Samuel_Tow

That's not what I saw on Pinnacle. The Nemesis Staff was the same clockwork lollipop it has always been and the Black Wand was the same old evil trident. I'll check out the Blue Wisp pet on Victory, I think I have that on a character there.

Could this be server-specific? Or maybe client-specific?

*edit*
No, still not seeing anything. My Blue Wisp Pet came out as expected, though my Domesticated Giant Rikti Monkey seems to have gotten even bigger, but it's been a while since I've summoned it.

Interestingly, that had the opposite effect on me. Maybe it's a defence mechanism or maybe I'm simply limited in my capacity to care, but after being deluged by such high drama for so long, I ended up just shutting down completely and following the plot on a purely logical level. "You will need a sacrifice" say Vanessa, and my reaction is "What are you talking about?" "You need someone to act as a distraction who's going to die. Noble Savage!" Oh, OK, that makes sense, I guess. Let's get on with it.

I've often said that drama in games needs to be handled carefully, because unlike in real life, in a game people have the option to just stop playing, or as I did, just click through the mission objectives. The point of drama should be to keep people engaged, not to make us feel like we have to distance ourselves from events. Real life drama can't alienate people because people HAVE to deal with it. But when fictional drama gets too heavy, I flip the channel.

That's essentially half of what Praetoria is - ambushes. I'd complain about new content and its over-reliance on ambushes, but this IS Praetoria, after all, where "ambush" appears to be the one-size-fits-all solution to all mission design problems. And if ambushes can't fix your problem, you're clearly not using enough of them.

I will say one thing, though - First Ward is a lot more "hectic" than legacy contain, with always two separate streams of text to read and an objective which spawn one or two different streams of ambushes. And I don't like a hectic game.

Or how about the fact that that's not even remotely what I see?

Or how about the fact that I've seen and made plenty? Or how about the fact that maxing the sliders doesn't make believable large characters so much as grotesque bloated puppets? Why do you think we're here complaining about how the sliders worked if we thought they worked fine and had no qualms about maxing them out?

Considering how poorly it's implemented? More often than I'd expect.

Which tools, specifically? A muscle slider that doesn't work for women? The tools aren't being used as often as you appear to believe they should be because they don't really work very well. But you can't fix them at this point because people who've already made characters in the current system won't want to lose their body shape.

That puts your observations of sliders much more in perspective. You're apparently a very poor judge of sliders. Most of those characters have the legs slider either all the way to the right or close to it, many of them have the shoulders and waist slider quite a ways up and nearly all of them have the hips slider either all the way up or all the way down, depending on the position of the other sliders. When your female has a very high level of "muscle" slider, it makes her butt disproportionate, hence why a lower hips slider helps counter-balance that. A high muscle slider also makes the waist out of proportion, which is why a thick waist is also necessary.

Also, the pictures I posted, I posted specifically because those were intentionally revealing cheesecakes I used as examples of why I'm not qualified to talk about feminism. I picked them exactly because they were the PROBLEM, not because they were the SOLUTION. If we're talking about character sliders, though, then fine:

Tyler: Almost all sliders almost all the way up.

Pandala: Nearly max physique, shoulders, waist and hips, nearly minimum legs.

Isabella: Nearly maximal height, nearly maximal physique, waist, hips and shoulders, nearly minimum legs, I think.

Mary-Beth: Close to maximal height, physique, shoulders, waist, hips and leg slider.

Jack: Huge model, 3/4 height, heavy physique, wide shoulders, large waist, long legs.

Blige: Almost max height, almost max physique, wide shoulders, short legs, wide waist.

Sphyra: In her monster form, she's nearly max height, nearly max physique, with wide shoulders, long legs and a wide waist.

Brutticus: Non-edited, almost max height, almost max physique, wide shoulders, wise waist, long legs, wide hips. Nearly max everything.

Duriel: About 3/4 height, about 3/4 physique, wide shoulders, wide waist, wide hips, short legs, giant wings.

Shaffakoom: Huge model, 3/4 height, almost max physique, chest, waist, shoulders, very short legs.

Cheryl: Tiny little girl, almost minimal height, minimal physique, narrow shoulders and hips, short legs but wide waist.

Xanta: Non-edited. MAX height, nearly max everything else except for narrow hips.

Herald of Light: About 3/4 tall, high sliders for everything.

Do you need me to post any more?

I've been doing this for around four or five years, and that's more or less precisely the responses I've been getting. Several of the people to whom I've shown some of these characters have gone on to make replicas of their own, and one person in particular asked me if I could share the texture swap which produced the muscular pic. Every time I post my edited pictures of Xanta and Brutticus - or at least every time before everyone remembered them by heart - I used to cause a flurry of discussion and requests for adding muscular textures like mine, as well as almost always at least one PM of people asking me how they can do this.

