Events

• Dotted around the area, these are things you can do that might involve using your powers for more than just beating up thugs, such as putting out fires, rescuing people, demolition, construction, charity appearances and good causes that can pay off in interesting ways. That old man you spend some time talking to in a hospital? He could know the location of an item of interest or an old mystery waiting to be discovered.

I dunno about on here, but I had to hide the posts from the Facebook Save Our City of Heroes group because I was being bombarded with mass amounts of crud that had very little to do with saving City of Heroes, just stupid photoshops and screenshots without context.

Indie Games I can recommend wholeheartedly:

Aquaria - A Metroidvania style 2D game with beautiful art and an even more beautiful soundtrack.

Spelunky - A freeware 2d game where you take on the role of an adventurer exploring a series of caves where death can be anywhere and treasures to grab.

Iji - A freeware 2d platformer that is basic on looks, big on style. Game branches depending on how you proceed with a few big twists and an end game boss that screams of design awesomeness.

The Binding of Isaac - A fun rogue-like/Zelda style game from the artist behind Super Meat Boy.

Dungeons of Dredmor - Another fun rogue-like game. Lutefisk for the lutefisk god!

AAAaaaAAAaaaAAAaaaAAA!!! For The Awesome - Base jumping in crazy style.

The Wonderful End of the World - A Katamari Damacy type game by the developers of AAAaaaAAA!, Dejobaan Games.

Audiosurf - How many levels does this game have? How big is your music collection?

Beat Hazard - Audiosurf meets Asteroids meets Bullet Hell. Your music defines the game.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale - A cute JRPG where you raid dungeons and find items. And then sell them in your shop for maximum profits. Capitalism, Ho!

Cthulhu Saves The World - 16-Bit RPG goodness, full of snark and humour.

The Geneforge/Avernum/Avadon games - Oldschool Western RPGs from a shareware studio that has been about for years, Spiderweb Software.

Cave Story + - One man studio makes awesome, fun, difficult platformer.

Bastion - Gorgeous game, gorgeous soundtrack

Trine 1+2 - Fun action/adventure platformer games.

Defense Grid: The Awakening - A very enjoyable tower defense game, along with...

System Protocol One - Another tower defense game, this time with a quirky computer defence theme.

Mount & Blade: Warband - Be an epic general, adventurer, trader, brigand or whatever you desire. Lead small elite teams or massive armies to victory.

Ys: The Oath in Felghana/Ys Origin - JRPG beat-em-up with amazing soundtracks and involved boss fights.

Jets N Guns Gold - Side-scrolling shoot-em-up with an awesome soundtrack and lots of weapon customization.

"This person said something bad about us, let's give them lots of page views, exposure and comments." That's pretty terrible when compared with: "This person said something bad about us, let's ignore them."

Good points about Champions Online:

Looks-wise, Club Caprice blows Pocket D out of the water.

The Powerhouse is a great idea.

A green screen room in the tailors at the Powerhouse? It gets a thumbs up from me.


I bought a game box for £2 to use the code in there for 30 days of gold subscription so I can try something other than the Archetypes out.

New Atlantic City, Home of America's Future...

Above a gigalopolis of glass and steel floated a solitary being. Clad in bulky power armour with sleek curves, plates of white overlaid with darkened detailing and joint-work, Zortel observed the costal city below her. Scanners in her helmet tuned into the NACPD radio frequencies, filtering through their reports with the help of an analysis program to pick out pertinent information.

"B&E at Gameforge Electronics Warehouse, Franklin Industrial Complex. Metahuman Criminal Activity reported. Available units respond." A female voice crackled over the frequency.

Her suits thruster systems gave a soft whine as they came online, transferring power over from the hover drive as she boosted her way towards the scene of the crime. Her suit's synthesized voice responded on the channel in low tones. "NACPD, this is Zortel en route to the Franklin Industrial Complex. ETA is reading at forty-seven seconds, will update situation on arrival."

"Noted, Zortel. Units responding to the B&E at the industrial complex, be advised that we have a hero en route. I repeat, hero en route to the Gameforge Electronics Warehouse."

I downloaded it off Steam and have played about for a few hours, got a Marksman to level 10.

1. The game is action-y, my marksman is not. I'm level 10 and have 3 attacks, and only one of those is a non-pointy arrow. At this point on a Corruptor in CoH I'd have arrows that entangle, spread sticky glue about, freeze people in place, set people on fire, blind people and shoot them.
2. You died! That enemy you were defeated by magically respawns to full health. Even though you got them down to a sliver of health last time.
3. I found the UI very hard to follow.
4. An event mission was removed from my log due to changes in it and now the person who gave me that mission won't give it again, even after I deleted the items I had left over from my previous attempt at it.
5. It's a comic book MMO, not a superhero world MMO. It feels very artificial and cobbled together because 'comic books have x'. This
6. I take another character out of tutorial and it's the exact same mission again, and the missions are much more finnicky and annoying than in CoH.

Gonna use a very cheap retail box code to trial gold for 30 days, but I can't see myself sticking with it.

The NCSoft site still has an Upgrade to VIP button on, that when pressed takes you to the store that says there is an unspecified error. The CoH section of the store just has the create a free account option in there now. There is nothing in the Twitter news feed or the latest news regarding CoH.

It's fairly shoddy, really. Especially a week on.

