InfamousBrad

Isn't it at least semi-canonical that the reason all of this ancient Cimeroran contact with the 21st century doesn't alter the timeline is that the volcano they're camped on top of detonates soon, and we don't have the heart to tell them?

Which would come as a tremendous shock to historians, who were under the impression that Athenian democracy lasted for a hair over 400 years.

But, come on, this is a comic book game. If you didn't recognize something anti-democratic, vaguely fascist, about the urge to be rescued from the lesser people by a strong man who is above all laws, this is just another wake-up call. You can write pro-democratic, anti-fascist comic books; the writers of Captain America have generally managed it. But it's not the default for the genre.

Then you don't follow the news. Activision has been trying to divest themselves of WoW since late June: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/...-consideration

You. And CuppaJo before you. And Nivienne before her. And probably more that I can't remember off-hand. Among the things I've never been able to understand is how, even through several management changes, the City of Heroes community has managed its 100% success rate of hiring and training community managers to actually DO that. Seriously. No other game's forum's moderator has ever managed to do what you, and every one of your predecessors, manages to do every day: listen to people's complaints and suggestions, paraphrase them back by way of proving that you listened and understood, gave as much feedback as you could about the likelihood, and then neither promised more than you could deliver nor closed the door permanently.

As someone who's spent a lot of time managing forums on the Internet myself, and who's been on a lot of game company forums, Zwillinger, let me tell you that you and your predecessors have as much to do with why this game has an amazing community as its rich character creation tools and its powerset diversity. Maybe more. If some future studio were to snap up every creative and engineering genius in Paragon Studios' history and didn't snap up whoever it is that's hiring you or training you, they'd be missing the most profitable and reliable part of City of Heroes, the thing that kept it going during long content droughts by, if nothing else, gently encouraging people to keep imagining when it would some day be better because we were listened to.

I'm an MMO gamer. I like seeing other people around, even if I don't team with them very often. As an MMO gamer, I've spent 8 years watching studio after studio blow through hundreds of millions of dollars, then repeat the same mistakes over and over again. We're probably closing in on three billion dollars invested in the MMO bubble, somewhere around a dozen or twenty major titles, and nothing to show for it, nothing that's stable or growing instead of circling the drain, but WoW, EVE, RQ, and maybe GW -- all games that I hate for one reason or another.

I stuck with Anarchy Online until it visibly began to crater, I played Neocron and Neocron 2 almost all the way to the day they turned the servers off, I played SWG until the second time Sony wrecked it, I played Auto Assault (for crying out loud!) and Tabula Rasa and WAR until their developers got laid off, I played STO until PWE turned it into a casino. I didn't fall for CO or DCUO, and I didn't get around to MxO before it began to die, and I never thought Vanguard or Mortal Online or RIFT had a prayer. I'm still vaguely here. Funcom has already laid off most of the staff of TSW.

I can't stomach WoW, EVE, or RQ, and I think GW looks like garbage, and publishers and venture capitalists have stopped being willing to fund new alternatives. I still love MMO gaming, but there just isn't anything to play.

And Happy Days stayed on the air for 6 more seasons after Fonzie jumped the trope-naming shark. Discussions of when something "jumped the shark" aren't about when the announcement was made to pull the plug, they're about when the mistake was made that ruined the show or the game.

Yes, in fact, I think that if City of Heroes hasn't lost nearly their entire development team after issue 2, it would be a million-subscriber (or more) game now, because that is what happened for every other MMO that didn't make that mistake. At the same number of months in, EVE Online was barely more than tradewars with a 3D interface, and still well below 100k subscribers, not the monster we know now. At the same number of months in, Runequest wasn't even in full 3D, and also still below 100k subscribers, not the millions they have now. At the same number of months in, WoW was over a million subscribers, but well below the ten million they peaked at.

The reason that none of NCsoft's MMOs have ever done this is that they persist in thinking the same thing SOE thought (and still thinks, apparently): that an MMO is just like any other game, you lay off everybody but the maintenance staff after it's done, and people will keep paying you forever. Every studio that has made that mistake has seen the same subscriber curve: sharp bump up, overall steady decline from about a couple of months after the layoffs, when people figure out that bugs are no longer being fixed in a timely fashion and major content only comes out every year or two, at best, small bounce with major expansions but not enough to reverse the trendline. Whereas every game that kept investing in their product kept growing.

When they ramped up hiring for Going Rogue, it was a Hail Mary pass, an attempt to find out if an already dying MMO could be saved by reinvestment. It hadn't been tried before, so it was worth trying. But a game that was barely profitable at 15 employees that did not have revenue go up, was probably only barely cash-flow positive, and not technically profitable at all, at 40 employees. When they doubled that again for Freedom, and revenues only barely went up, it almost certainly went cash-flow negative.