It's easy to dismiss people's affinity for these concepts when you have nothing to provoke it, but over the years, I've seen plenty of interest for the large and exaggerated characters that I create. I know it exists because I've seen it.

And I'll stick to insisting that "it's like that in comic books" is a poor excuse for not including a wider array of character designs, specifically when it's not actually like that in comic books as often as people claim.

Then you need to pay more attention. That's all I got. These exist. I've made them. I know of plenty of other people who've made them. I run into them in-game every day, I see them posted around the forums every day. All you have is anecdotes, and if you'll be using anecdotes, then so can I, because what I've seen is nothing even remotely like what you're saying.

*edit*
To add insult to injury, for half the female characters I posted, it's not really at all evident that they have the muscle slider all the way up, because they don't look muscular. Here's your reason for why more people don't use it: It doesn't bloody work.

That's mostly because our existing female model doesn't scale up even remotely correctly. Higher "muscle" slider values simply make the breasts significantly bigger, the pelvis significantly plumper and the thighs significantly thicker, but it affects the upper and lower arms very slightly, the waist almost not at all and does not affect hand and foot size in the slightest, or if it does I can't see it. Making female character with a higher "muscle" slider value just ends up making them more Rubenesque unless you REALLY know what you're doing and compensate for it with the right costume details supplemented. It's something I might even go as far as to call an "art" just because I've had to battle with this shortcoming for quite literally seven years.

You don't see more "large" women in City of Heroes because the model just looks bugged and distorted when you try to make them. The few of us who have them do so despite the limitations while simultaneously exploiting numerous loopholes in both costume selection and human perception to make something that doesn't look like a newspaper caricature. The basic reason we keep asking for a "Huge Female" model isn't because we want women to become much bigger than they are, but rather because we want women to become bigger in a less distorted, much more believable and aesthetically-pleasing way.

Saying you don't see very many large female characters is like saying you didn't see many animal characters before the animal pack as a means to argue against it (which people did). Well... Yeah, obviously, when the parts aren't there to make decent animal characters, you won't really see all that many. Since it came out, however, I've seen more than a few. I ran into one just yesterday, in fact - a minotaur warrior akin to what you see in Cimerora.

"The general concept" is whose concept of character design? Yours? What we believe "the community" believes? Because it certainly isn't mine. I don't like the comic book aesthetic. I never have. That's why I'm playing this game and not one of the numerous other comic book games - because this one doesn't force that comic book aesthetic down my throat.

As a point of fact, "when in Rome, do like the Romans" is probably the most repulsive ideology to my senses, and I don't say this as a putdown, but more to provide context. For a game to assume that I'm going to prefer to follow someone else's aesthetic sense blindly because that's what I'm supposed to do is offensive to my senses. I imagine this must be how sexism feels to those directly impacted by it, but there are few things in fiction that insult me more than when a game believes it knows what I want better than I do.

"It's like this in comic books" just never held water with me. I've never seen it as a reason so much as an excuse. It's OK to be sexist towards female characters because it's like that in comic books. After all, there women exist to be kidnapped and tied up in bondage gear, so why should a game ostensibly based around comic books have a more progressive view of gender roles, and indeed of physical body shapes? Only that's not always how it is in comic books, and even if it were, that's no excuse for why we should copy an unambiguously BAD thing. Someone once said that City of Heroes doesn't need to restrict itself from doing something until Marvel or DC put it in a book and publish it, and I've always like that way of presenting things.

To summarise, I have no problem with the game expanding to include other people's concepts that I don't necessarily like. At best I'll try them and find I liked them all along, at worst I don't lose anything by it. What I CANNOT support is the notion that some people's concepts should expressly NOT be accounted for because "it's like that in comic books." If I ever had to go to ancient Rome, I'd make sure to pack a machine gun, a jet pack and a flack jacket.

It is terrible, actually. I'm never one to question people's opinions and desires - to each their own. So if you like your girls to be weak and your men to be strong, then hey, more power to you. I've honestly never had a problem with anything a player creates. Even if I am violently opposed to the idea, I can always just avoid said character. But if you yourself are disappointed in your own attitude, then the onus is on you to change it. If you want to, you can, and I know this for a fact both from personal experience and from people I know.

I'm not saying you NEED to change what you like, quite the opposite, in fact - denying what appeals to you and trying to substitute it with what you believe should appeal to you but doesn't is extremely damaging to a person's psyche. I happen to know this for a fact, as well. As I said - if that's what you like, then don't be ashamed of it. Go for it, do what feels natural to you and have fun. It's why we're all here, at the end of the day. But just try not to use your own bias as an argument against other people's biases. Now THAT is terrible.

