Lothic

No I wasn't saying you blamed Lynda for today's lack of Wonder Woman attention.

I was trying to say that, like you, I think a key problem with Wonder Woman is that, unlike say Superman or Batman, we've really one had ONE memorable live-action Wonder Woman. To most people Lynda IS Wonder Woman as far as what they expect so it's pretty hard (unlike Superman or Batman) to imagine anyone else playing the role. That's part of the "mental inertia" I was trying to describe.

Oh I'm not saying it's impossible. But it only took Batman roughly 20 years to jump from Adam West to Michael Keaton. It's been around 35+ years since Lynda first portrayed Wonder Woman with no obvious replacement in sight. Just highlighting that there's been a significant difference between the two. *shrugs*

Granted the Catwoman movie was less than "worthwhile" but at least it was one more movie than Wonder Woman's had in a while. And sadly the fact that things like the Catwoman movie, the Elektra movie and the recent Bionic Woman TV series collectively stunk probably (at least indirectly) hurt Wonder Woman's chances for movies and/or TV shows anytime soon as well.

As far as the Lynda Carter "legacy" goes that certainly hasn't helped matters much either. I'm not saying Lynda did a bad job or "messed" up Wonder Woman as much, like you're suggesting, since she's the only serious example of a live-action version of Wonder Woman everyone's stuck thinking that any new version of the character would somehow have to be a clone of that campy 70s style. That "mental inertia" has clearly been hard for a lot of people to overcome.

Actually a "time machine" that only travels forward in time is fairly plausible and almost doable with current technology. When you think about it the sleep chamber Fry got locked into for 1,000 years was a "time machine" of sorts.

The genius of this show's time travel shenanigans was established even during the first episode. If you rewatch that episode and slow motion it during the scene where Fry is falling backwards into the sleep chamber you'll notice a frame or two where they show Nibbler's shadow hiding under the desk where he (as we learn in a later episode) has just tipped Fry off his chair.

I honestly believe a large percentage of what you're asking for already exists in this game. The emotes and power customizations we have come at least part way to what you're talking about. Could what we have be improved upon? Of course it could. We already know our Devs are interested in further power customizations which will expand on what we have available. If other games can provide examples of what "could" be done it will only motivate our Devs to do better.

Frankly if you're trying to "max out Defense" on a Controller you're playing it wrong to begin with.
Square peg, meet round hole.

I don't have any trouble with people exploiting an "oversight" to gain up to three extra badges the Devs supposedly didn't intend (or at least expect) people to get. If people want to burn respec tokens for badges today when they may not have to waste them later if they just wait for the Devs to "fix" this situation then more power to them.

I think the long term "problem" comes from the realization that if the Devs let this thing go unaddressed then they are basically sanctioning the idea that earning badges can be based on whether or not people chose (or didn't choose) to respec their characters potentially many years before anyone ever dreamt that doing so might affect their ability to get those extra badges today. To me leaving this "working" as it is now would be a very sad way to deal with this situation.

I favor the idea that all 6 respec trial badges (3 hero and 3 villain) and their associated respec tokens should be earnable by anyone without any relation to how many (if any) of those respec tokens have been used in the past or not. Unfortunately I think the Devs complicated the situation by making "before" and "after" respec badges just to toy around with the badge text. This is probably why this will not be a trivial code change and is probably why we'll have to wait very long time for this to get fixed, assuming it gets fixed at all.

Professor: Behold, a time traveling machine.
Bender: Time? I can't go back there!
Professor: Ah, but this machine only goes forward in time. That way you can't accidentally change history or do something disgusting like sleep with your own grandmother.
Fry: I wouldn't want to do that again.

Batman, Superman, Spider-man, Catwoman, etc. have had plenty of movies and TV shows despite anything they've ever been marketed with. It may turn out that "inappropriate marketing" won't hurt Wonder Woman too much, but I hardly see how it's going to be very helpful for her cause either.

I'm convinced the main reason Wonder Woman has not had the same media success the others have had is that the industry in general don't understand and/or know how to handle the character. Linking her to real world products that have very little (if anything) to do with her core character is not going to help that situation. At this point I just don't think the Wonder Woman character can afford any "publicity" which keeps her relegated to the murky media limbo she's been stuck in for decades now.

