ChurchMouse

I need to nag Mr. Mountie to put up a Virtueverse page then. The Overbrookers are blessed with one blatant Canadian hero and our team leaders are both from Canada in real life.

For the love of Pete fix this. I'll be changing my @ handle to eyestrain man if I have to deal with this much longer.

I suspect I will spend entire days in the character creator; cackling madly while I try to decide exactly what shade of red best suits my fire blaster. I also suspect that the Alt infection will take on Biblical Plague status.

I was fortunate to stumble into the Overbrookers and though we are really only active about once (maybe twice) a week I get my RP fix there. If I wasn't working most monday nights I'd have another RP SG to hang out with. It might be harder to find Redside RP... I'm no expert on that side of the game though. If anyone has their tuesday nights open feel free to check out our listing in the SG groups forum post and put in an application.

There's a series out there, can't remember the name, that combines dragons and napleonics. The first book is quite good.

You know, until a minute ago I never, ever, thought I'd see something to match the sheer glory of the Cthulhu plush toy. I finally have. Major kudos to the person that sent that to you Deebs. That's just amazing.

I'll be there for certain. Like I could resist the lure of a Cape party!

I've run into the same problems that everyone else has in this thread. Heck, my introduction to this fine game was when a bunch of my guildmates from WoW dragged me over to be part of a static RP group. I quickly discovered that I much preferred this game to the one I had left behind but when my guildies moseyed back to WoW I was left without a group and after a few months I left the game too (A silly decision in retrospect, there were some very good groups around I could have joined.).

When I came back to CoH I did so with the determination that I would find team mates, socialize my unsocial tail off and get in good SGs. So I got on the Cape channel. Went to some neat parties. Even joined a SG or two.

But I really hit paydirt when I was browsing through the listings for recruiting SGs and came across the Overbrookers entry. It's, by design, a small team where everyone knows everyone else. Yes, we've had player turnover, but the core group is very stable. As a result we all know each other's stories and characters. And since the group enjoys putting the boots to evil we even get some RP in while fighting. (I shall admit I have not mastered the art of typing out well written sentences while desperately fighting for my life but I'm getting better at it!). Though the group is looking to add a few new members by and large its a static group and a lot of fun to play.

So they are out there. I know that the OBs aren't the only ones. Check the listings in the forums. Go to recruiting fairs. Throw yourself into some RP PuGs and see if anyone on them catches your fancy and if they are in a SG. Heck, create your own SG with a static membership and get some of your in game friends to join you. I'm not saying that Overbrookers are everyone's cup of tea. But I do believe if you keep looking you are likely to find someone who is.

(Oh, and speaking of the OBs, happy anniversary to the team! One year down and going strong.)

Congratulations!

I managed to take my Rad/Son Defender Radon Kid from 19-50. Well... ok... to be more precise Deebs and a few of her friends who stepped in to spell her for dinner took him to 50. I was mostly busy being savagely mauled by assorted and sundry plush toy villains we were fighting.

Congratulations on your new bundle of joy!

Good God no. My bachelor's degree and the handful of Grad classes I took while finishing up the dratted foreign language requirement they shoe horned me into more then cured me of any desire to join the world of academia. Am I interested in the subject? Sure.

There is a lot of very interesting things happening as regards MMO culture and interactions. And those very interesting things will be studied by someone else. I'm very happy just playing a character running around in long underwear fighting crime.

You are very much correct, you do open yourself up to a lawsuit. That's one of the points that was drilled into my head over and over again. People can sue you and they can sue the institution which sanctioned your study. It's one of those first cause no harm and second make sure they signed a waiver. Add to that it's likely that some of his research subjects were minors... it's the sort of thing that could cause a legal department for a university to lose a lot of sleep.

I do whole heartedly agree with your point about the nature of PvP. My nephew/room mate is a professional Halo player and lets just say that the way he and others refer to one another is... colorful? You have an excellent point, when you go into a PvP zone you do invite other gamers to... well... kick the daylights out of you.

My problem with his study in that regard is he prejudiced his research before he even started. The professor narrowed down his subject matter to the point where he was going to get the results he wanted to get for his paper. As others have noted, he did not employ a strategy of fighting fair sometimes and dirty at other times. He did not use multiple characters to see how the interaction changed for one that was well liked by his fellow gamers as opposed to someone who was openly despised.

It's not that he was engaging in PvP. It's that he limited his study to one particularly infuriating aspect of it and from that very narrow aspect preceeded to make broad generalizations about the community as a whole.

It would be like if I went out of my way to find a left handed Native American who works at Walmart and then stated, in an academic research paper, all Native Americans are left handed and work at Walmart. He cherry picked his methodology to get his desired results.