Then I present you with DC's Forrager straight out of Countdown (whom Linkara referred to as "the bug lady" which is what she is) and Image Comics' own Horridus out of The Savage Dragon, I believe.

Also, I want to point out what I feel is a cataclysmic misconception here: Yes, these women have "some form of pleasing shape" to them. Were you under the impression we were asking for concepts that we, as their creators, found ungainly? Did I come off as asking to be able to make something I hate? Because that couldn't be farther from the truth. Everything I've asked for has "some form of pleasing shape," it's just pleasing TO ME. I happen to find the shampoo commercial model body shape to be actually quite ungainly when a woman possessing this shape is given a battle axe and sent out to fight sobi mask thugs in her super high heels and protective bra and panties.

To me, "some form of a pleasing shape" is the shape of a character who looks like she can conceivably do the things she's doing and who looks like she could actually do them well and more than once. Obviously, characters who don't look like their powers are popular, as well, and I have a few of those, but merely by factor of omission, I like female characters who actually DO look like they could fight a dude without snapping at the waist like a dry pretzel. I like those because you don't see them every day, and I like esoteric, rare, unusual stuff.

I don't know if it's sexism, objectivism or what have you, and I don't want to condemn society for having the ingrained ideas of what men and women should be that they do. People will be people. What I WILL condemn society for, however, is stamping out any errant thought. "I don't like this" is not an argument against the existence of "this," nor should it ever be permitted to be one. I don't like green eggs and ham, but that doesn't mean such shouldn't exist, just that if such did, I wouldn't want any.

To swing this back around to feminism, let me ask the women in the audience: If every man on the planet were a horrible sexist pig, but always kept his thoughts to himself and never judged what you chose to be and present yourself as, wouldn't that count as a step up from what we have now? Is it, in other words, important to change people's minds at their core, or is it enough to legitimise our own choices and opinions? Because to me, a "live and let live" policy would be very much enough in pretty much any situation, because I never really mind what people THINK, only what they SAY and DO.

I disagree. Every time we log into City of Heroes, we accept the game's EULA. Issues of how legally binding it is aside, that means we are subject to the game's rules of conduct. Make an offensive character and you get your name and your costume taken away. Do it too many times and you lose your account. And at no point can we say "Well, the game let me do it, so I should be allowed to keep it!" because that's just now how the game works. It's our own responsibility to create characters in good taste.

I think the problem you're hinting at, but not directly stating is quite different from our "responsibility" as players. In fact, the above quote and the following sum it up quite nicely:

City of Heroes will never become a City of Furries or City of Fat Girls or City of Anything Singular. Seven years of gameplay have proven that these fads don't hold. But even if it did: So what? What does my playing an animal character even matter for another person wanting to rip off the Blue Beetle? We have a responsibility to keep within the boundaries of the rules and the boundaries of the law, but we don't have a responsibility, and should never have that, to keep THIS game restricted to any one subset of themes. In another game with a much more stringently-defined aesthetic, I could get that. In a Fantasy game, US Marines are out of place. In a realistic shooter, anime cats have no place. In a space opera, there's rarely a place for medieval beggars. But in THIS game? We could have an entire scientific study on exactly WHAT the theme of City of Heroes actually is, and even after that's done we will still have no earthly clue what the game is supposed to be about.

Sure, you can say "comic books," but then what ARE comic books "about?" Ridiculous stories of people juggling planets? Dark philosophical quandaries? Political intrigue? Furry animals? Are we talking DC or Marvel, or even Image? Are even talking American comic books at all? What about cartoons based on comic books? What about the broader range of general cartoons and live action movies? With Marvel making so many, even that boundary doesn't exist? What about those Star Trek comics? How about Archie Meets the Punisher?

Why should it be seen as anyone's responsibility, be they developer or player, to restrict the game to any subset of themes when the game doesn't HAVE a subset of themes it's restricted to as a general thing? Why should some themes be seen as so dangerous to the game that having a large number of people explore them could cause the game to "die?" So what if we turn into City of Fat Girls? If I don't want to make fat girls, then other players making them doesn't force me to make them in turn. If I don't like the character type, I don't make it. And even if we assume that all player characters suddenly turn into fat girls, the canon NPCs will still be the same as they have always been.

Even in the worst possible scenario of irrational group think, there's still room for errant thought. And this scenario itself will never be. People come here to play what they like, not what others are playing. Nothing ever at all done to the game short of tying Incarnate powers to Incarnate costume pieces is going to get people to make characters they don't like and actually play them. The larger your player base - and I believe the point of Freedom was to get more people - the less power fads hold, because more people are simply harder to sway. Sure, every new costume pack will generate a wave of people using and abusing them, but that never lasts more than a week before people stop experimenting and return to what they like, and only those who genuinely loved the pack will keep using and abusing it. I love the IDF pack and will probably use those boots on a third of my character roster, but how long do you expect to keep seeing full IDF/Defence combos before they start dying out?

