Samuel_Tow

Yeah, kind of puts the Popeye Windup Punch to shame, doesn't it? Not that that's saying much, but DAMN

I haven't finished the arc yet, but there's something... Odd about the Numina pinup on the loading screen. Now, this might sound like open criticism, but I'm just trying to express what throws me off about it. Feel free to correct me on any and all counts.

The first thing I notice is that her face actually looks decent. No O-face in sight. I can respect this greatly. She does have something of a large nose, but that's really not the point. It does seem odd that her lipstick comes FAR below her lower lip almost until it meets her chin, but I don't really know the specifics of female makeup, so maybe that's done to make her lips seem fuller. How DO you put makeup on a ghost, anyway?

I really like her hair. It's both sensual and reserved, which is quite hard to pull off in artwork, but what is that vertical "rim" at the back of her head intended to represent? Is her hair from the left somehow twisted and wrapped over the top of her head and coming down on the right? If that's the case, then why is it as long as her hair on the left? Wouldn't you need a very uneven haircut to pull that off?

The next thing I notice is that her right hand REALLY stands out. I'm not sure what it is, maybe the way the bottom of the palm juts out makes her hand too big for her tiny wrist, or maybe her fingers are a bit too long. I can't quite say. What I CAN say, however, is that her index finger seems unnaturally short, much shorter than her ring finger. Now, I do know that some people's ring finger is longer than their index finger, but I'm not sure if it's usual for it to be longer by THIS much.

I immediately start comparing it to her left hand holding the skull, which appears larger larger than her right, despite being in the foreground. Maybe it's just me, though, I can't be sure. I really have no complaints about the left hand, other than that her index finger feels like it shouldn't be visible, obscured by the skull if she was supposed to have an even spread of her fingers. Certainly it should have been obscured by her middle finger. In fact, if you go by where the picture suggests her index finger knuckle would be, then she has a HUGE gap between her index finger and her thumb, clear on the other side of the skull. Upon reflection, he pinky looks as long as her ring finger on that same left hand.

What really catches my eye even more, though, is... Why does Numina have fingernails on her gloves? And I'm not talking about pointed fingers as though the hands beneath the gloves had long nails, I mean she has actual pink fingernails AN TOP of her gloves. It's like she isn't wearing gloves at all, but instead has her forearms and hands body-painted pink. That can't be right, though, because her right wrist shows fabric wrinkles, and I can't see a reason why she'd paint her hands. They're not very obvious on her right hand, but that has fingernails, too, just not as long as on the left hand. Surprisingly, this reminds me of Wagner's artwork, a little bit.

Then I notice that... Wow, she has large breasts. Not a bad thing. Not a bad thing. I like it. But as I'm looking at them, I start to notice that her right shoulder seems to be very far away from her rib cage. At first I thought it was just because her hair hides part of her neck so things just look off-centre, but that's not it. The middle of her throat goes over her centreline, which her clavicles radiate away from. However, whereas on her left shoulder the clavicle goes over the actual shoulder (which I'm not sure it should, but I don't know enough about anatomy), on her right shoulder the clavicle seems to end a good inch before her shoulder even begins, which is odd considering what the clavicle is supposed to link up with. Now, at first glance it looks like part of the collar bone may be hidden by her hair, but if her right clavicle did go all the way up to her shoulder, it would be much longer than her left one. And, yes, I know her torso is at an angle, but that rotation should have retained the length of her bones. I don't know, it just feels like her right shoulder is jutting way out.

And while I'm looking at her neck and collar bone area, I start to wonder... Is her outfit made of sticky tape on the inside? I though Numina wore sort of a long sleeveless coat, so why am I seeing her clavicle bones through it to begin with? Why is it dipping down into the indentations of her body and between her breasts to begin with? It feels like that coat is made of shopping bag nylon or something equally as thin, while I would have expected a coat to be made of a thicker material, especially with that high collar. I know that in comic books, you essentially draw naked people then trace tights over them, but I honestly thought that Numina wore a coat?

Finally, her eyes. They're pretty, but what is she looking at? At first I thought she was looking at the magical skull she's holding in the "oh Yorick poor Yorick" stance, but no. The way her head is tilted up, the skull is actually below her full forward line of sight, so her eyes would have to dip down in their sockets, but instead they're as far up as they can go without opening the eyelids wider, which makes her gaze actually point straight up into the sky. It almost feels like she's looking at the moon, but that can't be as the moon is in the background. Then I thought she may be looking at something forming from the pink ectoplasm that the skull is evaporating, but it would have to be just out of frame, so... Can that be it?

