Captain_Photon

Well, it's still the same game. Expecting any new content to be something other than a new combination of already-established gameplay elements (fight enemies, destroy objects, etc.) is a little like going to Taco Bell and being disappointed that their new menu item isn't chicken Kiev. 'Course it's not going to be, that's not what they do there.

Threaten to move to the EU servers in the off-season unless they build us a new stadium at taxpayer expense?

And we get one called "Zukunft", which probably means something utterly mundane in German but looks excellent and intimidating to the non-German-speaker.

Indeed. If possibly difficult from a coding standpoint (given that I believe they're currently selected from a pool in much the same way as the objects from Propel and /e alakazamreact, such that not everyone sees the same thing).

ISTR, way back when City of Villains was new, somebody explaining that you can't customize human henchmen (e.g. from Mercenaries or Thugs, which came later) at least in part because the designers felt that would be too open to TOS-violating abuses (pimp masterminds, etc.). Another manifestation of the This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things effect. Still, even if they don't want us completely redesigning them, it'd be nice to at least be able to repaint them. Standard Code Rant applies, of course (see above).

Depending on which plaque you read, yeah; some of the others very strongly imply that the place has been an abandoned, haunted zombie fogfest since at least WWII. That's one of the things I like about the City of Heroes universe: Despite the fact that it was invented from whole cloth when the game began, it manages to have the same creaky continuity and strange that-guy-should-be-a-lot-older-than-he-is problems as a real comic-book universe that's been going on since the 1930s.

I believe you are correct, and I don't really want to wade through that backlash again.

I suppose it's inevitable, things evolve, but man, the whiiiiiniiiiiing.

Except during the Halloween event! HINT for Banisher seekers who can't hack the fog in Astoria.

(Which I like, by the way. It's a huge pain, yes, but as a previous poster noted, it's also part of what makes the zone unique. Not everyplace ought to be easy. Old Faultline was, and Terra Volta is, a nightmare for super-speedsters, for example. Why not have a hazard zone that's equally tough for fliers?

That said, anyone else remember the day the devs accidentally broke the zone so there was no fog, inadvertently revealing that, despite the lore about it having been abandoned for decades, it has all the same cars, modern buildings, Crey Biotech billboards, etc. as the rest of the city? )

Villain, actually.

Well, I am a bit, but only because they're charging money for it and its central feature is something I've always thought should've been in City of Villains at launch.

In the big cluttered warehouse maps, sometimes bad guys will spawn inside the crates, at which point you need a GM to teleport them out into the room. Possibly that's what happened this time, and you didn't see that part 'cause the GM didn't 'port you back to the room until he'd moved the misplaced foe.

Heh! That's like the disclaimer on a prescription drug ad. "Cimerora may cause compass enlargement. People who have had adverse reactions to GPS or printed MapQuest directions should not take Cimerora. If you experience disorientation, anxiety, or a sudden desire to visit Guildford, tell your doctor immediately."

Ah! That explains it, then, I think. It was near the controls that made the heater work, so it must've opened some kind of cabin vent or some such.

It doesn't, unless it works; then it impacts me by inflicting upon me a stupid system that ties character name visibly to player handle, thus taking whatever tattered fragments of a fourth wall the game has and chucking them out the window some some joker doesn't have to come up with something new. It's damaging the creative illusion - which is kind of the point of the game, otherwise we could all just play Connect Four - for the sake of the uncreative. I won't just stand around pretending I'm okay with that.

"Sorry, Johnny" doesn't fit the reference. Honestly, some people...

I'd have tried "The Ecdysiast" first, personally, but that's just me.

(Well, okay, I wouldn't have come up with that concept in the first place, because, you know, T-rated game and all, but you see what I mean.)

Lord Recluse isn't blind, he's just sensitive to bright light. So he can see himself in the mirror every morning, if he doesn't turn on the light bulb surround over the sink, and not being an ********, he says to himself, Holy crap, am I evil. Just look at that guy. Brrrrr. It's all downhill from there!

(That's what the new boards consider a curse word?)

No, but you do have to conform to the rules of the game.

Sorry, Charlie.

*sniff*

New Overbrook is cool and all, but I miss the desolation and sort of brooding feel that old Faultline had. Shame we can't Flashback to it somehow.

I'd say it's a fallacy because it's impossible. "Unique" is an absolute. There's no such thing as being "more unique". Something is either unique or it isn't.

Just trying to see it from the point of view of the suits at NC (who, after all, are at the ultimate level Korean, so to them the American version was annoyingly foreign - see also the short and unsatisfactory life of City of Hero). In retrospect, that was a silly thing to do; I'd as soon fathom the mindset of that guy who went to an Internet café and played World of Warcrap until he died.

My assumptions are probably also colored by the depressing-and-mostly-accurate international perception of my own countrymen as a pack of witless louts who won't tolerate anything that ain't in Amurrican, gawdamit. For my part, I wouldn't play a German game in German not because it would somehow offend me, but because I don't know German and wouldn't be able to tell what's going on.

A further wrinkle is that in an MMO the problem is not only what language the game is in, but what language the other players are using. If they (from my perspective) added all the EU servers to the list available on my client today, and I found my way onto the French server, I could probably figure out from context and layout what most of the buttons and menu items do, but I wouldn't have the slightest idea what any of the players were saying. My knowledge of French doesn't extend very far beyond "hello" and "I'm sorry, I don't speak French," and I would probably spell those wrong.

(The thing about menus and buttons reminds me - my mother's husband used to have an old Mercedes-Benz, from before they bothered translating the controls or indicators for the US market. It was kind of fun driving around in that old boat, trying to work out what controls did what and which dial showed which status. It was relatively easy to figure out from context that the dial labeled BENZIN was the gas gauge, for instance, but I still don't know what the knob marked ENTLÜFT did.)

If I've actually become so ruthless as to defeat all things that are a threat to my power, then it would appear that I am now the world's ultimate villain, so presumably I'll spend the rest of my career trying to keep the heroes from taking me down in turn.

(Hasn't there been at least one Superman Elseworlds story along these lines? Absolute power corrupting and all that?)

I strongly suspect at least one of those posts got read, because the thing I suggested in it is in the game now, which makes me inordinately happy given what a small thing it is.

That is an excellent name.

Give them your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...

Man, I'm going to have to completely redo my IO sets to get that.