SlickRiptide

At least a few of those are auras that came with the themed "booster packs". You paid $10 each for those booster packs. Tarot Cards, for instance, is from the Origins Pack that was pretty much all auras and themed capes. Are you sure that this list is from an account that owned any or all of those booster packs?

Here's a list, if it's helpful.

If you paid for something and you find that you don't have access to it now then you've got a customer service issue that you need to contact them about and straighten out.

I don't want to put the blame specifically on Matt, but I DO believe that the problem is that they don't have a Ree Soesbee on staff; a professional writer whose sole job is to curate the story and expand it (and in the case of Ree is someone with experience at producing episodic content). It seems like they have sort of a communal understanding of the lore, not unlike a sort of virtual Wikipedia, story bible notwithstanding. Nobody really appears to have the job of editing anyone's work.

Oddly enough, I sort of believe that this current question about the Skulls is a case of the studio trying to make good on the lore. Someone said "Hey, these Petrovic guys are kind of under-developed story-wise. If we are dressing up King's Row and giving the Skulls a real story, then we should acknowledge that we have them written up as having ethnic roots."

The problem is that the "in your face" way they were going about it changed the character of the gang so drastically (in my opinion, anyway) that it became a different gang with the same name. That bothers some people and bothers others not at all. Your mileage may vary.

Is a level 7-20 gang that most people will skip through in a day really worth spending time and effort on making them subtly ethnic? I dunno. For my gameplay and immersion it is, but for the financial bottom line of the studio, it might not be.

I'll be happy in the end if they can swing it to acknowledge that they started life as an ethnic gang but became something bigger and possibly even better/stronger than they would have been if the War had not forced them to grow beyond their ethnic roots.

You're correct, mostly. This studio is actually pretty responsive to player input.

After eight years there are dozens of "hot buttons" that get pushed all of the time around here. For every one, there are a bunch of "usual suspects" that can be expected to have opinions on them. I am not unaware of the fact that I qualify as one of those "usual suspects". Given that, I don't expect anybody to take my opinions as any kind bellwether of the state of fandom.

Once in a while, "the usual suspects" bring an issue to light that attracts attention from the greater community. This is what happened with the CoT, for instance. When that happens, the studio sits up and takes notice; as they should. If I decide to weigh in on some topic like this one and anyone at the studio even notices, I expect that most of the time the notice amounts to "We can't ever make that Slickriptide happy, can we?" (I doubt that I'm even on their radar that far, frankly.)

However, if the topic generates interest from a dozen people who normally don't post at all, then I know I'm on to something real. I'm just as sure that Freitag and Zwillinger and the rest of the OCR team take note of those reactions and when Matt says "What are the native restless about today?" that one of them says "This topic here is generating discussion by more than the usual suspects. We should monitor where that one goes."

So, no. Nobody who comments here expects the studio to adjust the game to their liking and specification.

Occasionally, though, this sort of discussion does and has historically had an effect on the implementation of the game. It seldom derails and re-routes the train, but sometimes it results in the game taking a more player-oriented direction than what the initial target was intended to be.

Sometimes it's as simple as people complaining about having to "defeat" Sally to get a badge and an in-character article appearing in the Paragon Times that offers an explanation WHY Sally needs to be "defeated" over and above it being due to badge-awarding mechanics in the game engine.

Other times it has a larger effect like the CoT thing or the adjustements that some powers have had based on player feedback and such.

Bottom line, ;tldr summary - Nobody should expect the studio to act on their opinions but there's nothing wrong with civilly expressing your opinions or engaging in spirited debate about the proposed changes. Those debates do sometimes help the studio chart the course of the game's implementation.

So, Samuraiko's real goal is to catalyze the Singularity!

*slams a shot of wodka and pours another*

One - "That happens in comic book publishing all the time" is a crappy excuse for anything.

Two - Read what you wrote. The discontented forumites here "don't like it". The difference is that they have a forum for expressing their dislike whereas the comic book publishers are insulated by their letters pages.

