Peripheral

Back on topic:

1. The breadth of character/costume customization from the start. I don't want to deal with bland starter looks or earning the right to wear different clothes.

2. The ability to team without worrying about level or gear. I want to be able to play on my own and team with friends when I feel like it without having to coordinate leveling just to make sure we can still team together effectively. Just put the super-sidekicking system in everything.

I tend toward playlists that suggest a character without ever deciding on a theme song, but I have a few figured out.

Sulphurous - Demon summoner stuck in a body-hopping ersatz reincarnation cycle
Silversun Pickups - The Royal We
(On the rare occasions when he's more in sync with his original self, it switches to selections from Brian Carpenter's Ghost Train Orchestra.)

Spiritwise - Former undercover Syndicate member in the Powers Division, current Primal Earth vigilante
Rotersand - Exterminate Annihilate Destroy
(On a bad day, though the Dalek samples are a bit much. And ideally the Reclubbed version, but that appears not to be on YouTube.)

Ectoplasmic - Cheerful child poltergeist of sorts with memory problems
Explosions in the Sky - Welcome Ghosts and Psapp - Fickle Ghost.

Borderwalker - Is the paranormal investigator half dead or half alive?
Sammy Allen ft. Hypnogaja - I Can See Into Forever
(End theme from the game that inspired her occupation)

Kid Leech/Amelia Stone can burn through energy at a higher rate than usual in order to make herself move at superhuman speeds.

Sapling has the super speed power, but she isn't "super" fast. She does some parkour and is a strong runner, so she generally gets from place to place quickly.

Sulphurous only uses Ninja Run, which represents that she's pretty good at running away.

Secondhand Dreamer teleports using someone's old pocket-sized teleportation device science project that she found in a storage room. It used to overheat regularly, explaining why she sometimes ran out of endurance and fell while porting across zones.

Iceworm also uses a teleportation device, but his worked better from the start.

Borderwalker "teleports" by stepping as far into the spirit world as she can. Distances aren't quite the same, so it's usually faster than walking. She can't maintain it for very long and is never entirely sure she's still aimed at her destination though, so she keeps disappearing and reappearing as she travels.

Hexblaze finds that magically allowing herself to jump higher than normal and land softly is easier than controlling flight.

Street Valkyrie's ability to fly is divinely granted. Ectoplasmic floats around because she's a ghost, and Allekto flies because she has wings.

When in doubt, I go with Natural. I'm more likely to use its attack power anyway, and then I can pick which wand power I want the bonus on. I figure it can stand for what they filled out when they applied for a license, if you want to play it that way, or it can work for most powers like pointed out above. I've used it when the other origins that could technically work for my character had other implications or associations that didn't feel right, too. So if I had a character who didn't know or wasn't telling anyone the origin of their powers, I'd probably pick Natural.

I'm only clear on a few of mine, and some of them I don't play much currently.

Leaden Dove is a lurching mass of shadow, bound into a roughly humanoid shape by chains, ropes, bits of string, and apparently anything that was available.

Spiritwise looks about the same as she does normally, but with ghostly wisps whirling around her and trailing behind, talking, whispering, or screaming just on the edge of hearing. She doesn't seem to notice them.

Borderwalker looks faded and slightly transparent regardless of her current state. She seems disconnected from her surroundings, and from this perspective her interactions with mundane objects seem labored, as if manipulating them and passing through them are equally difficult.

Hexblaze wears a bloodied and torn cloak and robes or her normal clothes, also worse for wear, by turns. She looks weary but determined to drag herself along. A faint second image of herself is superimposed on her, but it doesn't always manage to match her movements.

Street Valkyrie wears her paramedic uniform, but her wings have torn through the back and her armor shows at her neck and hands. She appears to have her official sword and raven-emblazoned shield with her regardless of which set she's actually using or if she's even armed.

Sulphurous is a wiry, skittery young man in his shirtsleeves, still wearing Jane's fine, silver chain necklace. The skin under it is raw. He looks terrified.

1. Yes

2. No

3. Yes

I think my only repeats were Stephen King and William Gibson. Stories about my decidedly unscary child ghost got Kurt Vonnegut and Steven King. A sort of fairy-tale-styled legend I wrote about someone else's character got Lovecraft.

