Samuel_Tow

I have to disagree here. There's nothing wrong with stepping into a suggestion to explain why you don't like it, as long as you don't turn it into a crusade to keep the suggestion down. Suggestions need a decent discussion, and that takes both supporters and dissenters.

I come from a culture which has historically used animal characters in children's stories by giving them human characteristics. This goes beyond the cunning fox and the ever-threatened rabbit, too.

Not only does it draw on Western styles, but Fred Perry, the comic's creator, is American, himself. Gold Digger is an American comic book, and though it may not have been published by Marvel, DC or Image, it still counts,

It has always been thoroughly confounding to me that "furry hate" people are capable of demonising even slight anthropomorphism, yet completely neglect the kinds of Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons an entire generation (namely, my generation) grew up. I don't know when these people grew up (both companies have been around for decades), but when I was a kid, I watched shows like Top Cat, Scooby Doo, the Swat Kats, Talespin, Disney's Jungle Book, the Lion King and so on and so forth. For a time, it seemed like replacing people with anthropomorphic animals was just what cartoons did, and it was OK. Suddenly, 20 years later, it's not. Huh...

As someone who's had rather a lot of exposure to the eponymous "furry art style," I have to say that this is pretty much entirely true. The notion that "furries" are some kind of cooties that people catch from prolonged contact with anime is so absurd as to be hilarious. Wake up, people. Most "furries" are Americans, born and raised in America and drawing their inspiration from American fiction. Their art style and themes of choice reflect this, which you would know if you did, in fact, understand what you hate. In fact, the several companies who make their business out of furry comic books have modelled them after the American porn industry more than anything else, and have about as much to do with anime as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Commando has to do with Shakespearian theatre.

This is really what gets my goat (pun totally intended) about this irrational hatred of anthropomorphic characters that gets brought up even where no anthropomorphic characters were even mentioned. It's the kind of hatred that's based on precisely NOTHING AT ALL, as demonstrated by haters' complete inability to even identify what it is that they hate. Ugh!

Speaking of Trigun, Jesu Otaku made a very good Trigun review on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.Com which I encourage everyone to see. I had not and have not seen the actual anime, or indeed read the manga, but I would still recommend the series based on her delivery.

Characters with unreasonably large breasts actually very rarely pop up outside of hentai, and when they do they're usually sporting gag boobs for the express purposes of physical comedy. I don't know where this belief that every woman in Anime has ginormous breasts comes from, but it does not reflect reality as I've seen it.

Off the top of my head, I keep thinking back to Lina Inverse from Slayers, though her NOT having big breasts was something of a running gag, and she did partner up with Naga in the movie, who actually did have gag boobs, used precisely as a gag. Moving on to other things, Ghost in the Shell's Major Motoko Kusanagi did not have huge breasts as far as I can remember, despite the fact that she had to strip naked for her invisibility to work. Battle Angel Alita's Gally didn't even have what could be defined as breasts, as her body didn't actually have skin over her metal superstructure aside from on her face. Beyond that, Paprika's titular character, as well as that scientist woman whose name I cannot remember (who were the only two women in the movie) appeared to be very average built, but then Paprika is a serious movie. Speaking of serious, Fulmetal Alchemist featured an entire host of female characters, and most of them wore military uniforms or otherwise frilly dresses which basically obscured their body shape.

Pretty much, the only time you'll see gag boobs in anime is when they're made a point of, such as the woman from the Moon in Basquash, but that brain-cavity-inducing anime has far deeper problems than "low gravity breasts." With hands embroidered on her shirt, no less.

Huh... Now that could be an interesting addition. But it does explain the apparent selective perception seen here.

I challenge you to look at Long Range Missile Rocket (sic), which is a power that requires accuracy, damage slotting and a not insignificant amount of endurance slotting, plus a power which really benefits from recharge reduction. It's a T3 pick in Munitions Mastery, which means you are physically incapable of taking it before level 47, and if you do take it at level 47 and six-slot it, then that means your level 49 power will be physically incapable of receiving more than a single extra slot.

I've always maintained that we need to get a few more slots at level 50. Even if it's by a couple. Just something to make level 50 stand out a little more than just another enhancement level.

CoV nothing. People were asking for jetpacks and backpacks since before I joined in May 2004. Why is this such taboo for the developers?