Also... Where is Numina's back? The panel is sort of leaning towards her back, which makes her look like she's leaning back and holding the skull up in the same fashion that a doctor would look at an x-ray against a ceiling light, but then it occurs to me that I should be able to see part of her back or at lest part of her side below and behind her right arm. The only explanation for why that's invisible that I can think of is if her torso really does end where her coat sleeve suggests it should and that her large breasts just make her torso look much bigger than it is, but that means her right arm is REALLY sticking out.

Finally - and this may be a stupid question to ask, but which set of her teeth are we seeing in her mouth? Looking at where her mouth is in relation to her jaw actually suggests they should be her upper teeth, but then doesn't that make her mouth shifted somewhat high up on her face, or does it just suggest she has a very sturdy lower jaw? Those can't be her lower teeth, as it seems a bit too high on her own skull for it to be them, and it would make her face kind of... Weird if they were. The reason I'm asking is the way her lower lip droops forward and down, we may actually be seeing both rows of teeth where they interlock with each other. That's pure curiosity on my part.

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Again, I don't want to come off as bashing on the artwork. Compared to Tutorial Sister Psyche, Numina is AMAZING. But there are just some things about that pic I can't quite grasp visually. As I said, it's very possible I just don't understand how things should be proportioned and directed, so if you can correct my misconception, I welcome the clarifications.

After listening to so many people complain how expensive the set is, or what numbers it has or what AoE it has and whatever else I missed out on in the last few days, I kind of felt compelled to write a good thing or two about Street Justice. Let me just say that on its own:

I LOVE Street Justice!

I honestly couldn't tell you what it is about the set that gets to me so much. In part, it just looks damn awesome, better than I remember a new set looking in YEARS, but that's not all there is to it. This set actually plays well, too, or at least plays in a way that really motivates me to want to play it. See, most of the time when I play a set, be it new or old, I kind of go through the motions. I know what I'm supposed to do and I'm just shooting for DPS or whatever stat is meaningful at the time. Not with Street Justice. With this one, I have a few attacks that I instinctively sort of WANT to do. It's not really about damage or about utility, or even about looks. Something about some of these attacks just "feels" right.

Now, granted, my one Street Justice Scrapper is only just now reaching level 30, so I don't even have the whole set, but even so, I already have my favourites. I love Spinning Strike both because of its backhand swing, and also because it's just a damn potent power. I love Rib Cracker because it looks so painful and because I kind of learned to rely on it. I even like Shin Breaker, the one attack which looked the most out of place as a heavy damage dealer (especially against things with no legs, like Spectral Demons), I love as it's the PERFECT attack to use on an enemy you just knocked down. I've always wanted a sort of "stomp on downed enemy" attack in City of Heroes and this is essentially it. Score!

The set is damn stylish, but I don't think it suffers in performance, at least not from my experience. I know much was said about its damage numbers and AoE and whatnot, but in my hands, it does about as well as any other set I've tried. Oh, sure, I haven't tested it against Pylons, largely because I don't get ambushed by Pylons in my missions very often, but I'm really not sure how much I'd care about those results one way or the other. The bottom line is the set WORKS. If anything, it's Super Reflexes letting me down, because ancient legacy has banished my AoE defence to level 35. But Street Justice? I can't get enough of the thing.

And that, really, is why I felt the set was awesome enough to talk about - because I can't get enough of it. Cards on the table: I've been playing this game for over seven years, more or less a quarter of my life. I've seen it all, I've done it all and I really haven't been able to find anything to really fire me up in this game. Sure, from time to time I'll make an amazing new concept character and "fall in love," but that's fleeting, in the long run, because I'm still playing the game like a jaded vet.

Not with Street Justice. Playing this set makes me feel like I did when I'd just picked the game up back in 2004. It's exciting, and not just the numbers or the performance or the getting new powers. The whole set itself is just fun to play. Very fun to play. I'm lucky my workplace is undergoing renovations and I'm forcibly off work, or I'd have been SO slacking off these last few days. It's weird, because when I sit down to play, I always feel reluctant. "Man, I don't want to do this any more." But as soon as I fire up the game and plant a knee on some poor schmuck's face, it's instantly the best thing I've ever played. Funny how that works.

I guess it helps that I did, actually, make a pretty cool character to top it all off, or remade, to be precise. A long time ago, I made teenage girl character who dreamt of growing up to be a hero like her parents. Originally, she used Martial Arts - little girl, so she had to be fast and fragile. That's always been kind of "done," though. So when Street Justice came out, I couldn't help but put this kind of amazing, vicious brutality in the hands of a little girl, who went around putting the hurt on big chunky mean bad guys. It's simultaneously cute and amazing to watch, and it's twice as much fun to play. I'm actually thinking of snagging powers from Fighting at some point, just to add even more hurt to the equation.

