Olantern

I'm convinced I contributed the idea of repeatable missions in the Rikti War Zone.

In the long, dry content spell between the release of i6 (CoV) and i7 (last ten levels of CoV), players made a lot of suggestions for things like zone revamps. I remember my first post, a very long explanation of a Zigguraut Trial, being along those lines. (While we were to get a Zig Breakout event in i24, it didn't have much in common with what I suggested other than the theme.) Several people suggested revamps of what was then the Rikti Crash Site. Many of them contained ideas about a trial or task force in which heroes fought a Riktified Hero One, which was eventually realized as the Lady Grey Task Force. The idea of defeating pylons within a certain amount of time to raise the shield covering the crashed Rikti ship was also a player idea that came out of those threads.

For my part, I wrote up a fairly simple story arc about slowing the Rikti war machine, but I also suggested that the Crash Site gain a source of repeatable missions. Rather than using something like the then-new newspaper mission system, though, I suggested the mission granter be a Longbow agent. (Keep in mind that the Crash Site was a hero-only zone at the time, and Vanguard was not yet an active faction in the game.) I even listed some of the missions the contact would grant, a selection of hunts, defeat boss tasks, and the like. A year and a half later, we got the Rikti War Zone, featuring Borea, who grants repeatable missions, including a selection of hunts, defeat boss tasks, and the like. Coincidence? You be the judge!

EvilGeko said everything I'd like to say much more compactly than I can. Developers, while I'm sad about losing my own CoH friends and playtime, my heart truly goes out to you. You do excellent work, and know that you have been profoundly appreciated for it.

The best thing to do here would be to PM Zwillinger and ask him to pass the information on Legal.

I see a couple of issues with this.

First, even with generous player donations, I don't think it's possible to run an active MMO. The funding for even one "server maintenance guy" position is probably beyond what the community can pay. Moreover, there's the cost of server space, hardware, etc.

Second, what I think this thread is asking for is not that, but the more reasonable position of buying the intellectual property rights to the Paragon City/Rogue Isles setting. The problem here is ... what is NCSoft's incentive to sell it? From the publisher's point of view, why throw away the chance of creating a new product (MMO or otherwise) years from now by letting those rights out of its grasp? This, as much as raising the money to pay for it and getting the legal forms followed, is the real challenge here. And no, I'm afraid I don't have any solutions.

EDIT: Forgot the most important part. I am an attorney, but IP and transactional work in general are not my field. Any of the other lawyers in the community will tell you that one thing any lawyer has to be really careful of is not to give legal advice on matters on which the attorney is not qualified. For that reason, I'm not going to list some of the other attorneys in the community of whom I'm aware. Further, if the people posting here are serious, the best thing to do is probably to conduct something like this off-fora, through e-mail or the like.

Back when CoV was in limited, closed beta, before they let the current CoH players in, I remember telling a friend that I hoped it included a "Bite" set. The friend, who was already in the beta and thus knew there was no biting in the works, replied, "What would the tier 1 be, 'hickey?'" I told him that that seemed more like a DoT attack.

I have three (slightly) more serious observations:

1) It's nice to see the devs responding to longtime player demands for "open claws" by creating a new set. I'll probably pick this one up, even if it doesn't include biting DoT!

2) As this thread shows, their efforts are going to go unappreciated by all the players who really just wanted a totally new animation set for the existing Claws powerset.

3) Boy, there's an awful lot of swine-swimming going on lately. And the OCR folks seem to have given up on trying to contain the revelations that come from it. Man, I don't envy Marketing's task right now. How do you "reveal" something when your customer base knows about every aspect of it as soon as you start the foundation work? I predict a lot of the same stuff we heard from these fora with Staff ("they're delaying it JUST TO TORMENT US!") over the next year or so.

At one time, some of the pulp stories of *The Spider,* the Shadow's always-italicized and over-the-top cousin, by Norvell Page, were also available on the Kindle, but I haven't been able to find them recently. Anyone have any luck? I had been waiting for the classic "The City That Dared Not Eat."