Certain pieces keep recurring, of course, like the Clockwork chest, but they recur for a reason - they're the only really good item in a category that is very poorly represented. This, to me, is not the sign of some damaging copycat epidemic. On the contrary, it's a good thing - it means people like this costume piece and would pay for more pieces like it. Does it really make any sense to refuse to develop more for fear of the game dying if too many people are using big bulky chest pieces? Can we honestly be afraid of City of Chest Pieces?

But, fine. Let's throw caution to the wind and suppose that the over-abundance of a specific theme could endure. What does it say about us as a community when we can so much as suggest that "fat girls" could bring about the death of the game? What does it say about us if we can consider a female body shape not consistent with Emma Frost to be so dangerous to the game that it could kill it if it were allowed to propagate? Do you see where "feminism" (and I say this in quotes since I don't know what I'm talking about) comes in?

I get that some people don't want to play fat women or large women or tall women or women who don't wear high heels. I get that, believe me, I do, and I see nothing wrong with it. If you paid for the right to make characters, you should be allowed to make whatever you damn please so long as it's not illegal or against the rules. What I don't get is how a broader representation of female body shapes can be considered to be damaging to the game even in a hypothetical example. Seriously, why?

I don't mean to insult you, Kitsune. I know that's not what you meant, and I apologise if I come off as way more harsh than I should. But the sort of mentality that you bring up - and I have seen it exhibited by actual people - just hurts my brain. It smacks of school children ostracising the fat girl because they don't want the other kids to see them together. This kind of fear, especially directed to body shapes that many, many actual real people have, is something that I find outright insulting, and I'm not even one of the people who get written out of society like that. Are we, as basic people, so unsure of our own mental self-image that the mere existence of quote-unquote "unattractive people" threatens us so much?

Really, it's not just people who HAVE these body shapes who are being sidelined here, but people who LIKE them, as well. I mentioned "Rubenesque" before, and that's an aesthetic that many find beautiful, yet by comic book standards would count as fat, and therefore ugly. So what are people who like that to think? Or, even more directly, I like the look of muscular women for a variety of reasons. What am I to think when I'm repeatedly told that big women would kill the game?

If there's one belief I hold about City of Heroes more than any other, is that no theme which isn't illegal or against the rules is out of place here, and the more themes that we cover, the better. The broader the choice of what we can create, the more appealing the game will be to the more people. This requires art time and money, of course, but before that it requires tolerance - we need to be tolerant of each other's likes and preferences, and we need to be tolerant of things we don't necessarily like. So long as every player is free to NOT make and team with characters he or she dislikes, then really, we shouldn't have any claim over what other people do with their time, money and characters beyond that.

I honestly don't know enough about "feminism" to speak on the subject, but I know this much: I have never had the desire to fix people's ideas, perceptions or beliefs. That's simply not necessary. What I've always wanted to fix - if I ever wanted to fix anything at all - is the way people actually treat each other. So long as we can stop bullying players who happen to have "unpopular" fantasies and ostracising them as errant weirdos, then really, that's job done. So long as people are allowed to play the characters they like, then really, other people's opinions no longer matter, not unless they are specifically requested, and THAT is this game's strongest point, at least in my eyes.

Last, but not least:

Isn't that the same thing, though? City of Heroes has a fictional universe that is - as far as I can tell - completely unrestricted. For this reason, it will never be diverse enough to account for all people, or even all likes of even just the current players. When the goal is infinity, you can never succeed, but the art team have done a pretty dang good job of going most of the way there. It's merely a question of time and opportunity to add more diversity and enable more of the game's potential.

That is, provided we don't have a violent dislike of specific themes, but I personally don't believe there are any which are legal which deserve anything even remotely like "violent dislike."

Saint Justice? I love it!

So... Justice Fighting? Fighting Justice? What were we taking about?

This is probably the only time I'm going to say this, but right now I'd rather have Saint Justice than power customization. Saint Justice is DONE. It's been done for a month. There's nothing left to do on it. The only reason we don't have it yet is because some soulless corporate executive decided to delay it for marketing reasons.

Saint Justice can't wait, because there's no functional reason for it to wait other than stalling tactics.

That makes sense. When you open your LFT window, you don't see a Sewer Trial, you see Death From Below. It makes sense to call it what it's called in the menu where people who haven't run it before will have to find it to join it.