I can safely say that if that's what Freedom promises to bring in the future, then HELL YEAH I'll pay for it! If Street Justice is this awesome, I dare not try to imagine what Titanic Weapons is going to be like. Oh, my!

Malta helping the Sky Raiders is supposed to make sense since they're trying to have a "minimal presence," but what's funny is... They already do that. By having super-efficient commandos pull off a quiet operation before anyone even knows they're there, they leave a minimal presence. That's exactly what's supposed to happen to that young heroine whose reputation they're supposed to ruin.

Malta helping Maelstrom... Not so much. He's not covert at all, to the point where everyone, both in-fiction and actual players, refers to him as a Praetorian, when he's actually NOT. He's a Primal Earth jerkass who went to Praetoria, shot his best friend and is now working his emo fringe off for Tyrant and his lackeys. You're not doing a good job being covert when you're better known as a Praetorian affiliate than for who you actually are.

OK, granted, Malta spawns have been showing up in Peregrine Island for no real reason since I2, and since I7 they started publishing taunts for heroes in the paper, but we can chalk that off to a just a misunderstanding of who Malta are, like someone learned all hew knows about Malta from coming across them in the streets of PI. However, this is the symptom of a much deeper problem:

City of Heroes no longer has any mystery in it. At one point, the game went out of its way to keep secrets, misdirect players and build up to great reveals. The Cimerorans, the Rikti, the Clockwork, all of these start off looking like one thing on the surface and end up being something completely different when you learn the truth. At some point, however, the game's writers seem to have said "**** it, the players already know everything!" and dispensed with any sort of tension or mystery. Everyone knows who Malta are. Roy Cooling is more than happy to chat about them openly. Everyone knows who Vanessa DeVore is, and she shows up in person just to mess with heroes. Everyone knows Crey is evil so their facilities are fair game for unsanctioned raids. You have to wonder how they get any business.

There's no subtlety in the game any more. Your contacts don't even pretend to need a warrant for you to raid an otherwise legitimate business. You can just show up at a Crey office and start shooting people and it's A-OK because they were probably evil anyway. Malta make TV ads announcing their badassitude because... Well, everyone knows about this super secret world conspiracy already. The Rikti have become chatterboxes, even though they're never supposed to speak, ESPECIALLY with each other.

These days, most enemies are treated as pallet swaps of each other. This one time, I went to save the Faultline dam from my double, who had taken it over with a group of Freakshow. I asked my friend why the Freakshow were helping my double, and he sort of shrugged it of. They're probably for hire. Then my good double shows up helped by a bunch of Warriors. Why? I have no idea, but they're presumably also for hire. You could have easily swapped who shows up with what enemy faction and it would have made as much sense, because the old days when story arcs explored the world and the factions that populated it are long gone. The enemies don't matter. They're just stuff to kill, and one faction is as good as another. All that matters is whatever NPC the writers made up on the spot. The enemies are just obstacles in the way. They're not part of the story, the game just needs enemies in it because it's sort of about fighting, mostly.

I guess that's why some of the newest story arcs try to involve actually fighting actual enemies as little as possible and instead focus on new tech gimmicks, like empty missions that you enter, have a conversation and leave or huge warehouses with all of five people in them with lots of inanimate objects to converse with. The game has this rich, nuanced world that Rick Dakan and the old team built from scratch, but that's boring! Let's have more jabbering Rikti and Freakshow with leet names. Because it's funny.

*edit*
To the game's credit, First War is probably the first place in a LOOONG time that actually seems to have been built with a shred of backstory and with a storyline that had both mystery (enough to keep me playing till 4 AM on a work day because I wanted to know) and exploration of the source material to a significant extent. Sure, it goes a bit batty-nuggets towards the end when it feels like the writers ran out of ideas and started putting in chicken leg women to up the stakes, but even then, it's a consistent story with enemies that behave according to their concept and an interesting plot that doesn't rely so much on gimmick characters (Circe the Sorceress notwithstanding). We'll see if that keeps.

Well, I used to report text errors, way back when. But when you see the same text errors year after year... What's the use? I don't know if the bug reports ever get read, but the text errors simply don't get corrected. I don't think anyone cares any more.