That it bumped along for another five years doesn't change the fact that it was perceptibly doomed by issue 4.

Where are the new story arcs listed? I couldn't find them, even when the Market is/was up?

Thank you very much! This should get stickied.

And I found out what my problem was. I couldn't find any of the new arcs. They're all VIP only? How annoying.

Given how development budgets have skyrocketed over the last half-decade, it blows my mind that we're not.

She was paying his bills. She was the one with an actual paying job.

It's more than that. Like a lot of Victorians, Lovecraft has a very Lysenkoist view of evolution, and that comes with a tremendous fear of degeneration, of literally regressing to a lower form of life ... not just by passing along inferior genes, but by becoming a lower form of life yourself. If you listen to un-enlightening music, or immerse yourself in abstract, non-representational art, you might become an ape-like being. If you practice pre-Christian religions, you almost certainly will become an ape-like being. If you study non-Euclidean geometry enough to actually understand it, you may well become an ape-like being. If you have sex more than a couple of times in your life, if you butcher your own food, if you clean up biological messes as part of your daily job, basically every time you do anything that reminds you that humans are part animal, you increase your risk of becoming an ape-like being. (That's where a lot of the recurring theme of cannibalism in Lovecraft's work comes from: not just the horror of desecrating a corpse, but the mental degradation that comes from thinking about the fact that humans are made out of animal protein.)

Victorian upper classes (which Lovecraft fancied himself to be, even though he just wasn't, and that's what caused most of his life-long financial problems) lived in constant fear of what they called "coarsening;" their belief that people other than the Victorian upper class and upper middle class had been "coarsened" was the primary pseudo-scientific justification for horrific living conditions among the English working class and for imperialism abroad.

Being a reasoning, moral, uplifted human being isn't just a matter of picking the right ancestors, to a pseudo-Puritan Victorian like Lovecraft; you can do that and still end up as an animal if you don't practice the mental habits of rigorous Euclidean logic, and puritan high-church Protestant faith, and Calvinist entrepreneurial capitalism, and bland thoroughly-cooked food, and fanatic hygiene, and abstinence from recreational sex, and mathematically regular harmonic music, and strictly representational art about uplifting subject matter. Every time you expose yourself to non-Euclidean logic or pre-Christian or ecstatic religion or collectivist economics or spicy or raw food or recreational sex or blood or mucous or excrement or syncopated rhythmic music or primitive or abstract art, you're playing Russian roulette with your humanity. Keep doing it, and you'll eventually degenerate from intelligent human to stupid human to pre-sentient humanoid to filthy animal. That's what the "hygienic" scientists of the era (that more or less ended with his childhood) taught.

I won't defend that belief (although quite a few Americans would), but it does bring this to his art: Lovecraft's best literary trick, in stories like "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Lurking Horror" and "Pickman's Model" and "At the Mountains of Madness," is showing what it must feel like to start out sane and slowly go insane, usually from having the props that were keeping you sane kicked out from underneath you. That's the trick that just about every post-Lovecraft horror author copies, the protagonist who knows that he's not living in a horror novel and who loses it when he or she finds out otherwise.

All of the subsequent inside-joke references to shoggoths and to non-human languages with too many consonants and funny punctuation and to fictional grimoires and to certain New England last names and to cyclopean ruggose stygian non-Euclidean sculpture shining with nacreous excrescence are there to acknowledge that debt, mostly. That, and to acknowledge that, if nothing else, Lovecraft rescued horror fiction from the endless repetition of gothic cliches of vampires and werewolves and ghosts and mad scientists and serial killers and witches in abandoned castles on the moors.

Agree with you that S.T. Joshi is the go-to guy on Lovecraft, and I'm not denying any of Joshi's conclusions. I just want to temper them with the equally valid observation that Lovecraft had his own idea of who were the peak of human evolution, both biological and social, and it wasn't just "white people" and certainly didn't include any white people living in his own century. Lovecraft, who signed his letters "The Old Puritan" and who constantly complained of having been born too late, thought that Anglo-Puritans of (approximately) Cotton Mather's time were the high-point of human history, and that it's been all downhill since then. Yes, he thought poor people in general and brown-skinned poor people in particular were biological degenerates. He also thought the same thing about Pablo Picasso and Walter Gropius.

If you really like the Dream Cycle (I mostly don't), you might really like the source material; Lovecraft's dream cycle is mostly his homage to Lord Dunsany's six-volume short story collection of pseudo-fairy-tales. There was a lovely collected edition of all six books, under the (somewhat misleading) name Time and the Gods, back in 2000; make sure you get that edition, because if you buy any other edition with that name, you're only buying 1/6th of the stories. Read them to your kids at bedtime if you want to guarantee that they grow up to be perky-goths or goth-romantics.