Look at it this way - when comic books retcon things, angry fans write letters to the editor. ANGRY letters to the editor. So, this kvetching is just like comics, so that makes it okay, right? Standards work both ways. The only difference is that the comic book letters pages are a very heavily moderated forum compared to this relatively unmoderated one.

Besides, after reading some of the stuff posted to the DC forums when New 52 went into effect, I find the idea of comic book readers being calmly "oh, well, we're used to this sort of thing" to be a fairly amusing one.

I laughed.

Troy, I have to imagine that if you asked nicely that someone at the studio would mail you the original files and that you could recreate it under your personal account.

If every dice roll starts coming up 666 we'll know the Hellions are behind it...

You make it sound like that's different than any ordinary day in Paragon City. ;-)

Never underestimate the power of a well-made bowler!

John, with all due respect I think you're knee-jerking a bit here.

In the end, we're all going to go on with our lives and nobody is going to shed tears if Emil Petrovic become Chernobog instead of Marrow Drinker. It's kinda hard to drink marrow in the first place and Chernobog is kind of a cool guy to be named after so really, it's not such a big deal.

The big deal is that the Powers That Be have been making a practice of being unfamiliar with their own product and of changing things whenever it suits them.

Case in point, about the Skulls - We all know that Skulls wear masks,right? When Atlas Park Mark 2 launched, Grym made it clear that whoever wrote his dialog thought that they wore face paint. It went live despite objections. Now, we have masks again and not just masks but masks that are going to become player costume elements.

Just yesterday, Matt made a post about how Marrowsnap was nothing special as a name, that HE created the name as a generic boss name and that any confusion on the matter of it being a specific boss name was most likely a confusion by the players based on lack of information (about which lack, don't get me started on Standard Lore Rant #3). It only took one following post to point out that the official studio website background information on the Petrovics says that they named themselves Marrow Snap and Marrow Drinker. Oops.

Matt would wave it off as a mistake, just a studio mistake that is being corrected/clarified. Regardless, it's not a single instance of such a mistake. It's a pattern that's been developing for years now.

The discontent and nit-pickiness if you care to classify it as such is a reaction to that. I don't ask that you change your opinion. I would ask that you look through the objections being raised here and on the beta forum and consider whether some of those objections (particularly about the Boris Badenov dialog) might be legitimate ones.

I will simply say what I've been saying - If the Skulls are being "clarified" to show that they've been an ethnic gang all along, then how is that making them more interesting and how is it improving the game? More to the point, what is being done to insure that continued gaffes about the story are dealt with appropriately, especially when the studio has publically stated an all-but-official policy that nobody should feel beholden to the established canon?

This is a RPG. The backstory is the foundation of the game, regardless of how many players could care less about it. Other game studios treat their backstory and in-game history as a strength. They build on it and feed it to the players as a benefit of learning the game. This studios throws their backstory away and publically makes statements about how their developers should be able to make whatever new thing they want without concern about whether it fits the established backstory, contradicts it, or outright erases it.

It is reasonable for people who care about the story to respond to that state of affairs. I support anyone who is fine with the changes to express their opinions and to BE fine with them. The game will go on regardless and few of us will quit in disgust over it. However, in return I ask that the opinions of the dissatisfied people be respected as well. Customers are customers and the studio needs to know about that dissatisfaction, especially in the rare case where it's not just the "usual suspects" complaining but a measurable percentage of normally quiet individuals.

Whether that's the case here or not remains to be seen. The final form of the whole thing remains to be seen. The studio has already said that they're dealing with the dialog. We'll see how they address any of the other suggestions/complaints or if they are comfortable with their design and choose to leave it as is. That's their perogative, too.

We all know that. There is constructive dialog happening here, not just ******** and kvetching. We should all do our part to keep it that way.

I've seen it both way. The early screenshots on the beta forum repeated Nalrok_AthZim's experience and was one of the original concerns being brought up. That combined with the whole "Everyone talk like fresh off boat" dialog had people concerned about that vision for the group.