And, seriously, why are text errors so hard to fix, even with precise instructions as to where they are? I've written a few Architect arcs and, of course, had no editor. When players played them, they sent me their final thoughts and pointed out text errors in there, usually half a dozen of more. Within 15 minutes of reading the report, I would have the text errors fixed and the arc submitted for a republish.

I sincerely believe that Paragon Studios need at least one person whose whole entire job is to play through new arcs before they're published, read every line of text and write detailed reports as to what's wrong and where. Said person should also have text error bug reports forwarded directly to his mailbox for him to verify and document. In-between doing that, when no new arcs or bug reports exist to be read, said person's job should be to just play the game and read all the text it supplies.

If that's what it takes to weed these things out of the game, then that's what it takes, because having 7 years of bad spelling and grammar is was funny, then it was sad, then it was funny again and now it's starting to turn sad once more.

See, this is what I was talking about back in the CoT thread - this is the right way to do things. Have a nice costume piece to sell? Sure, sell it. Price it good and I'll buy it. I ha 70 points yesterday and my stipend is being delayed, so I couldn't buy it, but I figured then was as good a time to finally use the Paragon Store and buy some points.

...

Then it turns out Customer Support LIED to me, because I can't buy via card from the store unless I have a "card on file," which I can't have because to have one, PlayNC billing wants to make a $0 withdraw from my card to verify that it exists, and my bank interprets withdraws of NOTHING as an error and denies the transaction because the software doesn't understand. CS "can't do anything about that," but they told me my card on file could be authorised the first time I tried to purchase. It can't.

Luckily, PayPal still works, but it took a while for my points to transfer over, too long for me to wait before going to bed. I'll be buying the Fireman helmet first thing when I log in today.

I honestly have no use for this thing. At all. I'm not sure I ever will. But you know what? It's a good piece and the people who made it deserve to be paid for their work. It's a fair price, it doesn't look rushed and the piece is good. I'm sure I'll need it at some point in the future. I'd like to see more pieces added like this one. Good show, guys.

You can abandon any mission, so there's no real way to fail one. It might seem like you can't, but all you need to do is find another mission, select that as the active one and THEN abandon the one you didn't mean to take. Not all missions can be auto-completed, but as far as I'm aware, all missions can be abandoned.

I tried sending bug reports for text errors. Seven year old typos are still there. Go and read Maria Jenkins' "Ask about this contact" text some time. Her arcs got updated (sometimes), but her description still has the pre-launch shoddy writing, and no-one looked at it. Also, during the Eternal Nemesis arc, Archon Cassady is still referred to as Fieldmarshal Bulech, I think in the mission entry clue. I've reported that. It's still there.

Look, I get the occasional bug, missed trigger, misaligned texture and so on. These are often hard to catch. But obvious mistakes I catch on the first read-through just have no excuse to exist, not in the quantity that they do. Seriously, guys - hire an editor, or at least have someone with a sharper eye read through all of your texts before you greenlight them. And make sure it's someone who hasn't read them before, as you become blind to mistakes once you know the text well enough.

Yeah, it's not a big deal, but it's UGLY. Ugly mistakes like this make the game look very unprofessional, even if it's otherwise very good and very competent. Especially now that we're trying to woo new players, presentation should really be top priority, and ugly typos really detract from that presentation.

Seriously, hire an editor, or at the very least run the mission text through a Beta forum of some sort where a select few people will go specifically to find faults with your writing. Or at the VERY least, don't bin "text error" bug reports before they even reach QA, please.

I looked as far as I could, and the only explanation of how and when Paragon Points are to be given is "400 per month." No mention of subscription plan is made, which is consistent with what we were told in Beta - you get your points on your bill date or what would have been your bill date every month. VIPs will never get their points stipend clumped together on one end of longer billing cycles.

As far as the date breakdown I gave, I was guessing on the exact dates, but the principle remains the same - I fully expect your points reward date to start sliding backwards until it matches your bill date. I inferred that it would be by a day, but that would require 13 months to shift from the 13th all the way back to the 1st for people (like me) who had that. Sliding back two days per month would bring it down to just six months, and doing it three at a time down to just, what... Four?

That's how I've always expected it to happen, which is why I made such a fuss about not getting my points on the 1st of August despite being on a 6-month billing cycle, myself. That's also what I read out of Zwill's announcement. At this point, that's what I'm pretty much convinced is going to happen, and will remain convinced of it until I have reason to believe otherwise, which will be either them launching a better points tutorial or the 13th rolling around and me still not getting my 550 points.

The point, I think, was he made a character who had pistols and could play like a Scrapper. I don't approve, but it's none of my business.