Lothic

A couple of months ago when the stealth panther first went on the beta server I suggested they make it so that the eyes only glowed yellow when the stealth toggle was on. This would mean you could have both a natural looking panther (when stealth was off) and a "magical" glowing eye panther when the stealth was on. It'd be like getting two panther powers for the price of one.

Sadly I'm not sure the Devs ever got around to changing it. To save time they probably could have even used the natural eyes they created for the lion pet so the modification to the panther should have been fairly trivial to accomplish.

Oh well...

People like you what cause unrest...

Sure there's always the "Marvel has an actual god as a character" angle.

But look at the main premise behind the Thor movie and why it worked. It worked as a "relatable" story because we were presented a god (Thor) who started out all too human in his faults: he was vain, reckless and overconfident in his abilities. These are failings that all too many of us "normal" humans have. It was only after Thor's lesson in humility did he truly earn his mantle of greatness. This is a classic plot that can directly translate to any one of us.

On the other hand you compare that to Superman, a god who basically starts out as a perfect paragon of truth and justice. He's an ideal that very few if any of us could hope to truly relate to. He's the ultimate Boy Scout that apart from the overused Kryptonite trope is basically omnipotent. Hard to make good stories about a character that basically can't be threatened by anything in most circumstances. The same can be said for Wonder Woman, a warrior princess who embodies strength, compassion and virtue to such a degree that there's very little room for her to maneuver as a character which could evolve through a compelling story.

The key idea I'm trying to convey here is that it's simply easier to write for most Marvel characters than it is for many DC characters. I'm not saying it's impossible to write a good DC story, I'm just saying that it requires good enough writers to tackle the built-in obstacles and "god baggage" that many of them bring to the table. It's hard to write stories that threaten gods, and it shows in movies that semi-fail like the last Superman movie and the "hypothetical" Wonder Woman movie that no one's been able to create for decades now.

I'll grant you that the absolute differences between these two companies are less than they were 50+ years ago. But I still contend the basic paradigms that define the main characters of these two universes are significantly different enough that one group tends to be more "realistically human" than the other. That difference makes a difference when it comes to writing stories that directly resonate with an average audience.

I know I'll probably be burned at some kind of stake for saying this but I really hope Joss never trys to resurrect Firefly again. Don't get me wrong I really liked the series and it was a terrible shame it didn't get a fair chance to continue. But at this point it's just been too long to pick up the pieces for another go at it. Sometimes lightning really only strikes once and you can't get it back again. *shrugs*

I'm hoping that the success of Avengers will let Whedon do all sorts of -new- things that will be cool and worthwhile. Trying to Frankenstein an old project is probably not the best use of his new-found movie-making capital.

Don't worry, I'm all about letting them do what they need to do to make these badges work properly.

My goal in tossing out a few minutes worth of pseudo-code was to highlight just how relatively straightforward it would be for them to redefine these badges to be based on account creation dates. As a workaround to their current roadblock on this issue my idea almost could not be simpler to implement. If it took one of the Devs more than a few days tops to make this happen I'd be amazed.

That's the most infuriating thing about this for me: Posi has chosen to "give up" on this when a very simple Plan B solution clearly exists. If I was suggesting a fix that would take weeks or months to finish then sure I could see where Posi would have every right to ignore it. But a fix like mine should be something they could do blindfolded.

Actually as a cute twist I'd almost expect Neeson to tell the aliens something like, "You're NOT going to sink my battleship!"

Yeah despite what I said earlier I didn't mean to imply that all Marvel stuff is great and all DC stuff sucks. There are plenty of examples from both companies of things that have been done well and other things that have been handled poorly.

I just think in general the Marvel universe and the way most of its characters work tends to be more "writer-friendly" than the DC universe. Basically it seems to be easier for people to crank out good Marvel stories because they don't have to deal with the inflexible baggage that comes with some of the DC characters.

If you're going to muddy this scenario with a JJTrek-ism then maybe they could just redirect the "supernova that threatened to destroy the entire galaxy" in 2387 over towards the planet where this Enterprise crashed and just have it destroy the planet to wipe away the ship's presence there. That kind of nonsense would likely be right up Abrams' alley. *shrugs*

I think part of the problem is that many of the DC characters are effectively modern-day versions of Olympian gods. Characters like Superman and Wonder Woman can come off as "hard to relate to" because they are so powerful that it's difficult for them to do things that equate to what normal people deal with. I think Batman sort of gets a pass on this because despite all his fancy tech and brains he's just a "normal" man.