I sadly suspect this'll get the same level of attention the unreasonably high original requirement for Empath got. It only took about 4 years of constant petitioning, argument and suggestion on these forums for the Devs to finally concede there was what they called a "decimal point" problem with it in the first place. In the case of these respec badges the Devs may once again wave their hands and try to play it off like there's "no problem" to fix either.

I hope I'm wrong about that, but I'm fully expecting we're going to be stuck with this problem for (at the very least) a long time.

I saw that statue a few years ago when I visited Shibuya. Cool story.

Well didn't Hermes dig up "another" one of Fry's fossilized dogs in one of the newer eps? I think it was the one where they played around with the evolution vs creationism debate when the Professor became a god to a world of robots which quickly evolved from nanites to "humanoid" robots.

I think they probably threw that in because they know they've kind of played around the whole history of Fry's dog so much that they're just having fun with it now.

See that's the thing: I almost don't even see this as a problem with defining/insulting feminism or questioning whether or not Wonder Woman does or doesn't wear makeup. It's more an issue of what makes sense for the character and the general misunderstanding many people seem to have about what she's all about. As Arcanaville was implying earlier in the thread overt excessive vanity is not a quality Wonder Woman has ever expressed. Sure as a woman she's good looking (and probably doesn't mind looking good) but she's never been portrayed going out of her way to dwell on that aspect of her character. The very idea that her character would be used to sell products like makeup is fundamentally laughable.

A rough analogy to this is if Conan the Barbarian was used to sell gardening tools. Sure if Conan ever decided to tend a garden he might use those same gardening tools. But when would you ever seriously think Conan would be overly interested in spending any significant time talking about or actually bothering to garden at all? The concept of "gardening" just doesn't fit into anything Conan is or has ever been involved with.

Now one more time I understand that linking Wonder Woman to a line of real world makeup was simply a marketing maneuver and I'm fully aware many other superheroes have been related to products over the years that have nothing to do with anything their characters are about. Still I consider this a yet another symptom of how many people in the industry don't really "get" Wonder Woman and I'm taking this as yet another sign that the hopes of getting a good Wonder Woman TV show or movie continues to be fairly remote.

The British word "bollocks" probably comes pretty close.
It's fun to use naughty words in "foreign" languages.

The irony of this of course is that the slang the Resistance uses in Praetroia is this game's attempt to copy Nadsat.

Yeah I learned about how terrible this word was (regardless of context) back in the recent thread where a reference to a character in Blazing Saddles was mentioned. This is one of the reasons why I hate word filters which have no ability to discern the context of what's being talked about. Obviously that word would be unacceptable to use if we were actually talking about people with Down's Syndrome, or even people who live in Mongolia. But since the subject matter of this thread was so completely unrelated to those things it's fairly ridiculous to be "protected" from that word. Oh well.

Back to the topic of this thread, people have been predicting the end of the world pretty much since the beginning of the world. There was widespread famine across Europe in the year 1,000 AD because everyone was so convinced the world was going to end that year many farmers didn't bother to plant any crops the year before. I have no doubt that sooner or later the world is going to face some serious challenges either via global warming or from some kind of major meteor impact. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend that any date on a calendar already has that plotted out for us. I guess I only wish I was as famous as Lucas so that people would be willing to listen to any mad theories I wanted to spew forth.

It may be "hard to extrapolate" just how much of a real disadvantage it'll be between level-shifted and non level-shifted people on a team. But I think you'll agree the silly elitism that exists out there which tends to discriminate against people being invited to teams for these kinds of petty reasons will likely latch onto this new "data point" to use whether it's truly significant or not. And sadly, like the number differences with the Alpha slot itself, I think the justification for this kind of elitism will actually be based more on verifiable, provable reality than just the run-of-the-mill baseless stupidity.

It's probably just evidence of how "spaghetti code-ish" this game has gotten after almost 7 years of patches/updates.

The code that runs those dummies is probably linked (in strange unexpected ways) to other parts of the code related to how powers work or how targeting works or who knows what. When they make a change to something unrelated they probably unintentionally step on those target dummies, causing them to break from time to time.

Welcome to the very huge and relatively old computer application we call City of Heroes.

