Eisenzahn

If that turns out to be the case, and the announcement consists of info for the next Regular Issue (even if it's scheduled to go into beta after GR launches), words would not exist to express my excitement. ...until we'd eventually see a list of things in said issue, and I'd say "So, no new Story Content", and other forum posters would say "Well, they haven't said this is all of the stuff. Maybe there's more coming". But there wouldn't be. Just like the last four damn issues.

Yeah. Paragon Studios has a lot of work ahead of them to get me back into the Optimistic Dev Apologist camp.

It's already bad enough that my creative process so closely paralelled an Image creator, without letting you know which specific Image creator.

Historical figures are officially OK. Or at least, the GM who encountered my friends and I as a band of superpowered versions of less famous US Presidents when we needed help with a stalled TF thought it was OK.

Or it could just have been that he didn't recognize James K. Polk, Chester A. Arthur, Millard Filmore, William Henry Harrison, Grover Cleveland and Rutherford B. Hayes... respectively as a Victorian Steampunk Cyborg, a Reptillian Hybrid Clone Made by Natives of the Mysterious Planet X, a Modern Reincarnation into an Eleven Year Old Girl with Terrifying Psychic Abilities, a Vengeful Ghost with a Corporeal Body Assembled from a Tangible Liquid Spite, a Colony of Hyperintelligent Insects actually Just Wearing a Suit and Rubber Mask, and the Immortal Warlock who had Called Them All Together.

Rumor has it that Harry Truman, Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt all wanted the 7th spot, but the fight that resulted when they all refused to surrender tore a hole in the very fabric of the world through which they're all still plummeting, raining blows like God's own screaming thunder on one another whenever they drift into range. No one would have had the guts to tell them that they were all too high-profile historical figures to be considered for inclusion.

William Howard Taft would have been the 8th, but he got stuck trying to get out of the bathtub again.

And how does that invalidate my statements? That just means that ERPers everywhere risk performing criminal sexual activities with minors. That's a subject for those communities to deal with individually. We're talking about City of Heroes here, and the criminal sexual activities with minors that the people in charge of City of Heroes would prefer not occur on their servers.

If it were reasonable to prosecute it, yup. But if the technology and manpower existed to make it reasonable to prosecute, the technology and manpower would exist to make sure that only adults were participants, and therefore it wouldn't be a problem.

A more serious argument than that YOU MAY BE COMMITTING CRIMINAL SEXUAL ACTS INVOLVING CHILDREN?

The team is NOT Ok with it. But the manpower and technology, as stated previously, doesn't exist for universal enforcement. People who ERP in private don't evade retribution because the GMs don't care. They evade retribution because the GMs don't know.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have my doubts about your age, based on your irrational emotional behavior. Typing proficiency is frequently a pretty poor indicator.

Reason A.) Because it may harm the game, yup. A game that I enjoy. A game that many other people enjoy, whose interests I'm looking out for as well. A game produced by people I respect, who are financially reliant on its continued successful operation. I'm quite certain I mentioned both of those latter groups in my prior post.

Reason B.) Because criminal sexual acts could be committed with children, and people like you are ok with that so long as it doesn't interfere in your self-gratification. How can you honestly even try to pretend that's a defensible moral position?

Fact or opinion: Engaging in Erotic Roleplaying with a minor, known or unknown, constitutes a criminal act in many of the jurisdictions in which City of Heroes is available?



So as we have it from your own words, the possibility of criminal sexual activities involving children "doesn't matter".

I've never suggested that you're too stupid to understand. Too selfish and obsessed with your own gratification, to care about the probable consequences, however...

The "It's Just a Game" fallacy. Just because things happen on the Internet doesn't mean there aren't real people sitting at those computers. And many more of them than you'd like to admit are children.

Erotic Roleplaying in which a participant is not of legal age to give consent for sexual activity, even if the other persons involved were unaware that a minor was among the participants, constitutes a criminal offense in many of the jurisdictions where City of Heroes is available. In many other jurisdictions, precedent has yet to be established. In all jurisdictions, even if the case is slapped down summarily by the presiding official as a waste of time and all charges dismissed, the damage done by the very implication of wrongdoing, in the hands of the News Media, could devastate Paragon Studios.