There are still some available as of the time of this post! Thanks, OCR folks, especially for posting so many codes. Also, a great time to give this aura away; long live the king!

I noticed that every pairing you list there ended in horrible death. Then I realized that may be a good thing, if we're talking about blasters.

Not my cup of tea, personally, but those are some FANTASTIC costume parts. This is really, really excellent work. I particularly appreciate the detail on the cape-thing.

Ah, a subject that never gets old. Word up, my homey, as it were.

Some new favorites for me include some of Grym's dialogue. Dillo gets the player spotlight among the Shining Stars, but I find Grym to be funnier, possibly because he says everything with an absolutely straight face:

"Apparently, these 'police dogs' remain bound by their vows of silence."

"I forget that I have bett- DIFFERENT senses than you."

"I will choose a small area nearby and construct a den."

In addition to what everyone else has said, remember, too, that forumites are not really the target audience here. The devs know that people who are all over beta, or the beta forums, know about the Tech Knight set. Those people are not the target audience. I believe Zwillinger has previously said that the goal is to communicate with people who don't obsessively read the forums, or don't follow developer Twitter, or don't get involved in betas, or what-have-you. Given some of the questions I see asked on these things, when I watch them, I think they're reaching that audience.

Put another way, if you were a player who loved costumes and hadn't heard of the Tech Knight set before, then saw this, you'd think this Coffee Talk thing was the greatest thing ever. Put yet another way, I think forumites tend to make the mistake of assuming everyone is a diehard forumite.

Finally, I'd just like to say that while I rarely watch them, I find it valuable to be have a reminder that the developers are real people, like everyone else, something that I think fans tend to forget.

An additional hurdle with this sort of thing is that revamping character models means not only revamping three PC models and every costume piece and animation that goes with them, but also every NPC costume and animation in the game, since both types of entities are built on the same rigs. It could certainly be done, but it would be a vast investment of animation and character art time, far more than anything that's been done so far.

I suspect that once we reach the point when the devs feel the game "looks too old" (a complaint I've never understood, but then, I grew up in the days when VGA was something to get excited about), they'll just scrap the game entirely and recreate it from the ground up, not deal with the challenge of adapting everything that already exists into a new, fancier form. That opens the can of worms of creating a "City of Heroes 2," which gets discussed at least every other week around here. It's also debatable whether the devs will ever get to feel that things "look old." I'm not sure that enters into the minds of people who primarily develop gameplay. As someone else pointed out, plenty of popular games, including one very popular MMO, have old or just plain simplified art styles, but I rarely hear them criticized for those reasons.

I'm considering this combo (though probably for a brute rather than a tank) for when Bio Armor goes live. I've played a lot of melee combinations, though I'm not a min/maxer by any means, and the possibility of nine different combat mode combinations (sixteen if you count "not using a mode" in each of the powers) sounds like an interesting diversion.

The thread has covered IO strategies and what to build for in pretty good detail. Does anyone have any thoughts on leveling this combination, or on SO builds? (Incidentally, I mean "leveling through ordinary gameplay"; I don't have the patience for farming or powerleveling.) How much form-switching (in both primary and secondary) might realistically be involved?

The category being listed is broad enough that I can't disagree with any of the listings. While I was a little surprised by the inclusion of, say, Iron Man 2, I can certainly agree that it was overhyped. This list is a nice illustration of a point I like to make here in internet-land: calling something "overrated" (here, "overhyped") doesn't necessarily mean it's "bad" (though they sometimes go together).

I thought I would help out by posting a review of one of the superhero books I recently finished. A couple words on how I did the ratings might be handy first. Instead of just giving an overall rating, I gave three scores. The first measures how interesting or original or creative or entertaining the ideas for the story and its elements are in the abstract. The second measures how well the author did in bringing them to the page. Essentially, it's a measure of what I believe the author's writing skill to be. The third is how much I, personally, liked the book and is far more subjective than the others. I did it this way so my own preferences don't interfere much in my rating of the book's abstract quality. As an example, I would score the popular Ex-Heroes as (5/4/3) because it has very strong concepts and good execution, but I don't much care for the premise.

