Samuel_Tow

Then you have rotten memory.

Isn't everyone accused of copying WoW whenever they do anything, whether or not it's actually in WoW to begin with, though?

As much as I tend to solo and bah humbug teaming suggestions, this seems like the next QOL to look for. It really makes sense, given the circumstances. People complain they don't see other people, and whether or not other people are there, but just hidden, the point remains - people can't find people. The problem is that players don't run into each other and can't form teams that way. The solution is to let them form teams in other ways. Team seek is a good way, but it assumes a certain critical mass of participants that ensures enough proactive team leaders recruiting. Whether by spoiling or lack of people, there aren't enough, so the next step is to allow non-team-leaders to form together into teams without having to act like team leaders and recruit. Enter "quick teams" that are formed by the computer. You don't have to use them if you're good at leading a team, but you CAN use them just the same.

It's kind of like with the difficulty settings. People found the game too easy, so they were given the option to make it harder for themselves. People then found that they could further tweak the difficulty of missions in the Architect, so we were given expanded mission difficulty settings as a response. We have problems finding each other and keep thinking the game is dying, so the solution is to bring people together and reduce this isolation feeling. And best of all, those of us who don't want to team can simply NOT take part.

That's a bit of a generalisation, considering you also get the Bolero, and the Witch costume pieces also come in full tights variant, as well as adding more boots and gloves options and a couple of hats. Let's be fair to the pack.

*edit*
Oh, and that cape and hood that men got, too. There's a lot of stuff in there.

And, really, what did men get out of that one? One jacket in two slight variants and a pair of boots. I don't think they even got gloves with those, but I could be forgetting. Oh, that and a couple of hats, too. But no pants, no belts, not even any patterns that I've been able to see. That's not to say males didn't get anything, but they didn't exactly shortchange females on this one.

Upon reflection, it's Mace Blast that I've played around with, and the knockback on it isn't really too bad. The redraw will be irritating, but if it's either that or waiting on attacks to recharge, I can deal with it. I can just imagine it's a cool transformation from axe to mace before it fires and then back again Disruptor Blast I don't think I've actually tried, now that I think about it, but on as long a recharge as it has, I don't think it'd hurt me that much.

Health should stack with Fast Healing and Against All Odds, so it's a nice buff. As far as the rest of my build, it isn't what I'd call tight, so much as it's set in stone. This particular question with what powers I can spare to play with may or may not come down to a question of performance, but the rest of my build is a question of concept and I'm really not looking to change that even a the cost of extra performance. If I want to take Disruptor Blast, I'll have to dump either Health or Hasten, and seen as how Health fits the concept more than Hasten... But again, I'm not convinced I actually need it.

I should have just taken a legitimate screenshot. This one was done as a comparison shot for my old costume help thread, and I tried to vary as much as I could between the two pics. Since I didn't remember what I varied, I tried to go off what I saw, and apparently I missed a lot

Took me a while to get a screen cap, but would something like this be close to what you had in mind? That was this one's original intent.

I'm not sure what a female version of that would be, as women don't get the Baron jacket, and pretty much the centrepiece of it is that one jacket. You can go some ways with the Bolero, and though I don't have a decent vampire/gothic pic of it, I do have Grimwall, whose design principle was a regal, aristocratic dress. It came off as less a dress and more an ensemble of fur coat, lace top, bridal skirt, lace legs and Lady Gray's boots, but I think the look, at least, is in the right vein.

They're identical except for hair and tie colour, vest (one with and one without) and shoulders. Proportions have not change between the pics.

And I'm not sure if the Baron jacker is available for females, but I'm pretty sure the Bolero is not available for males.

You mean like this?

Wait, isn't Disruptor Blast the targeted AoE that Arachnos Drone Coordinators use? I think I took that one on my SS/Inv/Mace Brute some time ago and it was basically a red fireball.

Either way, I just realised that I can have Mace Blast, or Mace Blast and Disruptor Blast, but not JUST Disruptor Blast, because it's a T2 Epic Blast, which requires either Web Envelope (I always thought this should be Web Envelop). I don't want Web Envelope on this guy, partly because immobilizes on melee folk aren't very useful, especially AoE ones, and partly because it doesn't fit his concept.

Now, I want to keep Health, which means I need Swift, as well, and that gives me only two slots. The trouble, however, is that I'm also planning on taking Hasten, and if I want Disruptor Blast, I'll have to ditch Hasten, which I'm not sure is a very good idea. Err... Is it?

I had a look, and I was able to scrounged up four slots for just Mace Blast at the moment without really pulling anything I cared about, so JUST Mace Blast is on the map already. But should I look for five more for Disruptor Blast?