This game is privately owned, which means that the wishes of its owners take priority over whatever Rights your government may guarantee you, so long as you participate in the use of their private property of your own free will. The Terms of Service are very clear. Paragon Studios does not wish to have criminal actions take place in their game, nor do they wish for their game to harbor behaviors that may not be criminally actionable but would still be a public relations catastrophe if exposed. This is a sensible position, and I support them in their effort. I support them because I enjoy this game and respect its creators, and because I do not wish to see them subjected to litigation or a media lynching. I support them specifically by having discontinued personal participation in Erotic Roleplaying within the confines of their game, and by reporting any and all incidents thereof that I become aware of to the GMs for moderation, should such events appear to my best judgment to fall within the definition of an actionable offense presented in the Terms of Service.

Show me a way for a player to prove, to a standard acceptable in a court of law and with an ease of use to be viable in even casual encounters with complete stranger, that the person they're ERPing with at any given time is legally considered an adult in their home jurisdiction, and I would imagine the GMs would stop caring quite so much about Erotic Roleplayers. I certainly know I would! I'd probably even go back to doing it every so often, if I could be sure the other people involved weren't children and that I wasn't committing a crime, as well as violating the Terms of Service agreement that I accepted as a condition of my rental of Paragon Studio's private property.

I can't speak for other players, but this is why I don't like you, and why I don't like other Erotic Roleplayers in this community. Because you are selfish. Because you have essentially decided that your short term self-inflicted sexual gratification is important enough that you'll risk exposing this game and the company that owns it to all of the possible woes, legal, political, financial and media-related, that could come from being a place where sex crimes involving children are committed, and in so doing risk depriving other blameless players of access to this game. And more importantly, because you're the kind of people who don't particularly care that you may be committing sex crimes involving children yourselves, regardless of whose private property you do so in, so long as you get your cheap thrill from it.

In your specific case, I strongly suspect that the issue of sex crimes involving children doesn't worry you so much because you don't give the impression of being of legal age of consent. The hostility with which you defend your hobby reminds me very much of my younger siblings complaining when our parents remembered to securely lock the liquor cabinet.

Or else you haven't thought the consequences through to any great extent, much like I hadn't back in the day when I'd participate in Erotic Roleplaying in this game or in other similar environments. That's ok. A good person may make mistakes, even awful stupid dangerous ones, and still be a good person if they take steps to avoid repeating those mistakes when they acquire sufficient understanding to recognize the erroneous nature of the original act.

But that just doesn't appear to be the case with your avid defense of the hobby.

Sock Puppet Account is more useful to a Solo-Oriented Troll, and fulfills the same basic function. It's only available in Black Scorpion's Patron Pool, though. It works kind of like Phantom Army, but mobs will only aggro the decoys if their perception has been debuffed in advance.

Against an enemy who was already two levels lower than me? Absolutely.

I think EBs still appear from downgraded AVs. I'm not sure, though. I know EBs will downgrade all the way to Bosses in the Mission Architect, though.

As for -1 EBs... -2 Silver Mantis two-shotted my 43 Plant/Thorn Dominator with her first two hits the other night. It took me a tray of purples and a strategy that focused on spamming immobs until I could trap her out of range and let my Flytrap and Carrion Creepers handle her while I hid around a corner. I didn't want to use a Shivan, because throwing one of those at a -2 enemy would have just been too humiliating.

More content is good... if you can choose not to do it on a character who's not suited for it without missing out on anything. My Dominators and Corruptors dread their patron arcs, though, because I can rarely find other people to help me with them when I get to that level, and they're all full of EB/AVs. My less sturdy characters Hero Side can team exclusively, run other people's arcs, join TFs, and take whatever APP they feel like immediately at 41. That beats a free respec, in my opinion.

Ah, ok. I'm willing to take your word for it, I just like to see the official posts so I can try to discern some hidden DaVinci Code voodoo meaning for extra super dedicated fans only in their words.

Interesting. Do you have any official sources to direct me to regarding those options still being available (if at a reduced rate of acquisition) if you side switch? If it works like that, all I need to know is how badges will be handled before deciding whether to have my main Brute side-swap for badges (and then swap right back as soon as she's done).

I used to work with a woman whose name was Shauna Hayley Irving. She married man with the last name Tanner. We tried our best to talk her into hyphenating her maiden and married names, but I think our enthusiasm for the idea might have spoiled the 'hidden surprise' for her.

I've had three characters reset to generic status myself. In all three cases, I thought I'd had an original idea and been lucky enough to snag the right name. In two of those cases, the names were only available because they were copyrighted, but too obscure to already be pre-blocked like Wolverine or Batman or something.