I stuck in a bit of one of Neil Gaiman's "15 Portraits of Despair" and got Stephenie Meyer, though. That kept me snickering for a while.

I agree with AlwaysAPrice. I don't think "Medium" gets much use except to indicate willingness to vary between "lighter" and "heavier" RP. I tend to think of Light as having a very thin or nonexistent IC/OOC barrier and little need to differentiate or establish channels for both, though. Maybe that's something like "Ultra-Light" and "Light" is closer to pickup RP.

Right off the top of my head, I'd like these. Probably in this order, too:

-More female sit emotes. The male model gets a good variety and the female model gets a long list of names for the same few emotes. That should be fixed. The female model doesn't need specifically "feminine" sit emotes either. Just copy over the male ones.

-Another look at some existing emotes. /e sit does odd things to the female spine. It also breaks the front of the male model's waist. Ninja Run deforms the female spine badly while jumping and the legs go up very sharply when running, making the hips/butt area go completely flat.

-Fix the different sit levels. The male model doing the same sit emote as the female model will generally sit on top of an object whereas the female model will sit down into that object.

-Power customization for power pools, including alternate animations for the Medicine pool.

Spoiler space since everyone else is doing it!









Enough people have explained well enough why this isn't a useful survey that I won't go into it. Questions that are obviously skewed make all the data the survey gathers suspect.

Ignoring that, my main complaints were with questions #2 and #10. I wasn't sure what #2 meant and only figured it out once I read the spoilers. While taking the survey I was wondering if the implication was that sneaky art departments add in blood when no one's looking. That said, I didn't think games have gotten more violent, so answering a question assuming I said yes was awkward anyway.

Question #10 bothered me. I'm not sure where the assumption that you can empathize with a character OR realize that the game and the real world don't overlap comes from, but it's not accurate. In my CoH roleplaying experience, I know that maintaining an IC/OOC barrier and occasionally pausing to talk to other players directly doesn't keep me from empathizing with those players' characters. I can empathize with characters in single-player roleplaying games even while considering the effectiveness of the game's conversation modeling. Empathizing with literary or film characters doesn't require me to forget that I'm reading a book or watching a movie. It is possible to enjoy good characterization without forgetting that the characters are fictional.

I think the question was meant to ask if you empathize with characters or are detached while playing a game, but it's hard to tell.

Overall, I agree with others who have said that, if possible, this survey needs to be rewritten and tried again. As it is, I'd be hesistant to accept any conclusions it helps draw.

I think this is a problem with the emote and not the costume piece, so I'm posting it here. If I'm wrong on that, sorry.

Using /e sit on the male model leaves an odd gap between the upper and lower body, as if part of the character's stomach was cut out.

Happy birthday, Roy!

I only tried the Lord Winter event during the preview, so I can't comment on anything else, but I hope there's some changes before the Winter Event begins. Here's my thoughts on the event:

1) I have to agree with the requests to rename Lord Winter. There's plenty of other suggestions, and anything has to be less confusing than giving him the same name as another GM but backward.

2) Please lengthen the timer by a few minutes. I think there were two full teams and some spares when I tried the event, and we were doing pretty well. We were making steady progress even with some people not noticing when LW was intangible. We still ran out of time though. Getting more people than that per run is going to be tricky especially toward the end of the Winter Event, and we can't count on everyone knowing what to do.

3) Please tone down or remove the greyout when LW goes intangible. It did make me stop attacking, but only because I thought something was going wrong with my computer. I think there was a suggestion to use the Hibernate animation a while back. Something like that would be much better.

I already have a ghost named Ectoplasmic. I suppose that counts.

Happy birthday!

I don't understand it either. The official explanation, as far as I can remember, is that they have great lawyers and all evildoing is by rogue agents. That works up until I remember that every time I see a Crey employee on the street, they shoot me. How do they explain away enough "rogue agents" to provide good coverage of a couple zones? And for that matter, what could they legitimately need with snipers all over Founders' Falls?

I can't suspend disbelief quite far enough to explain all of that. I tend to assume that they're evil and known as such to the hero population but that the rest of the populace is either sedated with Crey Cola and other products or that the laywers are supernaturally good. In RP, I try to avoid the whole problem and not discuss Crey workings.