I can't speak for other people, but purely for myself: You cannot create decent artwork without a specific artistic style, and the one City of Heroes has gone with is a largely realistic one that's still quite a bit shy of being photo-realistic, with a large selection of absurd and sometimes even cartoony imagery. I think this is just about the perfect style to go with for this kind of source material, as it makes the mundane look realistic while still leaving room for the unusual to look beyond bizarre if that's what it calls for. This is where I've found other super hero games, both MMO and otherwise, to fail - even at their most reserved, they still look outlandish and cartoony, whereas City of Heroes actually can look like a realistic, believable setting one moment and an absurd fever dream fantasy the next.

I don't believe having a specific artistic style is the problem, especially not THIS style which is about the most inclusive I can imagine. The problem, as I see it, isn't that players have some kind of profound disagreement with the art team as to what we should all look for so much as the art team has finite resources when it comes to what to make and the character models are limited in the body shapes they can represent. The problem, as you say, is simply to identify where the pool of applicable concepts can be most easily expanded and push in that direction with one hand while developing new tech to expand in previously impossible directions with the other.

I believe David and his team have thus far proven that they are neither sexist nor fools and have, in fact, proven themselves to be both very accommodating to our ideas and ingenious in overcoming the technical and artistic challenges required to implement them. The problem, therefore, is not the art team or their "vision" so much as simple basic resources, and that's a problem I "get." Priorities... Those I don't always get, but that's more a business problem than an artistic one, and even low-priority items are still kept on the agenda. Nah, the problem as I see it is simply identifying where else we can expand and doing it.

I don't believe the game needs to be "more generic" than it already is. Purely as a hypothetical situation, if City of Heroes used a much more specific, much more particular art style, say something like Blade and Soul, then I'd argue that the game needs to be more generic, but the art style we have now really isn't a problem. Sure, some sets are quire specific, like the Ascension and Celestial pieces, to some degree the Enforcer pieces, but then you have plenty of pieces that are pretty generic - basic tights, common street clothes, run-of-the-mill power armour. If you want to make a style-heavy character, you can. I have. If you want to make a stylised simple design, you can make that, too, and again - I have. We don't need a style that's even MORE generic than that simply because we'll start losing our more interesting looks.

As to whether that's more of a "feminism" problem? Well, at the risk of making me sound even more sexist... No, not to my eyes. Don't get me wrong, the sexual objectification of women in this game is harsh and producing such that aren't sexualised takes some doing, but I see that as just one of a whole range of stylistic limitations the game faces. To me, the overfocus on the underwear model physique for women, excluding those of a larger body mass and stronger build, is just as bad as the game's focus on tech and tights, excluding more Fantasy or magical looks, or the game's story's reliance on our characters being human and having knuckles and hair, often excluding the more off-the-wall creations. Sexual objectification is bad, obviously, but the biggest problem I see it as in this game is it limits our ability to make anything else.

I don't say these things to devalue the legitimacy or importance of feminism in real life, and again - I'm in no position to argue for or against it since I just don't know enough on the subject. I would imagine, however, that empowering players to make a wider diversity of female characters than shampoo commercials will have you believe exist in real life should be an unambiguously good thing in every way, both in-game and as a higher ideal.

I don't like the way you dismiss the whole issue for everybody just because it's not an issue to you based on community observations you have no way to make with nearly the comprehensive certainty that you exhibit. Please stop stating your opinion as universal fact.

That's assuming comic books are nothing bug explosions and flying cars, which even someone as poorly-read on the subject can tell you they're not. Comic books are about fantasy with a lower-case F, but what that fantasy is depends on the person fantasising. Some dream about being ridiculously buff, some dream about being very smart, some dream about having a stable family and some dream about their fat *** and beer gut being the latest fashion statement.

"Fantasy" is not the opposite of reality. It's an exaggeration of it, but it's not an exaggeration in any one single direction.

Firs of all, not all characters have the physical ability to BE in shape. Currently, I'm playing the ghost of a Roman soldier who possessed an empty suit of medieval armour. He is a ghost, he has no body, therefore he cannot be in shape. Before that, I played a woman whose body was almost entirely made up of cybernetic implants. Those aren't design to get into shape, because they simply don't work that way. Before that, I played an alien born on Earth whose physiology was not even remotely human by a long shot, therefore he couldn't get into shape. Once Titanic Weapons arrive to the game, I will be playing an ancient automaton from the beginning of time whose body is made of unknown materials and driven by the power of a star. She cannot get in shape because it takes the heat and pressure inside a star to alter her shape even in the slightest.

You confuse diversity with realism, and in the end do more to promote a very limiting kind of realism to a game that doesn't really need to have it. You speak of getting in shape and weight problems that are more or less specific to the human biology where half the canon characters don't even have that. Numina is dead, Positron didn't have a body for the longest time, Bastion is a robot, as is Luminari, the Clock King is a psychic trash robot, Dr. Vahz is a stitched-together pile of corpses, the Nemesis is an automaton with a human brain (maybe), Nosferatu is some kind of mutated monster and so on.