I know what image pops into your mind, but you seem incapable of comprehending that this is not the same image which pops into my mind, or that of other people who have posted here. To you, the image of anime is the absurdity you described above. To me, anime is Ghost in the Shell, Akira and Battle Angel Alita before it is anything else. And those three things are just a few of a much broader series of concepts that I would very much like to see the game represent in more detail.

In particular, I am very interested in a broader selection of actual cybernetic parts that don't look like mangled tech, but rather appear more humanoid in shape, but machine in nature. I would kill if I could get a decent approximation of Battle Angel Alita's Gally, though I will be fair when I say that Clockwork pieces are a good bit in the right direction. But they both belong to an existing faction and are one single solitary set of such parts among a massive selection of "humans in suits" parts.

If I had to expand on this, anime to me is also Soul Eater and series of a similar stylised design, employing unrealistic combat styles and unreasonable weapons, such as an oversized and apparently very heavy scythe. In fact, I based an entire character off Maka's outfit from the same series, which is basically a black trenchcoat over a school girl uniform, that I ended up having to modify.

I don't know what anime you've been watching, but I dare say it's prudent to avoid trying to speak about "what comes to mind" in a general sense when you show clear bias. Obviously, there is plenty of stupid stuff in anime along with the good, but I would sooner pick and choose the good bits and take in some of the bad bits than throw out the baby with the bathwater.

These two statements contradict each other.

While this is most likely true, it's also complete fan thesis, a large part of which I've put forward, myself, with screenshots, no less. It makes sense given how these powers work, but as far as actual, official information goes, I do not believe a developer has ever in the history of the game commented on this subject. Not even to deny its existence for the six years we thought it was coming and it wasn't.

I don't know what gives, and there probably is SOME reason why backpacks have been this long coming, but I highly suspect it's "low priority" more than anything distinctly technical. When we talked about power customization back in the days when it was out of the question, BABs dove in with us to tell us why this probably wouldn't happen. Neither he nor anyone else, nor even David Nakayama have so far stepped up to so much as acknowledge that this request even exists.

OK, my error. Jay did acknowledge its existence via a sarcastic post to the effect of "No, really? You guys want jet packs? I did not know about that. I am so putting it on my list!" It didn't really tell us anything on the subject beyond the fact that jay, at least, knows about it (like pretty much everyone else) but what the problem is has never been announced to the best of my knowledge. Not on the forums, anyway. I don't follow the developers on Facebook and Twitter.

I could do that, yes, but the problem is that turnleft and turnright (the two rotation commands) also control camera orientation, which is to say you cannot rotate your character left while holding the camera still. Thus, this is inapplicable for my purposes, one of which is to have a fetching lady walk around a team-made during pauses in the action, basically as a joke. I'd like to be able to see the action as it occurs without suffering eyestrain from the constant fast rotation. And, to boot, turnleft and turnright override camrotate, meaning I can't even use that to stabilise my camera.

In essence, it feels like turnleft and turnright rotate my entire character's basis off which camera position is defined, so while I CAN turn the camera independent of the character, it's always static to that character and rotates "around the world." And it's really unpleasant to look at.

I don't believe this is exploitable, and I don't really think the expanding spiral is an anti-bot feature. I think it's something to do with how Walk interacts with the server or some such, because I've been able to get pretty good results with Super Speed and the same bind. I think... I'd have to re-check. Thing is, though, I can always go for my alternate bind which keeps a tight, narrow and even slower circle and get that functionality. It just doesn't look as good.

Basically what this is doing is constantly walking left while constantly keeping the "forward direction" on a specific character, and in essence circle-strafing. Now, if I could adjust the direction of motion to anything between left and forward+left, say, left+left+forward, that would do it, but these are on/off options that don't really mix in any real way.

Imagine my direction of movement is a compass with me facing North. Right now, I have two choices: West or Northwest. What I'm looking for is West by Northwest. If I can achieve that, I think I'll be set.

I rambled about this for some time to probably both Nuclear Toast and the Vulpish One when it happened, because it really threw me for a loop. "You see an image of Metronome." Who the **** is Metronome? "Oh, he's a villain that does this and that." Dixie's married? To a guy named Surge? When?

