Olantern

Though I'm not certain about this, I believe that both CoH and the Reagan movie took the name from that of an actual street called "Kings Row," which was located near the original offices of Cryptic Studios. Then as in the time of the Reagan movie, Kings Row did not run through the finest neighborhood, so it became the name of a run-down part of Paragon City. I vaguely remember reading about Kings-Row-the-street in an old (I think) Jack Emmert post. That post contained no indication that anyone at Cryptic had heard of the Reagan movie.

I'd always assumed that its appearance in Sky Captain was supposed to mean that the theatre shown there was showing the Reagan movie at the time. As a previous poster noted, the dates don't quite match up, but I assume it's there to show the "period." (Of course, the background artists of Sky Captain may well have had knowledge of CoH, too; who can say for sure?)

The signature chest logos include the Freedom Phalanx (not Freedom Corps/Longbow), the Vindicators, Vanguard, Arachnos, Cage Consortium, and the Circle of Thorns, but not Hero Corps.

If he returns, he'd darn well get his fantastic cape from the promotional art, the one that looks like it has a layer for each of the crosses on the flag, rather than the pre-printed one that looks like a silkscreened flag seen in the hero cape mission.

Also, I thought he used Energy Melee when not wielding his sword, but I may be mistaken.

Well, every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed mage.

***

With regard to the thread in general, it's nice that someone likes Statesman, and I agree with many things SuperOz has stated (though not all of them). Unfortunately, I don't think a character like Statesman can maintain sympathy from players, or even writers, over the long term in the Broadcast Yourself age.

The first problem arises from the attitudes of players and readers, the audience for Statesman. Statesman represents authority, and many players create characters who are outside of, or even hostile to, chains of authority, making them inherently unsympathetic to him. Most characters who are granted personalities by their players are to at least a slight degree player analogues. Those characters represent, on some level, their players' desires to be free of outwardly imposed dictates and instead pursue their own morality. Unfortunately, as the face of heroism, Statesman has come to represent those imposed moral dictates. Rather than embracing Statesman as a moral ally against "The System" of players' vicarious enemies (the corporate corruption of Crey, the militarism of Praetoria, the diabolism of the Banished Pantheon, etc.), they see him as another part of The System that their characters stand outside. (Interestingly, the Praetorian storyline could be seen as reworking the melodrama of CoH to focus on this tension rather than the good vs. evil one so many players seem to reject. It's for that reason that I can't understand why the players hate Praetoria so much, but that's a different thread.)

Sometimes, this tension manifests as cynicism with regard to the internal story ("Statesman is more bad than a villain because he invades the sovereign Rogue Isles!"), and sometimes it manifests as cynicism with regard to the writing itself ("Statesman is a bad character because the devs are bad writers because they say he's the most powerful hero, and saying someone other than my character is most powerful is dumb!"). Much as I tend to criticize this kind of attitude, even I've used it with regard to Statesman in my CoH stories. It's just a natural impulse in contemporary folks. (For more on distrust of authority in fiction and ways in which in skews perceptions of characters, look around for internet reading group discussions of Paradise Lost. There was one called "The Constant Reader" some years back that had particularly interesting coverage of this point.)

The second problem is similar but caused by Statesman's writers (and developers), not his audience. Players are not the only ones with issues about authority and proclaimed virtue. I'm convinced that some of the writers who've worked on Statesman have used him to work out their own issues with Superman-type characters, to the detriment of Statesman as a character of his own. Mark Waid, much as I like much of his work, seemed to me to be particularly guilty of this, and I see hints of it even in Robin Laws's Freedom Phalanx novel. In fact, the only writer I can think of offhand who didn't use Statesman this way at all is Troy Hickman. "Smoke and Mirrors" presents a Statesman who is sympathetic to the reader because he is, on some level, a writer analogue rather than something the writer is working against. Put much more simply, in that story, Statesman is a sympathetic viewpoint character. But few writers have used him that way, and players have dutifully adopted the more hostile portrayals used by the majority of writers.