This isn't about realism, it's about diversity, and if that diversity is inspired by real life, then that's just as legitimate.

I have to challenge you on "better written" considering that new content managed to piss me off worse than I remember the game ever getting me angry in years. As for "neat mechanics," what you see as neat I see as pointless and distracting, an obstacle keeping me from doing what I really want to do, which is beat up some dudes. That's what the game boils down because that, in and of itself, is just a fun thing to do.

Aesthetic squabbles aside, who does it hurt if I'm still able to run the game's old contacts? They may not be good, but if I chose to do them, why judge their quality for me?

Off topic, but:

You can actually make thumbnail links here by simply listing your smaller picture enclosed in IMG tags as the text portion in the larger URL tag, with the actual link directing to whatever you have in its link tag. I'm not sure if that would have worked for you in this case, but I just wanted to go ahead and say that.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the subject, though. Granted, we've had some weird tangents that didn't have too much to do with it anyway, but your point seems to be "there can be no thread because there's nothing that can be discussed." I disagree. City of Heroes isn't the first game or medium to offer its players anonymity or the ability to express themselves in any shape they want. Second Life is still better in this particular regard. But criticising City of Heroes was never my intent, and improving the costume creator is only a tangential benefit of discussing these issues. It's a big god damn benefit, mind you, I'm not denying that, but it's still tangential to the point.

More, my point was "What actually IS the problem?" And there IS a problem, of that there is no doubt. Something, somewhere, somehow is causing a division and is causing these issues to recur. As a point of fact, we saw them very recently. Something's going on, and I'm interested in discussing what that might be. As I said before - I'm really not looking for a solution so much as I'm looking to understand the problem. WHY do some people feel the game's portrayal of specific concepts is bad? WHY do some consider that the attitudes towards certain concepts are unfair? Are they? Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but I'm more interested in knowing why we feel as we do than I am in knowing whether we're right to feel this way. I'm not looking for objective truths, I'm looking for subjective impressions.

You say you can't think of a better environment in terms of a solution to the situations posited. What situation is that? What solution are we looking to apply? How do you even define this environment? Speaking in general terms is easy, and it is therefore just not very informative. And I'm not saying these things to pick a quarrel. I'm saying these things because I can bet you real money that "the situation poised" appears to be different to each person observing and participating. The reason I don't want to start an argument here is because none of us really know what we're arguing ABOUT. What is the situation? Is it sexism? Is it feminism? Is it objectification? Is it corporate greed? Is it misguided creativity? Is it benefactor leniency? Is it pure bad taste? Is it stupid people? What, really, is "it?"

If I knew the right question to ask, I wouldn't need to ask it, because its answer would be obvious. That's why I end up making a complete dunce of myself by asking questions without really knowing what it is I'm trying to discover. That's why I feel a discussion is more beneficial than trying to divine solutions to problems we don't even fully understand.

Yes, City of Heroes is an inclusive environment. To a point. In terms of the actual game and more specifically the costume designer, the great diversity is greatly inclusive, but that doesn't mean there isn't a world more to ask for. In terms of community, most people are greatly accepting of most differing lifestyles and preferences, but I've seen prejudice and stamping out of ideas to know this isn't an isolated event. To avoid controversial examples, let's look at something simple - American comic books vs. broad-range Fantasy. Almost every time Fantasy elements are added to the game, invariably people will show up to make arguments as to how they shouldn't be added, expressly because they don't belong in the game's thematic. If our community were truly so open and accepting as to not so much as merit a discussion, these instances wouldn't happen, and yet they continue to occur on practically every opportunity. Dual Blades, the new Circle of Thorns, Walk, Titanic Weapons and on and on. It happens, and if it happens, there must be a reason for it.

Our game might be a shining example of an open-minded environment, but this doesn't make it perfect. Certain aspects of it are imperfect because time hasn't permitted for them to be perfected yet. Certain aspects of it are imperfect - or more specifically omitted - because they are seen by some to "not belong." Our community, too, is a shining example of cool, level-headed, open-minded people, and I'm proud to be part of it. But our community, too, is not perfect, sometimes by misunderstanding, other times by disagreement. There are still things to be said on both the subject of game and community, and they're not limited to JUST feminism, though that's a big part of it.

