Mr_Samoa

Huge congrats, my friend! I'm so happy for you two

[sorry, apparently my post didn't post the first time I tried to, so this is delayed!]

Hooray!

Just curious- if my friend had a trial account, does that count as a "game account" that will be reactivated as Premium?

Sorry to say, but io9 has the scoop that new Who may not be back until next fall, nearly 9 months after the Christmas Special this year. No word on if there will be a midseason break or not.

I loved, loved, loved these arcs. The characters were likable and the story wove into the main canon wonderfully. Besides that, this is a GREAT ongoing tutorial. It introduces all the main game concepts and I, as a veteran, never felt like it was listing out how this and that works. All the information was there, set into a story, in a very easily digestible manner. Whoever set that up did a marvelous job.

One note on the dialogue, though- I rarely picture my character saying exactly what the text says. I see the text as guiding my reaction. So if I wouldn't say "You're off your rocker, man!" I might say, "Forsooth! Your mind doth confuseth me!" and so on. Obviously, in some extreme cases [Dr. Graves], the actions you're forced to take are shoehorned in. But in an average arc, like Twinshot's, the actions taken are usually reasonable and I can use my imagination to come up with dialogue that goes into the story but fits my character.

*hoorb*

There's a lot in the thread I agree with, so I won't parrot it, but I will say: rewrite some of the 10-25 villain stuff. Now, don't get me wrong, it's good- but with minor rewrites it could be great. A lot of the content there references the Blood of the Black Stream, which is a concept left by the wayside. Update it to the Coming Storm! Wasn't it 3K Kelvin in those arcs, the Hellion boss? Maybe he had another name, I forget. But he's all about BotBS- when heroside, Hellions are chomping at the bit for the Coming Storm. There's a lot of potential to mix in Coralax and a lot of those other forgotten plot threads left in the low-level villain area. For example, say the red coral shards are from another meteor. Bam. Coming Storm. Of course, not everything needs to tie into the CS. But there's no reason to have these plot threads for content we'll never see lying around.

I've been a DC fanboy for 15 straight years, and I was very apprehensive (read: nerd raging) about the reboot. But I read this week's comics and I wasn't upset by them. Not all of them were great, and some of them had problems. But most of them, I liked the new directions in. Particuarly, Action Comics, Batgirl, and JLI.

Action Comics is a refreshing take on Superman. For years, there's been the feeling of "so what?" with Superman, because he's Superman. He's unbeatable. No matter what. But this is a Superman who is more fallible, less experienced, and weaker. I'm reading Superman for the first time in years.

Batgirl.... had a lot of handwaving. "For three years I couldn't feel my legs..... now I'm Batgirl!" and that kind of disappointed me. I don't get why people are raging about her freezing up, though. It's her first time out as Batgirl again after regaining her legs and she's still dealing with the trauma of what Joker did to her. That's a very human reaction. Yes, Oracle was an icon and I *loved* Barbara as Oracle. Yes, they took away some of that status, but they made her very human. If there's one writer I'd trust my favorite characters with, with no hesitation, it's Gail Simone.

JLI was good. I liked the team interactions. Booster seems to be in a mid-point between "80s Booster" and "modern Booster", and I'm okay with that. Not a terrible amount to say about this one.

One of the biggest things that swayed me around to this was my comic shop. I went in and most of the books were sold out, in a store that normally doesn't get a ton of traffic. There were people I'd never seen before in the store, talking about the new comics. That's exciting to me. I'm still very concerned about some titles, such as Teen Titans, which appear to be steaming piles of bullcrap. But, really, I can choose not to buy Teen Titans and enjoy the books I want to and so far it's going pretty okay. Given my way, would I have allowed the reboot? Not at all. But I love these comics and this is where they are, so I'm going to enjoy it.

Can anyone explain why there is so much "Fear Her" hate? I mean, yes, the episode had problems, but I certainly wouldn't use it as the standardized unit of badness in Doctor Who. It's been a bit since I've seen the episode, but I can't recall disliking so much that it stands out.

I laughed really hard when I saw just one person dressed like an orange chicken doing the Michael Jackson dance emote behind Marauder. It just worked on so many levels.

However, that pic up there is a little, erm, excessive...

Hah, I grew up in the time since I started playing. I'm currently mostly into an Associate's Degree, and I've been playing since just after CoH launched. Do the math!

So, in the time since I've started playing, I've:
*learned that I've learned a hellava lot about life, and that what I've learned is very, very little in reality
*become much more open with who I am and what I want to be, resulting in many good friends and a wonderful girlfriend
*become a writer, hopefully eventually a professional one
*been part of the rise and fall of the "first great age of the CoH Forums", was kicked out of the forums, and then figured out that internet forums probably aren't the best place to be spending all of my time... which leads directly to:
*gotten a life!