You brought up some really good points about the difficulties of making an ethical study in this type of environment. It does handcuff the researcher in many regards. There is a tremendous amount of research waiting to be made in this field. It's literally breathtaking. MMOs and the shifting societies and communities they create are fascinating for the social scientists who are aware of thier existence and scope.

The difficutly is coming up with ways to study a new social dynamic. Short cuts and baiting people into making hostile statements does not only the CoH community a disservice but science as well.

I hope that made sense, I really shouldn't type while juggling a cat on my lap.

I am a social sciences major... heck I'm a social sciences degree holder and I have worked on published research papers in the field of mass communication, a field that obviously pertains to research such as this.

Field research where you are studying people who are unaware of your research is a very gray area indeed. Ideally you would have complete cooperation and foreknowledge involved in the study; in fact this is the norm. But for some studies it is imperative that the subjects behave naturally.

If, for example, you are studying communication in small groups discussing what video to rent for the evening while at the store (A paper my advisor spent 6 months of his life churning out when he was in Grad school) then the subjects having foreknowledge of your study would alter their behavior. Let us be honest, not many people would cheerfully have a discussion about whether or not to rent Big Booty Babes if they knew a researcher was taking notes on their conversation.

Now there are some problems with this kind of study, you have to very careful to not influence the subject's behavior for one. For another you have to devise a rigorous and quantifiable criteria for studying the behavior observed that other researchers can duplicate to gauge the interactions that you see. For social sciences this can, not surprisingly, be a tremendous pain. But it's not really research if you don't have something quantifiable. Period. At least in my humble opinion.

Its on these two points that I have a problems with this professor's research. He is clearly setting out to influence his subjects behavior, and doing so in such a manner to guarantee his pre-determined results. If you behave in a socially unacceptable manner repeatedly and go out of your way to antagonize others they will react poorly to you. I humbly submit to you that this... this piece of knowledge we can already state as a known. Had the researcher acted in this manner in person he would have met with negative reactions from his subjects as well. And likely been gifted with a fat lip if he attempted this on someone with a low threshold for violence.

The other damning point against his results, and I have read his actual research on the matter, is that he fails to quantify his interactions adequately. He vividly describes the results of upsetting his research subjects but frankly the actual cold hard numbers that real serious research paper are built on are lacking. This is not so much research as journalism, and not particularly good journalism either.

All of which leaves aside the ethical implications of causing distress to your research subjects... while they are engaged in a recreation activity that they paid for. And I won't even bring up the controversy of whether or not, as some gamers claim, he misrepresented in his own research the activities he undertook to cause a negative reaction among his research subjects.

In short, this study is flawed, imprecise, prejudiced and a shameful display of what not to do in the study of a promising field that is rich in oppurtunities for research.

Argh, I missed the whole shooting match. I was there for the wait before hand, popped offline for a minute to answer the phone and came back to discover ye olde internet had gone belly up on me. Congrats and kudos to everyone. 60 Dropships is insane!

I will do my best to be there with my Justice Girl though I expect I will be late to the party as I'm also going to be part of the Great Rikti Turkey Shoot (part two) that same evening, starting at about the same time.

And according to your floating cake its happy birthday time for our favorite Forum Angel.

Aw, I didn't realize tonight was Jester's debut. Sorry I missed it. I hope everyone had a good time.

I can't believe I missed this thread earlier. I'm game for the blueside and possibly the redside. I'll bring Astounding Man, he had a good run last November. Like last year if you need me to be a team leader just let me know. I'm fine with being a grunt who takes orders too.

It isn't karaoke is it? I mean, I know the Cape has some DJs who are good singers... but I don't know if we are ready for Coz or Shecky karaoke.

8 CST tonight correct?

I'll throw in my two cents and advise for an appeal. Keep it polite and state your case clearly as to why it shouldn't be genericified. You don't have anything to lose and with any luck you can get your character's name back.

I do hope its very successful. I don't think it will be a death blow to CoH or anything of that nature but the appeal of Star Wars would definetely interest me.

An interest that survived the great collapse known as the NGE. I firmly believe that the debacle SOE created with that should be studied in any college class about working in the computer gaming field. Alienated player base, bugs galore and worse. It was the Perfect Storm of failure.

Hmmph.... I would never, never, get excited about a Harry Potter movie. Why the whole idea is... whoops... hehe, pay no attention to that advance ticket for the movie that dropped out of my pocket. I have no idea how it got there!

Honestly I'm looking forward to it. I thought the last movie was quite good and really helped to breathe some life back into the series. Maybe that's just the upbeatness that is the girl playing Luna Lovegood.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get my geek on for the release of Up.