There's a third issue, too. City of Heroes is a game, and that medium shapes the structure of its fiction. Many, though certainly not all, players want to "win" that game. They want to overcome every challenge it places in their path, including the challenge of making a character (in the sense of a bundle of electronic data, not in the sense of a character in fiction) as powerful and kitted-out as possible. Though this shouldn't necessarily have any effect on characterization, I think there's some bleed-through between game design and in-game fiction. That is, players not only want to defeat all the enemies on the map; they want the player character who did so to be recognized for making that effort. That is, after a long mission arc, players want to read, "You succeeded, $name! You saved the world! You're the best!", not, "You cleared out the warehouse, and some other guy saved the world! He's the best! But thanks anyway."

With that in mind, it's incredibly difficult to make a character like Statesman appealing. At the most basic level, his role is to be "the most powerful hero." Even though, like any good supporting character, he's far less important to the story than the protagonist (the player character), his power level causes a psychological disconnect for players. The player thinks, "I completed a Master of Lord Recluse Task Force on my fully-loaded Incarnate! My character can flatten anything in the game! So why am I still hearing about Statesman? My character's completed way more game tasks than him!" Essentially, the Achiever personality that lives inside all gamers, to one degree or another, is extending its goal from "I must beat everything and be the best!" to "My character must be acknowledged as the best!" As I implied, this attitude is inherent to the game world. No portrayal of Statesman, no matter how sympathetic or brilliant, can get around it.

Finally, of course, there's the lingering hostility to Jack Emmert that taints Statesman-the-character, due to the (confusing!) practice of assigning real-world people the handles of in-game characters. It doesn't help that Emmert was not good at dealing with fans. Worse, he tended to be perceived as a dictatorial authority on abstractions ... just like Statesman-the-character, as discussed above.

With all those things against him, it almost surprises me that Statesman has survived so long. And it's a testament to the strength of the heroic archetype that he still has fans. Personally, while I still have trouble understanding why the death would be announced in advance, I can't help agreeing with one of the posters above: for me, Statesman has always seemed like one weary immortal. It's nice to know he'll finally get some rest.

I'd like to see Calvin Scott methodically shooting people for not waving enough protest signs while Tyrant's tower burns in the background (after all, this is how I picture Nova Praetoria around level of the PC timeline).

Yet another reason why what I like to refer to as [Transform into Irishman, Possibly Drunken] is the most enjoyable power in the game.

I dunno. That place kinda feels like a "B" to me, you know?

I seem to recall a Praetorian mission where a contact explains why the Praetorians call it "Primal" Earth. It is because it's so savage and primitive from the Praetorian point of view. That is, it's "primal" not in the sense of "primary" but in the sense of Tennyson's "dragons of the prime," i.e., the savage dawn of time.

But I'm not sure that I'm not imagining that Praetorian text blurb entirely.

Further, none of that explains why Primal Earth calls itself that, though personally, I'd forgive any dimension that produced dimensional explorers for considering itself the "prime" one.

Illiterate? Write today for free help!

Will the last person to leave please see that the perpetual light is extinguished?

If you can't hear me, just raise your hand.

(I have a book of these and can go on for hours ...)

Also, thanks to Z. for recapping the "missing" panels.

I base my theory that the new design philosophy of the game is "shiny stuff and one-off purchases to draw in new players; large-group raids to build and ensure customer loyalty" on several things:

1) First, as you note, a variety of new content has been added recently, but the most notable parts have been at the introductory (new Atlas Park/Mercy Island) or even pre-introductory (new costumes and powersets) stages or as an entirely new endgame (all the Incarnate content). To me, that suggests two different target audiences.

2) The only part of the game that requires a subscription is the endgame content. To me, that implies that to the developers, "long-term player commitment=hardcore player=primary interest is large endgame raids." Other new content is accessible piece-by-piece through the market, suggesting to me that the devs view it as "for casual players." (Here, "casual" means "likes the game but doesn't feel the need to play a monthly fee to play.") Basically, the switch from a pure subscription to a subscription/minitransaction model enabled the devs to craft sets of content for different segments of the player population.