[EDIT] I thought the OP was talking about why they were sometimes not there after patch updates and/or server reboots. Didn't occur to me he was just talking about quirks with simple MOB spawning. Nevermind. [/EDIT]

Sadly I expect this will happen, and unlike other arbitrary prejudices this form of elitism will -almost- be justified due to the content involved. Incarnate level TFs require alpha slotting to avoid face-planting every 10 seconds. Any future content will likely be hard enough that people who aren't level-shifted will be an extreme liability to the success of the missions involved.

Not sure if the Devs are actively trying to encourage this form of elitism, but they are going to get it whether they wanted it or not. *shrugs*

This is why I still contend the Devs "are not that dumb" to allow their top-end character rewards to have, in effect, built-in disadvantages like this. It makes very little sense that a character "tricked out" with the best equipment the game will offer could potentially become less effective in earning loot from defeating critters than a "untricked out" character could be.

I'm not currently in the Issue 19.5 beta so I don't have the answer to this yet. But I suspect the exact way level-shifting will work will only prove to be a net IMPROVEMENT to how our characters will work and will not come with any hidden/undesirable disadvantages.

Well clearly from a name recognition point of view Wonder Woman is at the top of the list. No doubt about that. But for the pre-teen "girl power" angle they could've used Supergirl. For a more young adult "vampy" spin they could've gone with Catwoman. Of course the negative role makeup played in the plot of the last Catwoman movie probably killed that possibility regardless of the silliness of that movie or not.

This makeup thing is what it is, and at least it doesn't have anything to do with that creepy Batman squirt gun.

Well sadly I'm not expecting much of a bump from this either.
That just adds to the whole "this scenario could've been more positive somehow" vibe I get from it.

Use whatever powers you have at your disposal. Like I implied before some ATs/powersets have an easier time doing this than others so you'll have to experiment with what works best for you. Don't forget about using Rest as well. It can be a bit tricky to set up sometimes, but the goal is to take as much damage as possible per hit without dying for as long as possible.

Maybe, but I'm not really worried about who was more or less to "blame" for this. Again I'm not going to send any "angry letters" or boycott DC over this. I just think something more innovative and/or less questionable could have come out of this kind of business scenario somehow.

Maybe if we knew for a fact that this was going to lead directly towards generating enough hype for Wonder Woman to get her a new show/movie then I wouldn't be so critical. I'd just rather have a new Wonder Woman story than wear her lipstick or eye shadow.

Eh, I could buy a North-South ferry to sightsee the shipwreck. But honestly I'd think that should be it.

The Thorn Isle ought to remain fairly remote. The idea that there would or should be instant portal access to every part of this game that's even vaguely "far away" is a bit silly after all. Sometimes places simply take more than 5 seconds to get to.

The real trick to farming the damage badges is to find a mission scenario that allows you to maximize the damage you can take per unit time without too much risk of getting killed. MMs are at a disadvantage for this because their total max HPs are lower than most other ATs. This means on average it takes them longer to rack up "damage taken" points than other ATs.

There's no real exact method for getting these badges. The key for a "squishy" type AT like a MM is to find a mission that has critters which do decent single-type damage without any extra Mez side effects. I found that using Rularru Brutes worked well for my squishies. I've heard CoT Guides are also a good choice. Some people have used the big Rikti Soldier bosses, but usually only ATs like Tanks, Brutes or Scrappers can handle that. Just experiment with it until you find a scenario that pushes your Regen to the limit to keep you alive hit after hit.

Good luck.

Nerva is a big zone, but there's really not much justification for putting in a ferry service that would take you up to the north end of the zone. Why would a civilian ferry boat regularly go to Primeva or Thorn Isle?

A ferry boat service in IP makes sense because it's supposedly a busy port area. Nerva? Not so much. Those isolated areas in Nerva are "isolated" for a reason.

If Wonder Woman was a real person and she decided to endorse a brand of makeup I probably wouldn't care less because she'd just be following in the footsteps of many other celebrities who've attached their names to products. I might have a passing thought that doing such a thing would be beneath her public persona as a superheroine, but who would I be to openly mock a real life Wonder Woman who could beat me silly if she wanted to.

But somehow this situation (a fictional female comic book character attached to real life makeup) just makes me almost think they went a tad too far with it. Again I understand it's just pure capitalism at work. It just seems unfortunate somehow that the only thing they thought Wonder Woman was good for was for selling makeup. Did they really have to jump to that stereotypical combination? There's nothing "wrong" with it, but it doesn't exactly feel "right" either.