The first character was similar to an obscure Silver Age DC character who hadn't been involved in anything major since before I was born. Since I was in the process of transferring the character's resources to another alt before deleting him when the genericing occurred, I wasn't too heartbroken. 30 seconds on Google left me fully satisfied with the GMs decision anyway.

The second character was an almost spot on recreation of someone from one of Image's subsidiary imprints. I'm more than a little ashamed of that, because admitting I had an "original" idea that paralelled an Image creator makes me seriously doubt what creative talent I thought I posessed. 30 seconds on Google again confirmed the validity of the GMs decision. And after the rename, I came up with a better idea to fit with the powersets anyway, so it's all good.

The third character, I contested. Lunaticia is a violent sociopath and brawler for hire who flunked out from Mu Mystic training and became a Brute instead, hidden behind the innocent facade of a pretty twenty-something asian girl with modeling aspirations. La Lunatica is a seven foot tall albino mutant who feeds on the psychic energy of emotional trauma and transforms it into super-strength, from the post-apocalyptic future of Marvel's short-lived 2099 line. They have similar sounding names, and if La Lunatica were translated into CoV her mutant power sounds like a fantastic justification for a Brute's Fury, but the similarities end there. Fortunately, the second GM agreed.

Really? What does J actually stand for in this case? Not that it matters. It's not a question of what you could have meant, it's a question of what you almost certainly did mean. Even if you stumbled across the phrase completely accidentally, and had a wholly innocent meaning you thought you were applying, the overwhelming majority of other players presented with that name would assume it's a drug reference. And drug references are against the EULA.

So it doesn't even matter if it's offensive. Every single player in the game could look at a handle that's a drug reference, say it's totally OK, and it would still be an actionable offense in the eyes of the GMs. The policy is spelled out very clearly in the EULA, and even if you've never bothered to read that, you shouldn't be surprised at that specific restriction.

Eh... if I didn't say it outright, I meant to. It's simply not realistic to believe that you can keep ERP activity secluded only to verifiable adults in this sort of environment. And given the nature of the activity, the possibility of kids being involved is actually the certainty of kids being involved. ERP is fine and dandy, a vice I've indulged in myself, but it has no place whatsoever in a Teen rated game.

And if my last post isn't the one he was pointing at for unspecified hostilities, let this one be it. The OP managed to very carefully ignore the question of underaged participation, and the damage that could be done to the game if the right people caught word of a kid using CoH to hook up for sex chat, while manufacturing a wholly illusory grudge to drive him out of the conversation. That's some incredibly weak bullcrap. It feels to me like he couldn't come up with a compelling counter-argument for that point, and just wanted to try and make the rest of us look like badguys before he ran.

We are a very long way past the point where irritation and impatience are unreasonable. The last issue that delivered what I would consider an acceptable minimum quantity of new story content was Issue 12. That was in May of 2008.

The last four issues have contained two task forces, and half dozen new contacts (I'm being generous here and counting Meg Mason's repeatable Hollows missions and the Architect introduction guy as story contacts). They also contained the Mission Architect, which is significant, but which we were promised would not result in the development team abandoning us to generate new story content by ourselves.

The four issues immediately before City of Villains was released contained the addition of the Hollows (four contacts and a trial), the Shadow Shard (five contacts, four task forces), Striga (four contacts and two task forces), Croatoa (four contacts and a task force), the Eden Trial, all three Terra Volta Respec Trials, and all of the Kheldian content.

Paragon Studios has made an awfully big deal about how many more people they've picked up, but if there is still a story team at all, they've apparently stopped working on regular issues entirely in favor of a paid expansion. I'm entirely in favor of paid expansions, but those regular issues that we're not getting any story content in any more have always been a big part of what keeps my subscription active.

Going Rogue is going to have to be absurdly huge to overcome my frustration at this point. Big enough that I can subtract entirely a portion of story content that I feel is equivalent to what should have been in regular issues 13-16(+?) and still have enough left to not feel cheated by the box price.

Bingo.

Depending on where the participants live, ERP with a minor (even one who has not been identified as such by the other partner) may constitute criminal behavior according to the local authorities. Extremely difficult to prosecute in any jurisdiction, perhaps, but it doesn't need to go to court to have a devastating impact... it just needs to wind up on the news.