The problem is that you're applying your own moral and ethical beliefs to other people's characters and trying to judge them by that as though that's the specific vision of "morality" that the game world subscribes to. I have no problem with people bringing their own morality and indeed judging others by it, but on the basis of what they like, not on the basis of what is and isn't objectively heroic.

To give you a good example, I don't find all the breaking into Crey private property we do without due warrant and often probable cause to be heroic. "Oh, hey! The Paragon Protectors are getting strong. Go break into this lab that seems to be doing perfectly legitimate business and see what you can find out. And if security try to stop you, set them on fire!" It's a private business protected by a whole mountain of laws that you can't just "break into" like it were a Skull hideout, but the game doesn't bat an eye at this.

Basically, we can only judge what we like or dislike. The only way to judge what is or isn't heroic is by examining past precedent set by the game itself. And being that Infernal is a hero of our world, and his power comes from binding the souls of demons to his armour, I'd say necromancy in all of its forms is well within the rough norms of heroism, if used responsibly.

Don't we have that kind of stuff right now? I admit I'm not too well-versed in what "gothic" actually stands for, but pics might help.

You're going to have a really hard time substantiating this, given the difference in the scope of algorithms required to run the two games.

Bigots.

It's "mean," in that the eyebrows are are down, so it looks like it's scowling, but it's not monstrous. In fact, all it is is a face with a wider nose and a cat lip. That's about the extent of it, which is what makes it perfect for anthropomorphic characters that still remain largely human-like. It doesn't even have a snout to speak of, not even a short one like a cat would. In fact, it's more a texture thing than a face structure thing that makes it inhuman. In Champions, you just don't have that. Normal face options have something like four choices - one human, one nose-less, one zombie and one "geometric" that's basically a cubist's take on the human face.

If you want a feline face, you have to use the animal heads and go with the tiger one, which is... Beyond dangerously furry, put it like that. You can't use hair with the animal heads, so that's one MAJOR strike against keeping it human-like, and the tiger face is actually that of a sabre-tooth tiger, with a large snout and long fangs protruding to below the chin. In fact, because genuine cats have faces that don't differ from male to female (not to the casual observer, anyway), you end up with a head that removes the face's gender identity, and that's a WHOLE BIG STEP over the line, and usually a drop face-first into the uncanny valley.

And I blame Champions Online's development team for not giving characters a better selection of faces. Currently, they have a selection of FACE.

Not in every way. It uses the XP start menu and won't allow you to use the classic 95 start menu like XP will, so that's at least one way. That, and costing you both money and time reinstalling stuff if you're already running XP to switch over to 7.

On that note, I remember an errant Forcefield Generator that scared the crap out of me back in 2004. I'm running around in Kings Row at something like level 8, which was the highest I'd ever gotten at that point, and I see the huge impressive silhouette of a Force Bubble, first I'd ever seen, and VERY obvious. It's coming from behind a wall, in one of those scrap yards with stilted silos in them. So I jump on the wall and there are clockwork in there. I start tabbing through them, and they're all 7, 7, 7, 7, 24, 7... ZOMG! 24?!? RUUUN! I had no idea what I'd seen, as I just got the hell out of there before I could get a good look. I was convinced it was some kind of super-Clockwork that was coming to destroy me

A couple of days later, I came across a level 26 Tree of Life, again in Kings' Row. I actually saw it glow green through a wall, but didn't see the tree itself. It was between a large building and the wall that ran around its lot, kind of right next to the wall itself so it glowed through. That was back before "splats" were introduced to the game, so it was fairly obvious. I'm looking at this level 26 thing, but because it didn't "sneak up" on me, I wasn't actually spooked. For a while, I gently nudged up to it, little by little like a cat approaching a hair dryer, until I finally realised that it wasn't dangerous. Took a few swings at it with my Katana, but what do you expect a level 10-ish character to do to a level 24 Tree of Life?

I'd been in contact with my team, telling them about this strange thing the whole time, and they all eventually came over to look at it. Here we are, standing around the thing like civilians at a super hero fight scene and we're just looking at it for a while, until someone starts attacking. So we start fighting the thing, a full team of eight, I think, all around level 10, and we're not doing anything at all. We're missing constantly, and even when someone lands a hit, it hurts it for 1. And then it regenerates anyway, because it's a Tree of Life, after all.

A little while later, I spot a character that's not on my team sitting (yoga, at the time) on the wall, just observing us. I check his info and he's a level 24 Scrapper, I think Broadsword. I ask him in local to "Could you please help us defeat this thing, o mighty hero?" And he sort of laughs and says it's a bit high even for him. But he does come down and takes the thing out, by himself, in no more than a dozen swings, probably less. I mean, he's, like, twice our level and very impressive at the time. I have no idea who that guy was, but at the time, to me any team, he may as well have been Superman, because he was so much more powerful than us, and pretty nice too. We thanked him, we /me praised him and he laughed. Said we shouldn't really be fighting Devouring Earth at our level, which was the first time I ever heard about the things. And then he Super Jumped away, I think, leaving us all in utter awe.

