Shadow_Kitty

Slacker. Because that's me.

Toy Collector. 'Cause that's also me.

Kitty's Got Claws. And that's so definitely me!

Whaddyamean, "main"? I am Shadow Kitty! The other toons are my toys!

It's mostly the "leader of the free world" bit that upsets everyone else. Although it might even be true from some points of view, it still has an air of arrogance.

There's also a cultural difference about the flags in general. If you are to compare for instance "Saving Private Ryan" and the Finnish "Beyond the Front Line", you will notice something pretty interesting: I can't recall a single Finnish flag in "Beyond the Front Line". It's possible that there was one in the background on the soldiers' cottage scene or at a soldier's funeral, but I didn't notice it if there were, so it certainly wasn't in focus. "Saving Private Ryan" opens with one, close-up and very much in focus, against a blue sky and absolutely not in the background.

I think that part of the difference is that we every now and then have a extreme right-wing nationalist group more or less appropriating the flag for their own use, which given Europe's history with such parties gives the whole flag thing a little foul tinge and encourages a little bit of caution and reverence.

Case in point: to accuse the President for being unpatriotic by not wearing an American flag lapel pin is ... well, silly. In contrast, it wouldn't surprise me if the Swedish prime minister would be accused of being unwholesomely right-wing if he wore a Swedish flag pin.

So even though it is completely in order and true to the setting, it's a little bit unsettling, a little bit arrogant and just a bit too much.

This is exactly how I perceive Statesman, and why I dislike him.

Now, that's not a reason for wanting him dead (I would have preferred Ms. Liberty, to be honest), and I'm not particularly moved by his demise either way. I really don't care about him being alive or dead, as long as he doesn't cross my path.

That said, I enjoyed immensely dinging 50 in the last mission of LRSF as he was defeated and the mission completed. I might have laughed a bit over his body... but I digress.

The problem with being the world's greatest superhero is that you're not only invulnerable and undefeatable; you're also dull and boring. I enjoyed immensely when Emperor Cole was this grey character that did what he did, no matter how horrible his sleep-induced mind-slave utopia was, to save mankind (then the story moved on and he became this inter-dimensional super-foe that didn't even have Na'Zi parafernalia to make him a cartoon supervillain; kind of boring of the other kind) - and that is a kind of Statesman that I would enjoy. And by the way, don't take that literally. I don't want a primal Earth Emperor Cole, I want a human character that is not dull, that is troubled, that has human weaknesses.

I think that Frank Miller nailed Batman for me in The Dark Knight Returns. "Of course we're criminals" laughs Batman in the congressional hearings. "We don't have any other choice." And there's a double meaning to that: not only does he have to break the law to uphold the spirit of it; there is also the fact that no other course of action occurs to him. He doesn't have any other choice, he is driven to do what he does. He can overcome anyone he's up against, even Superman. There is only one exception: himself. And when he tries, he becomes a broken man brooding in his mansion or seeking death on the race track, lesser than himself.

It's that human dimension that I completely lack in Statesman. And as long as he doesn't have them, I care about his death about as much as I care about the numerous times that Superman has been presumed dead.

It isn't because of the technical aspects. Well, part of it is - the balancing of the free power system was a major pain in the butt with constant revisions until they kinda gave up and introduced archetypes anyway; and the game is mostly open world questing with all the problems that entails (lots of heroes queuing at the quest mob's/glowie's spawn point waiting for their turn). And quite a lot didn't like the cel shading technology.

The main reason that the other Cryptic superhero game sucks is content. Or lack of it. There was just enough content for ONE journey to the level cap, if you hoovered the zones for every mission there was. A lot of it was open world questing as well.

Content is king. And that is the real problem: if you want to revamp the character system with fingers, animated hair, asymmetric cossies, 3 or 4 colour picks per piece, animated eyes, eyes that are not part of the face bitmaps etc; if you want to revamp the zones for destructible objects; if you revamp the story engine for different choices affecting the quest outcome (something that The Other Game lacks as well), or revamp the mission engine for allowing different entry points and playstyles (also not in The Other Game), you quickly find that to do that you have to redo ALL content in the game, even if you don't use open world questing and free power picks.

And there's no chance in Helgoland that you will be able to compete with the current almost 8 years of content if you have to redo it from scratch. Fact is, chances are pretty good that you will end up with the same major problem as The Other Game: there's not enough content at launch save for one journey to level cap.

Unless you pick the sparkle aura.

I specifically want Ms. Liberty to live.

I want her to live the rest of her natural life knowing that I beat her. I want her to remember, every morning, that she lost, and that neither she nor her beloved granddad could stop me. I want her to live every single day in fear of my return, knowing that the only reason that she is still alive is that I denied her a dignified and honorable death. I want her to live a long and natural and shameful life until she dies of old age as a scared and fragile old woman.

Am I not merciful?

The other kinds are extended narrative poems celebrating the feats of a deity or demigod or other legendary hero; or a narration of events appropriate to the first kind. If you are picky, then I am.

Being a faceless dispensable cog in a 24-man machine is not epic, by any definition.

Don't generalize. I'm happy for your sake that you enjoy them, but please don't project that on me. I do not enjoy them, and I certainly do not enjoy having to repeatedly grind them in order to progress past 50.

The almost 5 incarnate trials sums up to 2.5 hours of play time. In order to progress past 50, that 2.5 hours has to be repeated over and over to get somewhere. Each issue adds another 30 minutes of play time. Even if there's no end to the trials they are creating for us, there is an end to the available Incarnate trial content, and it's far too short to be viable. And the amount added is sadly inadequate to add the necessary variation to alleviate the grindy feeling of the little content there is.

