DKellis

I am assuming that no matter if it's being doled out piecemeal or everything held back until it's all finished to be released at once, there will be complaints.

More site backstory under-utilization: Hero Corps.

The difficulty slider people we all know, and their history can be summed up at the ParagonWiki article (and the Disciple history badge), but other than that, nothing.

I'm sure people will mention that it's obvious that Hero Corps is evil, or working with Crey, or whatever, but I don't think it's that obvious. The direction seems to be that Hero Corps is now a subsidiary of Crey in effect if not actually listed as such on the stock exchange, but it's all circumstantial evidence and speculation. There's nothing decisive.

In other words, it's possible for a story arc to go "actually, Hero Corps are honestly good guys, just with different viewpoints from Freedom Corps and really bad luck with publicity", and not contradict the facts. Mind you, with how little we actually know, it's also possible for Hero Corps to be another Nemesis Plot.

Ever since the first Winter event, I've been holding out hope for something, anything about the Lord of Frosts.

He only appears in the backstory on the site, and while I know he's probably dead by now, I was hoping for some closure on the "mysteriously disappeared" plot development. One of his artefacts, or something. An unknown heir. Yet more time-travel shenanigans.

I admit I read the title of the thread as "Arbiter Fabulous is single, ladies", and went "wait, what?"

The primary reasons I've heard for not playing CoH at all are "it's an old game", "I don't want to pay a monthly fee", and "if I wanted to play online I'd play WoW".

The first is partly due to the increase in superhero-type MMOGs, whether released or upcoming. They're getting a lot of advertising, and so people recognize them better. There's the idea that since CoH is an older game, we won't have the better tech the newer games have.

The second I don't think can be helped. Here in East Asia, free MMOGs used to be the norm, until WoW. In fact, apart from WoW, free MMOGs are still the norm.

The third is due to WoW's massive inertia of community size. People are playing WoW because their friends are playing WoW; more people play WoW because the first aforementioned people are now playing it. This seems to be unique to WoW.

Something I've been curious about is the relationship between CoH's reputation for encouraging altitis, and the ability to customize characters (costume or powersets). I suspect the customization leads to altitis, but I don't have any studies or research to back this up.

I've met people who simply could not believe the range of costume options which exist in CoH (and Champions Online, as long as we're at it). They were absolutely thrilled with the customization in Star Trek Online, and when I told them that it was based on CO's much more robust character designer, which in turn I think falls short of CoH's several years of added costume options... I think "liar" was the mildest term used.

Part of the advertising could involve having a form of CoH's character creation somewhere separate from the game client. It doesn't have to be pulled from the game itself; a preview would be sufficient.

In addition, I think part of CoH's niche status is that we seem to be doing things differently from "the norm" (which, again, I think has been influenced by WoW's popularity). For example, we have little to no endgame content, but great progression content, leading to further cries of incredulity when I mentioned that the contact dialogue is readable. It's surprising to me how many MMOG players are conditioned to ignore or skim through contact text, because they are often poorly-written. (And if you believe CoH's contact text to be poorly-written, imagine how the ones in other MMOGs are.)

I see it as having to play another game and learning the keybinds all over again, or even the mouse movements for Y-axis and X-axis rotations. It's unavoidable, but we tend to prefer more familiar things, if we're going to be involved in it for a very long time.

Random: I think the very first time I ever heard of CoH was one of those online quizzes, asking me what sort of superhero I am, based on my answers to various (multiple-choice) scenarios. You know, the sort of quiz you find with banners to paste onto a blog or signature saying "I'm a Mutant hero!" or something.

This was way back pre-alpha, when there were several origins including Magical Artefact and Gadgeteering (which I turned out to be) and such. I mention this because I've been wondering where that sort of thing went. It's silly and trivial, but it is one way to spread the word about this game.

I define a "melee set" in this game as one that operates at 5ft (or up to 15ft, in rare cases) away from the target.

Truth to tell, what made me puzzled about Kinetic Melee is that while individually the animations look very cool, all of them seem to take some time to do, and we've already seen complaints about the animation times of Dual Pistols. For the big finishers those animations will probably be fine, but having them for so many powers is a little odd.

Mind you, I'm fully expecting that the animations shown in that video are meant only for that video, and the basic forms will remain in the release version, but at a shorter animation time.

For some reason this thread makes me feel particularly defensive.

"Why do you play heroic characters in CoV?"

"Because I prefer playing as the hero, but certain ATs are only redside."

"But GR allows you to side-switch."

"I know, but GR isn't out yet."

"With side-switching, the AT argument becomes invalid."

"Not right now, though. My heroic characters in CoV are still stuck in the Rogue Isles."

"GR allows side-switching!"

"I know, and I promise you that once it comes out I'll switch all my redside characters to blueside, okay?"

"Why do you play heroic characters in CoV?"

"I told you-"

"I wasn't talking to you."

"... may I please be excused from the rest of this discussion? Oops..."

Defensive, but embarrassed.

Not sure if I already mentioned it in this thread, but I picked up the R1 discs (two, in one DVD case) for the first season of Hidamari Sketch some time back.

The premise: Slice-of-life of four girls in the arts stream who live in an apartment near their school. Very cute artstyle.

The good: I love this show. It's fun, happy, and is done in simple bright colours that give it a sense of being a sort of art project. Not the sort of Art that is about Criticism and Messages and all that, but the sort of Art that a kid might do, splashing paint around because it's fun.

The bad: The DVDs are pretty basic. The transfer looks a little poor, although I don't know if that's because of the original source. It's not a high-budget, stylish release, which I think is a pity for such a good show.

Seeing a ranged attack curve around (or through) walls to tag that runner for enough damage to defeat.

It's hugely immersion-breaking, it's entirely luck-based, and it's only available with ranged attacks, but there's just that sense of rightness in seeing that critter HP bar lose that last bit of health with such elegance.