I originally linked to MovieBob's Big Picture not so much because I found someone who supported feminism (I think he did, but I'm not sure), but rather because he had found a unique way to phrase the problem and put it into a context that I never even suspected existed. That revelation inspired me to look for other similar ones in other similar topics, hence why we are here. Can we, actually, put other notoriously amorphous problems in such concrete terms that can be discussed objectively? Because it's this discussion that I feel is and has been truly enlightening, whether or not it actually conjures up a solution. So long as I leave with a better understanding and a better idea of how to put the problem into words, I consider that a success.

Earlier, someone (I forget who it was, but it was a redname) said that they priced all legacy Booster Pack costume sets at 400 Paragon Points for consistency, I assume with their respective Boosters, even though the "savings" wasn't consistent between them. Some offered a saving of only a few cents, some offered a saving of a few dollars.

While this is a good idea in principle, tying yourself down to a set price with variable levels of content creates just these problems - you end up charging way too much for some things but are still unable to lower the price because then you'd be charging way too little for others.

Far as I'm concerned, Costume Set Bundles should offer a set percentage discount and the bundles themselves should be priced by whatever the sum total price of all separate costume pieces is. Sure, it might produce some steeper costs, but it's not like those costs aren't real right now if you go through the editor and buy them piece by piece.

That's a tangent I forgot to pick up on

A few years ago, I met a curious Dutch woman when I was in the UK. One interesting thing she pointed out to me about the way I speak with people is that I don't actually look at people when I speak and rarely do when I listen. At first she wondered if there was something distracting me in the scenery around, before telling me about this a curiosity.

In short, I don't look at people's faces much. I look at their faces enough to know who they are, and I do have a very strong memory for faces, as well as a fairly strong sense of facial expressions, but people's faces aren't really all that interesting unless they animate, and most people's faces never animate either when they speak or when they listen. Sure, people like the Spoony One and The Cinema snob have very expressive faces even when they're not acting for the camera, but they're the exception, rather than the rule. For most other people, it's enough to track for motion and look at their faces when something changes.

Besides, trying to talk AND look is taxing on my brain That's why typing is so easy.

Yeah, I agree. I was so happy when Tights Sleek was added to Big and Banded boots and gloves that I... Wait, is my nose getting longer?

I'm not sure what pattern you're seeing in other people's costumes, but after a long time of keeping an eye on the Best Costume Designs thread, I've seen a great breadth and depth of character appearances that really isn't nearly as limited as you appear to suggest. People make all kinds of weird things, from robots to aliens to plant people to living insects and beyond. The game promotes diversity, and diversity is what I, personally, have seen.

Will more esoteric costume creator additions earn the studio loads of new players? Probably not, but at this point I doubt there's anything that will. However, what more esoteric costume creator additions will earn the studio is more new characters per player, and each new character a player likes is one more anchor to keep said player playing THIS game. After all, I play the game without a shadow of regret even without these many pieces I'm asking for. Had I the pieces, however, I would use them to make new characters or upgrade old ones and thus gain new respect for both the game and the studio, and the more I respect the game, the more money I want to pour into it.

At the end of the day, how many new players an addition will bring and how much it will cost aren't issues we have any real outlook over as players, not unless Arcana wants to pitch in on this particular side of the conversation. That's even more true when you consider that over-saturating a particular character theme with too many options tends to start having diminishing returns on player satisfaction. Honestly, if we got another tech texture to add to the dozen tech textures we already have, how many players will that gain us? How much point is there to doing this anyway?

The broader question here isn't player numbers, not in terms of what we can discuss, but rather the merit of creating new themes vs. supplementing old themes. As in all things, the answer is somewhere in-between the extremes, but I can say this with a great degree of certainty - if you give players greater freedom, players WILL exploit it. Maybe not immediately, but they will.

Precisely. This is something that right pissed me off in First Ward most recently. I wanted to know what was going on, but I just couldn't read fast enough. Why? Well, I was seeing caption text in two yellow boxes, caption text in two red boxes and four speech bubbles on-screen at the same time, all the while I was fighting for my life. I can't read that fast. I don't know anyone who could. Moreover, I don't know anyone who can read that fast while multi-tasking between reading and playing what is a fairly complex game. I cannot keep up.

Both Graves and Twinshot have the same problem. Twinshot, in particular, likes to show me a large dialogue window with three paragraphs of text on it while two characters converse with each other in fast-forward speech bubbles on top of what I'm trying to read. This is not a good thing, writers. I can't appreciate your writing if I am physically unable to read it. Oh, sure, I can go back and re-read it in my special tab that I made for this which most other people don't have, but guess what: Captions don't have names attached to them, so when you have three separate voices talking to me in captions, I can't tell who's speaking when I review the dialogue later.