Anyway, here is the actual review.

Prepare to Die!, by Paul Tobin

Ratings:
Concepts: 2 of 5
Execution: 3 of 5
Overall Enjoyment: 2.5 of 5

In this novel, a superhero named Reaver is defeated by an assortment of enemies. Rather than killing him right off, though, they grant him ten days to get his life in order, to "prepare to die." Reaver decides to return to his hometown, where he tries to reconnect with his childhood love and experiences various traumatic memories about some of the deceased heroes he's known. (Unfortunately, this makes for lots of flashback and a scattered narrative structure.)

Tobin's goal here seems to be to show a "human" side to his heroes, but his technique is a bit scattered. Reaver is definitely not a squeaky-clean hero; he occasionally kills off an enemy, feels guilt over his deceased brother's fate, and has affairs with pretty much anything in a skirt. In spite of all that, he's portrayed (in first person, an interesting touch) throughout the story as a sympathetic character. There's nothing particularly wrong with any of this, and it's nice to see some superhero fiction that recognizes you don't have to have Batman Morality in order to be the good guy, but it doesn't really add much, either. Tobin is on steadier ground when he deals with Reaver's awkwardness in reconnecting with someone he hasn't seen in years, but the challenges Reaver faces there are minimal enough that there isn't a strong sense of narrative tension.

Tobin also subscribes to the "it's all a sham" view of hero vs. villain conflicts that's so popular among writers of superhero prose, but this doesn't become apparent until the finale. Unusually, he argues that the sham is *good* rather than bad. Still, I felt that this addition was kind of an unnecessary left turn in the story. For much of the book, I felt I was reading a pastiche of something along the lines of Soon I Will Be Invincible, until suddenly, in the last chapter, it became a pastiche of Watchmen.

Where the book really shines is an element thrown in almost incidentally: the villains. With the exception of Reaver's nemesis, who is a fairly uninteresting (to me, anyway) Ozymandias-genius-for-betterment-of-the-world type, the villains in this story are patently evil and wantonly destructive. They routinely wipe out innocents in horrible ways and are absolutely without remorse. I haven't seen the supervillain-as-monster done this well in prose before; the closest I've seen to this is the commentary in the collected edition of the comic "Justice," where one of the artists makes the same point.

An additional strong point of this book is the way Tobin throws in references to the way his world deals with superheroes (and villains). Reaver provides a running commentary on the websites, books, news reports, porno-movies, and the like that deal with his exploits, as well as the way bystanders react to him (and other super-characters). Tobin handled this with a lot of thoroughness and believability. Unfortunately, the setting is otherwise kind of characterless.

Overall, I recommend this book if you're interested in superhero fiction, period, or if you want a somewhat different take on the issues presented in Watchmen (you'll have to read the whole thing to understand why I say so), or if you like to watch totally psychotic villains get thrashed. If your interest in superhero fiction is less completist, or if you can't tolerate long stretches without action (at least as much space is devoted to the antics of Reaver's girlfriend's "charmingly" goofy older sister or to the significance of makeout sessions as to superhero matters), or if you prefer super-protagonists to have a more squeaky-clean morality, you should give it a pass.

I hope you found that helpful.

My favorites include the ITF (has Romans and a lot of epic battles), the Sutter TF (essentially one long epic battle), and Tin Mage (also essentially a single enormous battle). Fighting entire armies just seems like something that it'd be logical to assemble a huge team of superpowered beings to do.

For quirkier stuff, I second the numerous Mortimer Kal posts. Plus, it provides me with so many opportunities to make lascivious comments about Mercedes Sheldon (the Grace Kelly of contacts). My favorite so far is, "She can cast a Radiance Spell on me any time!"

I always got the impression that forumites *love* anime and manga and want to see them influence the game more, not less (witness how many examples are based on anime I've never heard of), so I'm not sure where the idea of anime-hate comes from. (By the way, note for pedants: I'm going to use the word "anime" in this post to mean "anime and manga and other Asian or Asian-influenced material like them. Yes, I know this is a generalization, but I'm trying to save typing time.)