I walked into a Gamestation in 2010 and found a copy of Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa sitting on the shelf.

Seeing as I forgot to post pertinent lyrics last time:

Player One - Machinae Supremacy

I wanna play until I die / Don't wanna lose my reasons why / I race towards the sky / In a world that never ends / I keep coming back for more / Coming back until I score / Always stronger than before / In a world that never ends

Lovely gesture from their community, and I will say it did get me to look at the CO website and wiki, but... I just didn't 'get' the information. It seemed so much more restrictive. If I want to have electric powers I... what? Need to be a subscriber or purchase the Tempest Archetype, but if I purchase the tempest archetype while being a non-describer I can't be say, Electric and ice-using, I have to be gold for that or pay even more?

My playlist shall be:

Welcome To Nova Praetoria - Jason Graves (CoH Going Rogue Soundtrack)
Hero (2001 version) - Machinae Supremacy
Through the Looking Glass - Machinae Supremacy
I'm Alive - Disturbed
Super Shooter - Rip Slyme
Soundtrack to the Rebellion - Machinae Supremacy
Player One - Machinae Supremacy
The Contingency Plan - Opus Bridge (Written about a CoH EU Supergroup IIRC)
Restart! - Mad Capsule Markets
Flagcarrier - Machinae Supremacy
Oki Kuma's Adventure - Machinae Supremacy
A New Level - Pantera
Setting Sale, Coming Home - Darren Korb (Bastion Soundtrack)
I Know The Reaper - Machinae Supremacy
Action Girl - Machinae Supremacy
Falling - Gravity Kills
It All Ends Here: I Think Therefore I Am/Four Years/It All Ends Here - Star One
Shinigami - Machinae Supremacy
A View from the End of the World - Machinae Supremacy
Bodies - Drowning Pool
The Bitter End - Placebo
Indiscriminate Murder Is Counter-Productive - Machinae Supermacy
Republic of Gamers - Machinae Supremacy
Goodbye - Gravity Kills
A Tout Le Monde - Megadeth
Hero (2012 Version) - Machinae Supremacy
Endgame - Machinae Supremacy (Jets 'n' Guns Soundtrack)
Stepping Into The Void - Jason Graves (CoH Going Rogue Soundtrack)

Roleplay + RP Community Developer.

Introducing quality-of-life fixes and features for roleplayers (and of use to others, such as machinima makeirs).

Examples would include:

Buildings that you could enter in each zone to give more locations for roleplay, such as Up n' Away, Mega Mart, City of Gyros, Loyal Tea and Coffee, PPD HQ.

More emotes for use, including the sitting emotes that some NPCs had that were unavailable for player characters.

Website updates with lore on places, people and history.

Raising lore concerns with the story team.

Seeing as you're so proud of Praetoria, Protean, it gave me the following characters:

Zahir Rolando: A roboticist injured in a terrorist bombing at a restaurant in the Magisterium, that cost him the life of his boyfriend and his legs. With new robot legs based on Type 40 Clockwork parts, he began working for the PPD as an R&D tech, before travelling to Primal Earth to try and help stop a war. On Primal Earth, he works as a freelance consultant as well as the owner of Rolando Pound Storage in Independence Port, where he takes his bots out to deal with Devouring Earth in the area.

Maxine 'Maxi' Pound: 4 foot tall, strong and tough, she was a PPD 'Special Officer' partnered with Zahir. On Primal Earth, she works as a construction worker and demolition woman.

Zachary 'Zack' Tanner: Syndicate Assassin gone road ronin, he now runs an on-foot courier business in Paragon City using his 'authentic ninja skills' gained in his time with the Syndicate. Zack's Packages: He'll take care of your package, as if it were his own.

Constance Svanhildr: Former 1st Major in the IDF, an old but young soldier who fought in the Norwegian Armed Forces against the Hamidon and lost an eye in the process. Deserted the IDF after the marching orders came to invade Primal Earth, having signed up to fight the Rikti. Currently works as a porter in a retirement home in Paragon, as well as taking down Devouring Earth with her bare hands.

Lil Five: The Companion Clockwork from another player's house, managed to re-activate and against all odds made her way to Primal Earth with a very mouldy scrambled egg for breakfast. Was given to Zahir, who repaired her with WarWorks parts and updated her programming. Work as the store manager and assistant at Rolando Pound Storage. Mother hen of the RP Storage lot.

Jonathan Wong: Anti-Syndicate Task Force member, martial artist who went rogue to rescue his sister from experimentation. Now works at the Chinese Embassy in Paragon City, specialising in dealing with cases of Praetorian-Chinese Refugees.

Amanda Wong: Gifted young woman experimented on for work in a Special unit of the IDF utilizing stealth and assassination, was rescued by her brother and brought to Primal Earth. Works at Wong's Emporium, a store on Talos Island owned by the Primal Jonathan Wong.

Thank you for providing the setting to let these characters come to life, and for countless other stories.

I'd pay a bit more if it kept the game going. I'd pay even more if I got more character slots on Union for my money. (Blue Zortel is out of character slots and badly needs to alt)

There's a Freem t-shirt in Stuart's comic shop, a CoV collectors edition box in the background of Sheldon and Leonard's apartment, and I'm pretty sure there's been some other CoH bits around there.

Didn't VG Cats' creator play CoH?