Jack_NoMind

Someday, when I'm driving around with that license plate, someone's going to ask me what it means.

And I'm going to tell them: Log into City of Heroes and find out.

There's way too much dooming and glooming going on. Even if we're coming up on the end, it's not here yet; we're only in round 2.



Welcome to the week 2 recap! Here's last week's, which was on Page 10. Y'all are prolific. Also, I was told entirely unironically that my enthusiastic presentation style kept at least one reader on the edge of their seat. So this week, my advice is:

Don't even pay for the seat because it's OVER THE EDGE!

I don't know what it means either.

Actually, I'm a little tired today and generating all those tiny little brackets is hard work, so I'll let the links and some of the gorgeous images of this past week speak for me.

We've had another action-packed week of zero public presence from NCSoft. However, there is at least tacit admission of the cancellation of City of Heroes due to its removal from their English website.

Although the Issue 23 launch is still one of their most recent news entries.

In other news, we've made the news! This past week has seen a front-page article on Kotaku, several articles on Massively, and a fan-submitted but officially approved report on CNN!

Wait, hold on. Here we go.

Most of those, of course, were inspired by the very successful Unity Rally held last Saturday. It's hard to pin down exact numbers of attendees, but judging from the Virtue server queue, it was at least 5000 -- it may have been even more. As a result of the heavy load, CoH got its very own numeric meme: the instance cap of 33 was reached for Virtue's Atlas Park, inspiring a thread devoted to the topic with some fantastic art. Including a personal favorite from gec72:



Of course, the Dynamic Duo of TonyV and Maressa hardly stopped there! No, it was mere moments (seriously, it was like, a few hours later) before they proposed a new avenue of attack:

Hero Dogs!



Er... wait. No, not the dog (Jake! Thanks, frostcoh! -- click through to see his cat Sophia also ready to save the day)... the mask. Maressa, with a little help from Philly Girl and billymailman, generated printable masks for the Masks and Capes Call to Action. I'm using them in a devious plot of my own -- I have a biweekly D&D game tomorrow, and I'm going to bribe, threaten, and beg everyone present into making one and mailing it to NCSoft (using the addresses Maressa handily provided in the Call to Action).

That wasn't the only Call to Action from this past week, though -- Dinner's On Us started yesterday, and I understand that to make the goal of a full grand we need...

Wait, what? He just did it yester-

Three hours?!

Seriously, I was blown away. I knew it was coming up and I figured I'd throw a few bucks in before heading to work, but between when Tony was talking about it and when I got up to get ready, it was done. People here are amazing.

Well. Alright then. There's another Call to Action coming up for Thursday September 20th and Saturday September 22nd -- Positron's Ally, a CoH-wide task force celebration! See, now, back in my day, we did the old school Posi, where you were lucky to get a half-asleep Controller, much less a Defender, and PUG runs took eight hours. No bios! Uphill both ways! (No, really, I've been on two 8-hour-plus Positron runs.)

Judging from the effects of the last Call to Action, this will probably result in the eradication of the entire Clockwork, Circle of Thorns, and Vazhilok factions.

There's actually a ton of other stuff that's happened this past week, and I have an inkling of some of what might be to come (protip : brush up on your Architect Entertainment skills), but I'm going to have to leave you with just two more images capturing my favorite parts of the week.




That's all for now!

I'll make sure Maressa sees this.

...I would prefer this model because it places the role of owner in the licensee's hands, and indeed, there are indications (Minecraft, A Valley Without Wind, etc etc) that it may be catching on to some extent.

But I find it likely for any kind of MMO-esque game that the complicated 'trust' behavior will simply be dealt with by having authenticated and non-authenticated characters; much like how Diablo 3 allows solo online games and multiplayer online games, characters will only be permitted to join multiplayer games if they have been played through the web service every step of the way.

Obviously this is what you would do if you were designing the game. Still, you likely will not be, and I doubt it will happen very often in MOGs.

Besides, like other repliers, I find the potential physics of CoH2 more interesting.

ThPAA!

I'm dithpickable.

I like the idea of a co-op, but my understanding is that we are not organizing to form a corporation just yet.

World of Death Race?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_R...990_video_game)

Okay, okay:

The game: Snow CrashQuest

• The concept: Players take the roles of hacker/swordsmen, Inuit psychopaths, legitimized Mafiosos and violent young skater girls battling the forces of, um, self-aware alien language viruses, or something... wait, what was the bad guy again? Herpes from the Goddess Ishtar?
• What we keep: Hacker/sworsdmen, Inuit psychopaths, legitimized Mafiosos and violent young skater girls.
• What we lose: T rating and the Regulators (in disgust). Also Kheldians.
• What we add: A nuanced yet ultimately juvenile exploration of the rules of consent, some seriously bad-*** action scenes, REASON. So not all that much, I guess.
• Why it would be like City of Heroes: Primary/secondary powerset selection within archetype.
• The Downside: Sometimes when your character dies your (the player's) ability to use language is erased.
• Why I would play this: Because everyone *should* listen to REASON.

Huh. Transmetropolitan Online's description actually made me want Snow Crash Online.

Where everyone listens to Reason.

Definitely my favorite thus far.

I watch fox news all the time!



They're just so cute (before they grow up and forget how to feel joy).

I'm immune to close talkers, but I do have to get things off've shelves for them.

But we can't yet Arcanatar (a portmanteau of Arcanaville and avatar) "IT'S OVER 9000!"

I'm voting for the guy but I'll run that story if it gets us on Fox.

It ends with us crashing a subway car full of explosives into NCSoft's, uh, conference building?

Hopefully they're labelled MA++, or you'll get stuck after each one waiting for instructions.

Actually, what grocery store? Lots of people still need VIP status.

Pssht, Canny. We all know entropy's a lie. You only improve as you age!

Starsman : Yeah, but by first question (encoding AVs) was dumb (I borrowed it wholesale from an earlier post by Arcana on the subject without thinking). I changed the post to "hold on" as soon as I actually read what I'd written.