I often use my time with CoH as a measuring stick for how far I've come. I've spent my entire teenage life here. It's been a very interesting seven years.

For reference, in this game Romans fight superpowers and aliens with the powers of gods. And I see nothing wrong with that.

Presumably, they pushed back the Freedom headstart/release because of these server hardware issues. Therefore, the server/hardware issues will be fixed by the time Freedom goes live. So we wouldn't be borking anything and, in fact, it'd be a pretty good final stress test to double-check that the servers are working fine before all the freebies join in.

I'd sure love to see "old CoH" go out with a bang. I don't think the next month until Freedom hits needs to be all invasions all the time, but I'd love some kind of send-off event the night before Freedom starts.

Just a few small points:

Praetorians know Hami is alive. They have the sonic fences up to stop the Devouring Earth from getting in. They think that Cole just smacked him so hard that he was no longer a world-breaking threat.

As for Why Earth? I think it's because of Kheldians, honestly. I think some of the Nictus landed here more or less on accident, and the Peacebringers/Warshades followed them. The Battalion runs on Kheldians, so it seems obvious that they'd come to a place with a "Free Squid Buffet" sign lit up over it.

I also know the "enemy of my enemy" dealie in regards to throwing the Rikti at the Battalion, but really- who would go for that? Maybe news of the truth behind the war is hitting the Rikti homeworld, but it sure isn't hitting ours. Average Joe (the citizen, not the hero) still thinks of Rikti as invading monsters. How would it play if we went to a podium and said "Hey guys. *Another* dimension is about to invade us. And, also, some mean aliens are about to attack. But it's cool because those guys that killed your families and destroyed the city seven years ago are gonna come over and help. And I promise they won't kill you, because the war was actually caused by a robot. Funny story. So here we go, main portal that Omega Team died to close.... open sesame!"

On the topic of River, I would have gladly given up the whole twisted plot about her true identity and origin for a more well-planned romance in reverse with the Doctor. The first time she meets her she dies, and I would have loved for the first time she met him to be the day he died, and having her fall in love with him at the time of his death. And, yes, they threw some elements of that in, but they took the "She's a Time Vortex Baby" plot as the more important one, and allowed their timelines to jumble a bit more than a straight back-to-front line. Their romance is very cool to me, and very sad, and I wish that it could have continued as strongly as it had started.

Also, bring back Gen from "The Doctor's Daughter". She was way cool.

I personally like the idea that the Silence (the aliens, not specifically the Order, assuming the Order contains more than the aliens) were using their subliminal suggestion abilities on more than just Earth. There's been a lot of the Doctor's enemies forming together lately, and I think it's a really neat idea to say that the Silence has been working, subliminally, though all the Doctor's enemies to weaken and/or defeat him for some purpose. Obviously, they avoided direct confrontation with him for as long as possible, which is why he never learned of their existence (via using the marks to remember them). I can see a montage of every villain The Doctor's ever faced with a Silence hovering behind them. Perhaps they've even been behind all the Daleks that keep slipping through the cracks somehow. *shrug*

So today's the day. Flashpoint #5 is out, officially ending the DC Universe and rebooting it in the new Justice League. What did you guys think?


I'm on the fence, and a little confused. First of all, JL was good. Jim Lee can draw really, really well. I liked what I saw there, so far. Flashpoint was underwhelming, because of all the tie-ins, and all the build up going nowhere. A entire summer of comics did not impact the story in any meaningful way. In fact, no characters but Flash and Batman did anything of any use, at all. And that's shameful. I did like all the twists given here, and the very human dialogue given to Barry. What concerns me is when he's in the timestream, and sees three timelines. He's told that the timelines were broken apart to prepare for "their arrival", and that they needed to come together. I'm not sure if this means the DCU, Vertigo, and Wildstorm have merged in anticipation of some threat on the horizon, of if it means that the DCU, Flashpoint, and DCnU universes need to be merged to create an even more new one. Either way, I got a vibe of "Crisis on Infinite Timelines" on the drawing board at DC. As a 15-year long DC fanboy, I tried to go into the DCnU with unbiased opinions, and I'm not wholly upset by what I was shown today. My opinion may swing when I get my hands on some of the books whose solicits were... let's politely say "effing awful", and hopefully authors besides Geoff Johns and Gail Simone will surprise me. We'll see.