Personally, I'm not in favor of adding "anime" as such to the game. I have several reasons for this, some that are just based on my personal taste and some that are more systemic.

First, a "personal taste" thing. I was drawn to this game because I like Western-type superhero stories. I like the notion of colorful paragons of virtue clashing with fiendish enemies in a setting and context that's usually lifted more or less directly from modern, American culture. (I think of it as a fantasy novel where the author doesn't have to spend a long time describing the imaginary culture because it's very similar to the one I know.) I don't especially enjoy stories about anime-type heroes.

Second, the first of my systemic objections. We already have a fair number of anime-inspired elements in the game. There's an entire power set devoted to ludicrously oversized weapons, several devoted to fantastical unarmed combat styles, a selection of catgirl and wolfboy parts, all sorts of armored battlesuit costume elements, schoolgirl uniforms, and more. All of those things suggest "anime" to a lot of people, including me.

Third, another systemic issue that might seem to cut against what I just said. Asking for "more anime" in the game is like asking for "more comic books" or "more movies." While I'm not much of a fan, I've always considered anime more a medium than a genre. Just as you can write a comic book about superheroes, or about funny animals, or about an ordinary man whining about his life, you can have an anime about a giant robot, or about a rabbit-like demon-man, or about schoolgirls ... or whatever. The style is not the style's contents. I suspect that when people ask for "more anime," they really mean "more things like in [X anime I like]." That's fine, but being more specific is always more likely to get you either more people rallying behind your suggestion (not that that means anything in terms of whether it makes it into the game) or at least clearer negative feedback.

Fourth, an outgrowth of the third point. If, as I've argued, anime is more a style than a type of content, it runs into a problem. The style of CoH is not the style of anime. Anime uses structures like the big-eyes-small-mouth drawing style to demonstrate things like emotional effects. In CoH, to continue the example, faces are fairly realistic in proportion, and what might be demonstrated by exaggerated facial movements is handled entirely through dialogue. If the request for "more anime" is a request to add a second art style into CoH's existing one, I don't think I agree. The Syndicate resembles the antagonists from any number of John Woo-style action films, but the devs didn't add more photorealistic faces or slow-motion combat sequences when they were added to the game. Any new elements added have to be reshaped to fit the existing style of the game. (I should add that this argument applies to story elements, too. I have a vague impression that anime involves a lot of personal angst on the parts of the heroes, which isn't an element that's played up much in CoH heroes. Thus, it'd seem extremely out of place were it to be added here.)

So, there you have it. Lest the anime-lovers out there think I have no sympathy at all for their love of their favorite medium, I should add two things. First, as others have pointed out, we don't know much about Primal Earth outside of Paragon City. I've always assumed, with only minimal evidence to support my belief, that just as the Primal Earth U.S. resembles the world of superhero comic books, the Asia of Primal Earth resembles that of manga and other Asian comics. Perhaps this idea could be explored in a future issue update. The City of Hero heroes seem to suggest this. They're also a good example of what I meant by reshaping anime elements into the existing style of CoH. Mirror Spirit is a magical, girl-like spirit in a somewhat overblown (yet normal-clothing-inspired) outfit who periodically turns evil or something, but she's presented in the same style as other heroes. That is, she's like a Western superhero comics rendering of a manga character.

Second, bringing this back to the personal, back before my gaming rig died, I was working on submissions for the "remake the Vindicators" thread. I've been working on an idea I call "If the Forumites Wrote the Lore" for a while, where I basically do what the developers sometimes do: try to figure out what players' ideas are and implement them, rather than just creating what I'd create if I were doing it in a vacuum. Anyway, in my remake of the Vindicators, Valkyrie was to be a Japanese schoolgirl wielding either a huge techno-katana or a Gundam-like battlesuit; I hadn't decided yet. Again, this is an example of how anime-type ideas can filter into CoH without rewriting the basic art and story style.

I'd say we have about a one in four chance of actually seeing the Trollops for real some day. Which would be awesome for the name alone.