There's also this idea that DC characters in general are more "idealized" as heroes. They stand as near-perfect paragons of heroism and virtue. This again makes it more difficult for anyone to write a story that might cause them to change or deviate from their more narrowly-defined and overly serious personas.

Basically I think the Marvel characters have done better in the recent movies mostly because they are more flexible and even more "flawed" from a human point of view. This has given story writers easier access to them as human beings for good material to write workable movies.

I still don't really buy this as a viable idea for a long lasting TV series. Even if the sub was framed and was completely innocent if the rest of the world thinks it's a "rogue sub" then the rest of the world would do everything in their power to take it out regardless if it deserved to be taken out or not. Somebody would preemptively nuke the island to kill the sub and it'd be game over. *shrugs*

For Battleship I'd modify this a bit to say, "Haven't we had enough of Michael Bay to have to suffer somebody else making a virtual clone of a Michael Bay movie?"

I suspect Battleship will get the same crowd that drove the ticket sales for the Transformer movies so I have no doubt it'll at least make box office money. But since you did use the word "mindless" to describe this movie twice I think you are savvy enough to understand the main focus behind what's going on with this one.

I highlighted the phrase where your argument fails.
Your definition of "relative value" is going to be unique to you because, well, it's -relative- to you.
Just because you don't like its price point doesn't mean that's going to stop -anyone- else from buying it.

For what's it worth I wouldn't "argue" with a lower price for this power, but that's not the reality we're faced with.

Many of these functions (such as what I'm calling 'Award_Vet_Badge(i)') should already exist in the system in some form or fashion because these functions are already needed to check and verify whether a character has earned a specific badge or not. The "hardest" part of this appears to be extracting the account creation date from player account records. But considering how difficult it currently seems to be to resolve the whole total subscription time nightmare I would think this single date lookup is orders of magnitude easier.

I'd love to have a Dev tell us why this would be unreasonable to do...

Didn't really mean to imply MIB3 would completely murder Avengers' numbers. Just figured it would be a strong enough movie to come along a few weeks -after- Avengers to finally cause its numbers to dip significantly. At any rate it's safe to say MIB3 will be a much better movie than Battleship regardless of what either do to Avengers.

I honestly don't think it'll drop off that much more until next week when Men in Black 3 comes out. I have no real desire to see Battleship and don't really think it'll eat into Avengers ticket sales too badly. I suppose we'll see soon enough.

I'm sure it'll be popular but to be honest because of what you mentioned I'm probably not going to worry about it too much. It'll have a few cool applications like with Solar Flare or Bonfire but it's not going to suddenly solve everyone's "problems" with KB all by itself.

It's cool the Devs are giving us this new toy to play with but its limited supply is going to mean it'll be hyper-valuable for a month or two until they're all sold and we'll have to wait until next year to get more. No one's going to be able to make a regular business out of selling them year-round.

If they did that sure. But it's likely that's not going to happen anytime soon if ever. *shrugs*
Sometimes the Devs care more about game balance than just making money.

When the Hulk is handled properly on screen it works pretty well. But as recent movie history shows there seems to be a lot of ways to mess up the Hulk character-wise. Hopefully the few minutes of cool Hulk action in the Avengers won't encourage a rush to churn out hours worth new (but bad) Hulk material.

Yeah maybe - guess we'll find out.

My main concern is that it just doesn't seem like a rogue ballistic sub could hope to "camp out" at an island forever while holding the world hostage with its nukes without somebody, somewhere coming up with some kind of sneaky Seal Team Six plan to move in and disable the sub in some way to remove the threat. It'd be a sitting duck anywhere it wasn't constantly submerged somewhere.

Like I implied this seems like an interesting plot scenario for a good movie or mini-series. But how many -seasons- of a TV show could they keep that kind of standoff going without the rest of the world reacting to take them out. One ballistic sub could do a lot of damage if it went rogue, but it couldn't take out the ENTIRE world by itself unless they come up with some kind of campy "doomsday machine" twist (like The Mouse That Roared) that would allow them to actually hold off everyone.

Looks like a weird combination of The Hunger Games, The Postman and Book of Eli. Might be good.

This is an interesting idea but I don't see how there's enough "story" there to make an entire TV show out if it. Looks more like it would've been a good movie. Doesn't seem like they could hide on that island and just keep dragging it out indefinitely. Almost like a serious, modern-day version of "The Mouse that Roared" I suppose.