3) Other MMO's are characterized by "raiding guilds" and other highly-organized, player-created groups. It isn't hard for me to imagine marketing studies that have determined that such player-created communities make for stronger player commitment to a game in general. As a corollary, the devs are making a new effort to capture the achiever demographic and to build a similar raid community here in hero-land.

4) The devs have stated on these fora a number of times that they want to make sure that they don't create disincentives for players to run trial Leagues.

5) I've said this dozens of times before, yet it still doesn't register with forumites: The devs are game mechanics engineers in their professional identities and "gamers" in their hobby ones. They are not, for the most part, artists, roleplayers, writers, etc. For the most part, the story is there as window dressing for mechanics, not the other way around. This issue has always been present, but it has accelerated over the life of the game, particularly with the changeover from Jack Emmert as lead developer (he had a completely different set of hangups and problems) to the more powergaming, twitch-reflexes, button-mashing, raid-oriented Matt Miller as lead developer. This is a strong, strong impression that I get every time I see Matt Miller speak; if others don't see it, I'm not sure why not.

I'm not sure how to make it any clearer. But the overwhelming impression I get from the redesign of the game over the past several issues is that someone in the development pipeline decided, "The only way to keep a subscriber base and thus keep the game community going is to create a community based on raiding guilds, like other MMO's." That doesn't meant that plenty of other kinds of content haven't been and won't be created. It just indicates to me that the developers believe that the only people who stay with an MMO for the long term are people interested in endgame raiding.

I'm not even saying that endgame raiding is bad (though there are other kinds of content I vastly prefer, personally). I'm simply saying that (1) circumstances have convinced me that the devs believe it's the primary way to sustain a static player community (as opposed to the transient pay-per-content-item Premium players) and that (2) personally, I think that endgame raiding is only one way to build a long-term, static player segment.

I wonder if the increasing tendencies of the player base to overreact to and criticize absolutely every decision made in development and every feature and patch released has anything to do with this. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that player feedback of any kind is given absolutely no weight whatsoever because so much of it is so whiny, unreasonbably demanding, and negative. That is, when players point out something as a real problem, the devs ignore that feedback because everything else they do is greeted by players with the same amount of vitriol.

I have no problem with players reporting major issues, but I (and, I suspect, the devs and community team) am annoyed by the refrain we've heard constantly from the players lately that "the devs are stupid" and "the devs don't care" and "it's all the ebil marketing soots fault lolz." The more you trash the development team and insult them, the less likely they are to value your opinion. Indeed, I suspect that player opinions are now considered the worthless griping of a group of tantrum-prone infants around Paragon Studios. No wonder design decisions aren't based on them.

All of this just exacerbates the existing perceptual chasm between developers and consumers. (For instance, the team believes large-group raids are the foundation of a strong, committed player community, while players seem to focus on other kinds of community-building, such as global chat channels. Similarly, story-focused players are looking for a postmodernist, manga-like story, as well as having an idiosyncratic checklist of pet peeves, while the story team is more interested in telling a political morality tale. These are just examples.) Unlike many players, I recognize that I am not the one creating the game, so I expect to be subjected to the creator's own fixations, interests, and priorities. However, I think it would go a fair ways toward placating the increasingly angry player base if they were told in no uncertain terms that players do not take part in development or set priorities. Mechanisms like betas are designed for mechanical stress testing, not so players can have input on the game's published form. This is a fundamental truth that very, very few people seem to grasp.

Excellent observation. Since it came from someone players respect (respect for his craziness, sure, but it's respect, dangit), maybe someone will finally listen.

I will echo this statement by repeating something I've stated elsewhere: tvtropes may be fun to read, but if one of your rules of fiction is "it can't appear there," then you're going to be constantly disappointed, and your standards are, dare I say, out of whack.