You've been seduced by the Michael Houlebecq side of the force.

OK, flippant (and Lovecraft otaku-esque) remark aside, any time somebody brings up Lovecraft's racism and sexism, I have to ask them: who, exactly, are we accusing Lovecraft of actually liking, of him actually not fearing? I am, if anything, vaguely amused by somebody's invocation of his very early short story "The Horror at Red Hook" - because while the cult's followers were mostly Slavs and Poles and Italians (who we'd now consider white) plus a few Africans, the cult leader was a college-educated rich white guy, and he was the guy who was really dangerous.

Lovecraft said some pretty racist sounding things in his letters, and in a few places in his fiction ... but he wasn't really a racist in the sense that we think of racism, he wasn't even vaguely a white supremacist. What he was was a good old fashioned apocalyptic misanthrope, someone who believed that everything that had happened since 1630 was either dangerous or just plain no expletive good, and most of what happened before that wasn't any better, and that was why we were all going to die. H.P. Lovecraft didn't write the famous movie line, "And crawling on the planet's face: some insects called 'the human race.' Lost in time, and lost in space and meaning." But he could have.

To the (limited) extent to which there's a recurring theme in Lovecraft's horror, it is this: there are tri-racial isolate communities in the United States, and oppressed colonial peoples around the world, who have to have figured out by now that rich white people will never let them win. Sooner or later, some combination of science and theosophy will give those people weapons of mass destruction. And when that happens, they will use them, because they'll be willing to die themselves as long as they can take us down with them. Sort of a sci-fi/horror version of Rudyard Kipling's "The Pict Song" from Rewards and Faeries.

Look at your superhero. Now look at me. Sadly, your superhero doesn't look like me ...

The duplicate level range and the fact that there's no good reason to go there except to run Synapse once for the accolade don't bother me that much. To me, the bigger problems are your #3, and one more:

4) It's pathologically ugly. It is Sharkhead Isle level ugly.

Honestly, I'd like to see them blow up Blyde Square in Steel Canyon and blow up all of Skyway City, to catch them up to the events of Ajax and Tin Mage II, and write whole new content to go with it. Move it or Boomtown to a different level range, maybe re-range Perez Park, and have an entire alternate leveling path that deals with disaster zones: say, Hollows to Perez Park to Boomtown to Skyway City to Crey's Folly.

It's not far off of how the zones were meant to be used. There's a very, very, very obsolete leveling path in City of Heroes just for people who only want to grind, what CoH used to call Hazard Zones: team sized spawns, no story contacts, just go from spawn to spawn to spawn killing things for XP, then move on to the next Hazard Zone. When they quadrupled the rewards for end-of-instance complete and halved the debt for death in instances, people stopped using the Hazard Zones altogether, making them all revamp bait.

But if they had it to do all over again, if they had nigh-infinite resources for rewriting content, I could make a case for having a fork in the content, right after the Atlas Park arcs: go this way to be a hero in disaster zones, dealing with monsters and whatever, or go this way to be a hero in civilization zones, fighting criminals and such.

But back to the main point: for the love of all holy gods, please never again make me deal with those awful looping incomprehensible pattern-less Bridges to Nowhere. Seriously, the whole art direction of Skyway City was revealed in a developer blog post before the game went live: as soon as they created a villain group called the Trolls, they decided they needed bridges to live under. Seriously? A whole 1.5 mile by .75 mile zone, that started (back then) before you could spec Fly or Superjump, just as one stupid art gag? Dumb. Get rid of it, please, replace it with something less dumb.

Until he does, here's what I have in my notes from listening yesterday:

Changed one power in every blaster secondary to include a "sustain" mechanic. Non-toggles designed to be used at least once a minute, none require melee range, none self-stack, all but maybe Energize should be perma without any rech bonus.

Darkness Manip: Touch of Fear becomes Touch of the Beyond, adds 30 sec +regen & +recov on hit

Devices: Cloaking Device becomes Field Operative, adds +regen & +recov

Elec Manip: Lightning Clap becomes Force of Thunder, adds 30 sec +regen & +recov buff, doesn't require enemy hit

Energy Manip: Conserve Power becomes Energize, adds small up-front heal, long HoT

Fire Manip: Blazing Aura becomes Cauterizing Aura, adds tiny HoT

Ice Manip: Chilling Embrace becomes Frigid Protection, increased from 10' to 30' diameter, adds absorb shield to char every 3 secs

Mental Manip: Drain Psyche stays the same