I, too, am guilty of being overly verbose in my Architect writing, always exceeding my character caps on all text boxes I use. But I put those walls of text in clues and briefings where the player can read them at his leisure. When I make actual in-game encounters, I try to keep any text on-screen restricted to no more than two text boxes at a time, with ideally no more than one text box on-screen at any given time. I tried making bosses with chat on every health level, and it quickly transpired that this caused them to spam people with chat when they were defeated too fast. These days, I'll only ever give them an initial response line and an on-defeat line, and sometimes not even that. If you can't ensure that an enemy won't lose enough health to trigger the next line of dialogue AT LEAST 10 seconds after the first one has appeared, then you have too much dialogue.

I used to make combat and hostage objectives have both an idle text string and an aggroed text string. Because of how the game works, oftentimes they ended up spitting both dialogue types at the same time when you aggroed them. My solution was to take out the aggro dialogue and stick to just idle dialogue. When a hostage needs rescue, that hostage can say something when idle and have his guards respond, say something when aggroed and have his guards respond and then say something when rescued. Just because that hostage CAN say all of these things doesn't mean he SHOULD.

Never put more text in your game than people can be expected to read. Never be afraid to have an encounter in which people don't talk. Banter in battle may have been the stable of Adam West's Batman, but people engaged in a fight for their lives don't always blather on endlessly. Giving every NPC a motor mouth doesn't make the game more engaging and immersive. On the contrary, it serves to ruin our immersion because it feels like every mission is populated with nothing but Jar Jar Binks.

That's just it - I raised hell about the Barbarian set being too small and excluding too much stuff, but when I saw what was actually in the set I was gobsmacked. The Barbarian set has A TON of stuff, much of it unique to the set and much of it opening new possibilities. The male loin cloth unprecedented, the arm rings are a whole new ball game and even the female fur-trimmed skirts are brand new stuff. Most of that set brings with it brand new themes. I was wrong about the Barbarian set - it had more than enough stuff in it, and it was well worth the 400 points I spent on it. Hell, I feel it was worth even more and like a cheated the studio by paying just 400 points. I would have easily paid 800 points for the Barbarian set without a second thought.

The CoT set isn't even a shadow of the Barbarian one. It's small, it's samey and it's missing too much stuff for too many people. It's not BAD, in the sense that if I had those options, I'd use them. However, it doesn't bring nearly enough to the table to be worth it as a bundle, not by a longshot. A lot of what it has, good though it may be, is "like" a lot of what we already have, and the couple of pieces that are worth in it aren't worth 400 points without my good will, and I lost my good will when I saw what was in that set.

CoT is not a bad set. It's just too small to be called "a set." This either should have been held back, or it should have been announced at Part 1 of a larger set to come later. Because, as you say, even Matt Miller doesn't seem to know what's going on, and if even he isn't up to speed, a second CoT set was never in the cards to begin with. And that's just bad.

That's what I'm saying - the pack isn't BAD, it's just not worthy of being called a pack. It's not enough. All of the pieces have their uses, I'm sure, but none of the pieces are SO good as to make the pack worth it, and I honestly don't want to see these half-finsihed packs again. Not if "clipping" is going to be the excuse and not unless we're promised that the rest will come in as later additions.

I meant it more in the sense that they're not all THAT terribly different from what we already have. Sure, they have their uses, but are they worth buying the whole pack? No, not really. Are they worth buying in pieces? Eh, probably, but not immediately as they come out.

That's my point - I WANTED to buy the pack just because I wanted to buy the pack, but I disagree with the policy behind the pack. I'm no longer going to buy these things in good faith.

The "beer gut" is one of those things I was referring to when I talked about "broadening horizons." From kids, we're conditioned to believe that being fat is bad and being thin is good, so why would we want to make a fat guy? Well... Why do we make hideous scarred villains? Why do we make tragic deformed heroes? Why do we make monsters? None of these are things that society considers beautiful, but they still make for compelling characters. So why not a fat guy?

I don't know what characters I could make with a beer gut. I've never really thought about it because there never was much of a point. I can't, so why bother? If, all of a sudden, I CAN make a fat guy, though... I probably would. I'm not sure what his personality or character would be, but I'd do my darnest to make a concept society sees as "wrong" work. And if I could... Well, that just means I've broken into yet another conceptual field and my imagination has increased. And that's a good thing!

For me, it's always been less about bodybuilders and more about warrior women. I'm well aware that modern fiction has made a whole genre out of having improbably skinny women perform feats of incredible strength, what TVtropes calls the cute bruiser. However, sometimes I just like to make a female character who not only acts, but also LOOKS like a heavy, power warrior. I want to make a female character who looks she the muscles, mass and durability to do the things I have her doing even if I didn't give her any real super powers.

I want this partially because it's unusual, partially because... Well, because I can't have it , but also partially because it's the basis of a few really cool concepts that I have, which I've managed to "kludge" into the game by damn near breaking the thing.