Imagine some concerned parents catching their beloved, blameless, perfect, wonderful little spud doing some One Handed Typing while logged into a dark corner of Pocket D. Imagine them getting irate that such evil was permitted to enter their home and corrupt their innocent cherub, and flailing around for someone to blame (because it couldn't possibly be their own damn fault for allowing the kid unrestricted internet access and putting the computer anywhere other than a high traffic central location in the home) until they catch the attention of some blog schmuck looking for a story that can be spun into an acceptably profitable ratio of maximum pagehit yield to minimum necessary research. Imagine that our opportunistic blog schmuck is marginally competent at drumming up traffic, and smears links to his stuff all over the internet (but especially around conservative religious groups where the overlap of users who actually know anything about how MMORPGs work is likely to be minimal), where someone from a larger news outlet picks it up. Now imagine "City of Heroes is a haven for child molesters" every ten minutes on FOX News.

I'm a big fat Republican, and even I get queasy imagining Bill O'Reilly's hammy melodramatic grimace while "reporting" on such a "story".

That risk, no matter how minute it may actually be (and it's not... you know the scenario I've painted above is entirely reasonable), makes any kind of ERP taking place inside the game an act of profound disrespect to every other person playing. That's one big reason why a lot of other players don't like ERPers. You can't prove that the other player is an adult, and by persisting in playing that specific sort of activity with them you put the entire game at risk.

Edit: And before it comes up, yeah, there's been plenty of ERP generated from my own account in the past. I was even at the keyboard for some of it. Not all of it, or most of it, or even a large portion of it. Just how much of it was going on (Holy Crap, so much!), and how it was influencing the offline portion of our relationship (guess...), were major contributing factors to my breakup with the other person who used to use this account. Which, uh, was also against the rules. Don't worry mods, no ERPing OR account sharing from @Eisenzahn any more! That whole sequence also, unsurprisingly, is what prompted me to think so much about just how this sort of behavior can endanger the whole game, even when it's happening in "private". There's no such thing as private, the moment you involve a second person. You want to safely ERP? Until they start checking ID against biometrics at login, the only way to do that is in a solo mission instance. Whee!

I operate a family owned used and antique bookstore. We have currently in stock a pile of dictionaries dating back as far as 1922. Of the eleven I could find in the twenty minutes I decided to devote to this dispute, only two of them are newer than 1981 (and therefore reflect the shape of the language within my lifetime). All but one of them have an entry for decimate. None of them contain a definition that matches what you describe as the 'common' usage. Those that contain a definition all affirm that it is "to reduce by one-tenth."

Do you have an alternate source available?

If a new usage for a word only gains academic acceptance within my lifetime, I am permitted to gripe about it forever. Decimate may be listed with that definition now, but it was not ten years ago. Reference volumes may surrender ground to common misuse, but I never will.

You may feel free to use written language with whatever degree of imprecision suits you. However, it is unrealistic to expect others to refrain from making judgments based on how you express yourself, especially when your written words comprise the overwhelming bulk of the data available for us to evaluate. If another poster does not care to express their ideas clearly, it suggests to me as a reader that they don't care that much about whatever it was they had to say, because obviously they didn't put much effort into ensuring that I'd understand it easily. As a person who cares a great deal about expressing myself with clarity and precision, I have a greater inclination to react favorably to those who appear similarly disposed. My reaction is much the same to spoken exchanges featuring slurred speech, mumbling, use of arcane slang or technical vocabulary outside of those circles familiar with such (a particular personal irritant, often employed as an assertation of dominance through superior depth of knowledge), or anything else that inhibits actual communication.

Regarding punctuation, the rules are often so staggeringly vague, contradictory, or just plain poorly thought out that I feel free to disregard them whenever and wherever they annoy me. For example, the discussion regarding the placement of punctuation within parenthesis a few posts back. The 'mathematical' approach, where the period is outside of the parenthesis because it is meant to apply to the entire sentence, makes perfect sense to me. I have every intention of defying tradition and style in my personal usage. The important points here are clarity and precision. Where a rule of grammar appears in conflict with either principle, I'm quite content to let that rule die.

tl;dr

Communicate in whatever manner suits you, with the understanding that I will judge you in whatever manner suits me. If you don't care about your words enough to at least try to use them correctly, I can't imagine why I should care enough about your words to attempt to interpret their intended meaning.

Edit: Also, consider the word decimate. It means "to reduce by 1/10th." It does not mean "to generally destroy, demolish, ruin, wreck, corrupt, collapse, break, batter or vandalise."