At the time, I was convinced that what I was seeing was all there was to the game. Trolls, Outcasts, Lost and Clockworks. I had NO IDEA that there was so much more to see, so many new factions to battle. Man...

That reminds me, back in the day, my first character to hit 30 was fighting through the second Sky Raider arc at I think level 29. Right in the last mission, I suddenly see this strange soldier who is obviously not a Sky Raider, dressed in odd armour and retro military fatigues. He looks like he's an agent of a much bigger villain than Colonel Duray, so I check his info. It talks about things I don't remember, and mentions his Storm Rifle that's dangerous both at range and in melee, and I'm thinking... This is bad. And he's level 30, too. I beat him, of course, but his presence was a very ominous clue of what was to come.

Those sorts of encounters have long since lost their appeal, obviously, as I'm coming on six years now, but I still remember what it was like to be the new guy around these parts

That's as seamless parts of the unified whole. When you have an almost entirely anthropomorphic character, and with this much busy fury, then sticking a human face and hands on it is actually more dissonant than going with at least furry hands and face. It doesn't have to be an inhuman face, but... Wait, now I remember. Champions Online does not have a middle ground between human face and grotesque animal face. I was thinking more along the lines of our Feline face, or a human face coloured something like the fur, but that game just doesn't have it.

To point, it doesn't have to be an alien face to fit, but when it sticks out so much, this creates an even stranger look, because, as I said, it looks like a person in a fur suit, which I'm sure wasn't the intention. And again, it's not a question of body parts BEING human, so much as it is a question of body parts FEELING human even if they are logically evident to not be. As with most artwork, it's less what the artwork actually is and more what it represents in our heads.

Watching a documentary on the rise and evolution of Microsoft is actually a scary thing, because it demonstrates their cut-throat business model very, very clearly. Basically, it comes down to forcing themselves into a majority monopoly, and then using this monopoly to basically bully retailers into stamping out other business.

Take, for instance, the fate of Netscape. For a while, their Navigator was either the only or the best Internet browser out there, I don't remember, while Microsoft were dicking around trying to develop Internet Explorer. However, when they did, their approach was to basically force retailers to NOT install Netscape Navigator on the boxes they were selling and install Internet Explorer, instead. They did this by essentially giving retailers a choice - dump Navigator for Internet Explorer, or you don't sell Windows, and for lack of another operating system that will run on your computers, you don't sell computers at all. This is monopoly in its purest form, where a large business has enough control to remove a competitor from the scene by unethical means.

I can't really fault Gate's original popularity campaign strategy, I really can't. Basically, what they did was to give their operating system to as many manufacturers essentially for free with I think a certain amount or "rent" on it and just make it so EVERYONE was using Windows because it was so gosh-dang cheap and available. However, once the market depended on Windows, they pulled the reigns tight and simply didn't permit any other business to thrive. Yes, we have Linux, largely because it's not sold and not to the broader public, and we have Mac on machines that may or may not run Windows anyway, but by and large, they just don't seem to appreciate competition.

Which is kind of funny when you consider what Google have done and how they've basically snatched "the Internet" from right under Microsoft's nose. Yeah, Microsoft would like you to use Bing to search with and Internet Explorer and they try to develop their own proprietary interactive content codecs and sites that only work in Internet Explorer, but the fact remains that they have not, in any way, shape or form, been able to monopolise the Internet, because no-one wants their software in this field. Yes, people still occasionally use Internet Explorer, and some unfortunate souls even use Outlook, but Firefox and now Chrome have replaced their browsers, Google is the thing to search with, and now more and more developers are designing software and APIs designed to work on their systems, but bypass their malicious rules.

I still prefer Windows to any other operating system for the simple fact that it runs practically everything, whereas other systems simply do not, but the way Microsoft have been jerking me around with "exclusive" features restricted for no reason other than to get me to fork over more cash to "unlock" them does not sit well with me. Better that City of Heroes uses OpenGL, it seems.

Hey, no prob being interested in what you are It's not so much a question of taste as it is of work-un-safe-ness, as I was just expecting rather more... Danger with that description. I'm not disappointed, mind you, just surprised. And while my viewpoint is probably uncommon, that actually is tame, but there's nothing wrong with that. It's pretty good artwork

Does it reflect poorly on me as a person that, after having seen the pictures in question, my reaction was "Well that wasn't really very unsafe?" I'm starting to get worried

Having seen a few of your other Champions designs, however, just convinces me the design would look better without the actual clothes, as your other designs that don't have them don't really have anything particular that "bugs" me in them.