Seriously, Metronome comes out of nowhere and he receives ZERO introduction. He's introduced at length in the Loyalist arcs, but a Warden may not have done, and indeed most probably didn't do, any Loyalist arcs, so this villain's introduction is BAAAD. At least phrase it as "You see an image of a Clockwork acting strangely." and then have someone else fill me in on who Metronome is. Even the old City of Heroes stories weren't so reliant on having done prior content, always going "I don't know if you knew about this, but we think the Nemesis is dead. Maybe you killed him?"

In fact, on that note, the Faultline storyline is completely broken for Praetorians. We come into Primal Earth at level 20, which is past the point where Temblor and Penny will stop giving us missions, and within a levels' worth of taking missions from Doc Delilah and Agent 6. However, Delilah and 6's stories are written to reference previous things you did... That you didn't do, because you couldn't have done, because you couldn't have left Praetoria before level 20. Either the Faultline arcs need to be retuned, or all four arcs need to be opened up to the entire 15-25 range. Or AT THE VERY LEAST Jim and Penny's arcs need to be extended to the end of the zone's level range.

And the new Maria Jenkins arc is similarly dependent. I had a level 47 Scrapper I haven't played in a couple of years that I logged into a few days ago to try the Maria arc, and then I kept running into people going "You won't beat me again!" The **** are you? I ain't never met you before in my life! To her credit, Maria herself does a decent infodump on Tina McIntyre's Praetorian War right at the start of her arc which, though it could have been written better, seems to assume that I may not exactly have done Tina's new arc. But even though Maria assumes I haven't, that doesn't stop Neuron from acting like I have.

Seriously, if we're going to reference past events that my character did, can we please ensure that this character has, in fact, done those events?

That would be a start.

Or even Ghost in the Shell in all of its incarnations. Trying to say what anime "is" is about as pointless as trying to say what books "are." Anime is a medium, it is animation made in Japan. Nothing more, nothing less. It's the Japanese culture's interpretation of storytelling and aesthetics, which is something which is not at all foreign in American comic books in the slightest.

Furthermore, trying to define what American comic books are, or rather what they aren't, is just as futile, because they span themes and stories from across the world's cultures. And even then, the game isn't hamstrung into only doing things that can be found in a physical comic book.

Demorecording is kind of buggy, though, and difficult to play back. I used to try to record demos for proof of underperforming builds, but they always came out with a lot of errors, such as certain powers not animating, certain enemies not being in the right place and so forth.

I've actually gone on the record as suggesting a much more comprehensive system of demorecording such as what Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now had, which is to say something you could rewind at will and which gave you control of your own camera.

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This seems to be a running theme with me and these features. All of them seem like they ought to be so much more.

It's not a question of "upgrading the engine." No game in the history of games exists where you can grapple enemies of undefined sizes. All games which include grapples do so by anticipating enemy size and skeleton type, so you end up with different grapple animations for different foes.

Revenant is a good example. The character there could stomp on spiders, grapple human characters, climb up on orcs and do fancy flips to larger ogres. Thing is, you had one or two grappling animations per enemy, and you had NO grapplies with the bulk of them, simply because they didn't conform to the models needed for these animations.

City of Heroes have enemies that scale non-discretely, and don't always even have a humanoid model, to boot. You can't use the same animation or even the same power to grapple things as diverse as Swarms, Rikti Drones, Greater Devoured, Storm Elementals, Red Caps and the Kronos Titan.

A retread of Kinetic Melee where you toss people with energy is not out of the question, but that's not grappling, and it's not really needed. If you want to toss enemies around, play something with knockback.

I have mine bound to O. I used to have it bound to I for Inventory, but I decided to move my out-of-combat binds one key right on the keyboard, so it shifted to O.

The double click function has always been more annoying than it has been helpful, because I've almost always only ever used it on a misclick. And to boot, the first click doesn't even have to be on a menu item. Try that some time - click on the world somewhere and then quickly click on Enhancements. It'll still take you to the Enhancements Management screen. It's like the system only counts "time since previous click" and "current click on Enhancements," with no regard where the previous click was.

Almost invariably, I'll open the Management screen by accident because I accidentally missed the Enhancements button, corrected and clicked it once.

I thought they "stuck it into the mutant pack" for people like me who bought the pack thinking it was one thing when it was another, as a gesture of good will.