And compared to the rest of the content, even spread out over the 7+ years worth of other added content, 2.5 hours is pitifully little.

If the designers enjoy making trials as much as I like playing them, they must really hate their job.

One: The trials are not hard. Confusing as heck, but as soon as you learn how they work, they're formulaic and boring. You really don't play, you just follow the script, and the chance that even a PUG league will be so badly put together that it can't win the trial is pretty low, thanks to the probability curve of 24 random players.

Two: I don't want it easy. I want it epic. And "epic" means facing the ultimate horror of doom, alone, with a dull toothpick, and still have a chance to win, but everyone has to do their utmost to have that chance. Well, see above. You follow the script, you win. You can even have a pretty good chance of just pretending to be there, firing off your powers just for show, and let the other 23 follow the script, and still win. Is that epic?

Three: I don't want to have to do those same four trials over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, just to advance. It's a bit like the only way of progressing to 50 in any way is to do Frostfire, Positron, Synapse and Sister Psyche task forces over and over and over and over again.

The solution: Add an Incarnate difficulty setting. Everything is extra hard, cheats more, hits harder, chews your intestines for longer, regurgitates them, and spits them out longer with napalm. Add incarnate rewards to it, balanced so that you have to play for about as long grinding trials as you have playing regular missions at stupid difficulty.

Suddenly you have "over 1000 missions" that can move you forward past 50, rather than "four soon five incarnate trials" to grind and repeat as your only option. You also get the added bonus of not being a faceless nameless cog in the 24-man machine, and the content will actually be hard and challenging!

Good. Give us that then, and use that excuse rather than the pitiful Praetors that we've been giving a good spanking ever since Peregrine Island was introduced way before the EU release.

But on the other hand, that's just an arbitrary story reason to band an arbitrary number of heroes together in order to hit an arbitrary foe. There's really no good game design reason to do it - in fact, there are quite a lot of game design reasons not to: it gets a lot harder to balance the thing and you have to cheat a lot to make it a challenge.

There are also quite a lot of story reasons to not do it as well. The epicness of the story is diminished by you being a small cog in the epic machine that has to fight the epic foe. Epic fights are epic. Epic foes are epic. Cogs are not.

Which sums up the reason that I don't enjoy the trials pretty nicely. I do not enjoy being a cog in the machine. Being a cog in the machine sums up my real life pretty well, and I play City of Heroes to escape from that life.

City of Heroes was originally developed by American company Cryptic, and published by NC Soft's US branch (NC Soft is Korean, but has an international presence through affiliate companies in other countries). It was released to the EU market through NC Europe in February 2005.

Then, in september 2008, NC Europe, NC Interactive, NC Austin and ArenaNet were merged into NC West. Although never confirmed, it is likely that the Tabula Rasa spectacle was one of the reasons. The Brighton office was all but closed and the CoH EU operations moved to US.

Once upon a time, there was a European presence. There was a European publisher that had servers in Europe and maintenance that didn't affect EU prime time, there were a European board, they had European game fair presence, European shelf presence, even European marketing in game magazines.

We European customers entered a business agreement with that publisher, by the way. I.e. "we give you, the Euro corporation in Brighton, UK, our monies, and you let us play on your Euro servers in Frankfurt, Germany".

That publisher was killed. With it, any kind of European presence was killed - no more fairs, no more marketing, not even boxes in European stores!

The European forums were killed, the European forum community was smashed to smithereens, and we had to move over here. The nice things were that if there were a name collision, both parties were equally affected.

That didn't happen at the server list merge. Well, the merge was nice, but if there were any name collisions, the European player was the one shafted and lost their global name.

If you need more arguments than the sheer awesomeness of Broomsticks to convince them, you could mention that if it was included in a Magic Super Booster II, I'd buy it in 10 seconds flat.

Also look at Memphis Bill's post. That was even better, in my opinion.

In the long run, it may even be necessary. Those same textures are 7+ years old and in many cases so lowres that you can see the individual pixels of the UV map (not to mention that they're often flat and lack bump- or normalmap).

Ultra mode is fine and all, but shadows, reflections and ambient occlusion can only do so much to 7+ years old models and textures. Sooner or later, the game has to have a major art overhaul to stay competitive.

But I do have a nagging feeling that the art overhaul will also be known as City of Heroes 2.

Sadly, it won't stop harassment. Female only gyms work because the rule can be enforced. You immediately see if a male is trying to get in and stop him, and if he insist, you can call the police.

That is not possible in this game. It is too easy for any harassing male to start up another account under a fake female identity. All you need is an email address and time cards (and in the future, not even that). There is also cross-server messaging: if the creep ever gets your global, he can still harass you even if you are on another server.

It may even be counter-productive with a female-only server. Imagine that there is a female-only server, and then you discover you're being hit on anyway. This means that the safe haven suddenly is not so safe anymore. I would feel violated if that happened, and there is a chance that I would stop playing the game at all, because I wouldn't feel safe even on the server that was set up for me to be safe.

What you can do is...

• Ignore him. There's an ignore list that will help you in that respect.
• Petition him. GMs will look into the matter and take action.
• Find a good gender-mixed supergroup. In a close circle of friends, people rarely overstep like this, because there is a self-policing habit in a group.
• Educate people. It won't help you now, of course, but the next generation may be more aware of gender issues.

In the long run, gender segregation is a bad thing, just as race segregation, sexual orientation segregation, religious segregation or any other kind of segregation. It always reinforces the inequality, even if it is put in place to protect one group from the other.

It takes time to change this inequality, maybe even generations, but there's a reason that black-only gyms are considered a thing of the past.

Awesome!!!