I recently caught up on the series [since 2005] myself, on Netflix, and I am in love with the show. I'd wondered for years what all the hubbub was about, and MAN was I wrong to wait. I waited long enough to miss the hey day of Tennant, sadly. However, I've been greatly enjoying Matt Smith's run (though it is a bit more intellectual... my mother watched some of the pre-Series 6.5 premiere marathon, then the 6.5 premiere, and was *totally* lost despite my explanations, which sounded kind of crazy themselves). I've begun to dabble in the Tom Baker era stuff too (also on Netflix) and while I haven't watched a lot, it's been somewhat underwhelming to me based on how built-up it was. I'm going to watch more to build a more solid opinion, but I'm definitely a New-Who fanboy.

For someone just starting out, there's never really a good place to start. I suppose the beginning of Matt Smith's run is the best ,because the only real story carrying over is River Song, and she was only in one Tennant episode. But Tennant's run carries over stuff from Eccleston, and if you don't want to catch up on 6 years of story you don't want to start with Eccleston (though you should, he's Fantastic!). Of course the Tennant stuff is marvelous, but if you just want to jump right in there's only one and a half seasons of Matt Smith to catch up on- but you would need to watch all of it to make sense of anything. It's somewhat jumbled (see: Rory's history).

I've left whole contacts behind because they were offering Security Chief missions. I don't care if they have their whole story arc to offer yet, I'll leave them behind and go to a new contact and not waste my mission drop. If I really want that story arc, that's what Ouroborus is for.

I've always wondered why SG invites can't go through the email. For example, on my Steam, I can get a message that says "You have been invited to [Group]" and I can click to join or not. Obviously, there's potential for spam in putting this in CoH, but there's already email spam to begin with. I don't know if it's even possible with CoH tech, but it sure would be handy.

Interesting topic. I share your feelings during AV fights, where I'm basically standing there, going "click.... click.. click..." and watching their HP dwindle. They're mixing it up with things like Anti-Matter and Col. Duray with the "Avoid the marks on the ground" idea, and those require both knowledge of what the hell is happening and reaction time, but it still really doesn't feel exciting. It's a pretty fine line, and I doubt there's a way to mix together "exciting fast reactions" and "Everyone knows what they're doing" very well. I, personally, prefer things that require you to pay attention and react to a changing environment. Like, at certain points during the fight the floor sinks into lava and you have to get to higher ground while fighting the AV. I'd prefer even that to be somewhat random though, to mix up encounters, and that's tech that goes beyond the average MMO, even with all our new shiny updates.

On the flip side, I think missions should be faster paced. Even in a huge group of foes, there's very little urgency. You may need to click Hibernate quickly to avoid death, but that's about it. I personally fight minions like I was actually in a movie- I leap over guys and hit one to stun him, then spin and kick another and leap over the third to hit the fourth who was about to shoot me. I'm constantly moving around and usually take most of the enemies out at about the same time, because that's more exciting to me. I don't get hit less or do more damage, but it helps immersion and it helps me not feel like I'm standing there getting shot while beating the stunned guy for five minutes. Perhaps I was spoiled by Batman: Arkham Asylum, where a slow reaction time could have a fatal consequence. I really, *really* liked the fighting in that game.

I agree with SlickRiptide. Even if Mender Silos is Nemesis seeking redemption for causing something, there is NO way he would be totally up-front about everything. He's hiding something big, and he's still manipulating the situation so he ends up on top. Except that maybe this time him ending out on top means he has to save the rest of the universe instead of ruling over it, and he sees that as redemption.

With all this talk of Kheldians around, I'm also wondering where Horus is. He's the last Blue King character not in-game and he was supposed to be trying to lead the Kheldians on Earth against the Nictus. Obviously time has passed since the Blue King book (see: Apex), and I gotta wonder where Horus has been. The talk about Twilight Son's host has some very interesting possibilities, especially considering how short-lived Kheldians are without a host. [tangent thought: Kheldian bonding prolongs the life of the Kheld and the human host. If Mender Silos is a physical body and not some automaton, perhaps Nemesis extended his physical life (instead of existing in a digitized mind form) by bonding with a Kheld, maybe even in a temporary relationship to give him a few years here, a few years there, without permanently being bonded. A relationship like this gives lots of opportunities for him knowing firsthand about the Battalion- hosts can sense their parter Khelds out in the universe, after all. But maybe this is just a tangent I thought of. *shrug*]

Personally, I prefer the new tutorial over the old because the old was very dated, and I was pleased to see Coyote stick around in the new one. It is a great hook to the game and it does feel very epic for me- but I do agree that there's a bit of a drop off from "giant space goo monster" to "fight some Hellions in a cave". I'll agree that Praetoria probably has the best tutorial, because it introduces game mechanics in an unobtrusive way and puts you right in the heart of your own story.