Last night I logged in and hung out mostly around the hospital doing the early-story missions. The spawn groups were nearly all diverse, though it was a big odd to hear an african-american woman talk about beating the snot out of me in an "accent".

Maybe it's a distribution problem or maybe they're trying to somehow illustrate that as you work into the higher levels that you're getting into the ethnic leadership of the gang. Or maybe it's all just the RNG.

I'm glad that they are NOT removing all of the diversity of the gang but if there are problems (and it seems that perhaps there are) then they should be addressed.

On a different note, I've decided that I can live with the club hair, but it is rather goofy looking.

Hard to argue with goat wisdom, heh.

I'd be happy if they'd just be consistent and assign someone to sort through all of this and keep it straight instead of being (apparently) ad hoc about it all. Matt made a comment on the beta forums about where the name Marrowsnap came from and it was interesting from a history of the game development standpoint but it ended up pointing out that he didn't know what the lore on the company website said about the guys that we're all discussing.

Then again, that page was produced during the Arctic Sun days and they almost seem to have it in for anything he wrote. Maybe that's just my annoyance at the vaporization of the Paragon Times talking.

At any rate - it's certainly a "small" thing given that it's a level range that people breeze through at the drop of a hat, but a lot of the negative reaction is push back from the way the lore keeps getting systematically stomped on and from the way that various people in power appear to be unfamiliar with their own product.

I think they can write the story they want to tell without making such fundamental changes to the makeup of the Skulls. As I proposed earlier, I don't think that the Skulls would logically be a homogenous ethnic gang today even if they WERE one before the Rikti War because their ethnic community almost certainly doesn't exist any more; at least not in the form that it took before the War.

Undeniably sinister, though.

The models have changed to eliminate any african-american or any other non-slavic-appearing people from the ranks.

On the flip-side, there are women in the gang now. Maybe the two changes balance out...

Now, that's sig-worthy!

Puts a new spin on the whole "opening new chapters" bit. :-p

The game lore SAYS that they are recruiting from anywhere. What are they doing with the recruits from Atlas Park if the gang is primarily ethnic? Turning them into Soylent Green?

I'll grant you that, yes. I personally never thought of them like that but I can see why some people would. As a foil for and rival of the Hellions, that's pretty much their main function the game, truthfully, but if they built it into something more I'm always in favor of that.

I don't believe that changing the underlying structure of the gang membership is necessary to achieve that, however. It's enough to elaborate on the structure that's already in place and tell us the Skulls' full story. We don't need to transform them into something else in the process. As we've discussed elsewhere, the game is founded on deep mythical roots and having the Petrovics and their lieutenants be cultists of ancient Eastern/Central European dark arts is just fine with me. They can be that without having to lose the home-grown foundation of the lower echelons of the gang.

*****EDIT*****

At the risk of being overly verbose, I'll elaborate a bit on this.

Turning the gang into an ethnic gang is like turning them into the Russian Mafia. There's nothing interesting about that. They're just a bunch of ruffians who are trying to muscle into America and expand their operation into our territory. We already have the Tsoo to represent that kind of gang in the game. Bringing another one in doesn't give us anything new.

If the Petrovics are a couple of guys who come to America and bring their dark arts with them, and set about establishing a power base in the wake of the Rikti War and manage to succeed to some extent to build something out of the misery, despair, and wreckage of the War, that's interesting. They're villains, albeit small time in the greater scheme of things. They are exotic and mysterious and you can get why they attract the poor and the disenfranchised to their cause.

If they're primarily a bunch of Slavs who are banding together because "Hey, cameraderie and us against them" then that's boring. The fact that it's "realistic" does not make it less boring.

As always, these are my opinions and your mileage may vary.

Political correctness has nothing to do with it. Let's not start bandying straw men about.

At this moment, the Skull are a mostly typical inner-city gang, that happens to also be a death cult (and they dress like something out of The Warriors, which is not really coincidental).

The new gang is NOT a typical inner-city gang, it's a (possibly typical) ethnic gang.

The question is - Why? How does this retcon/rewrite/clarification improve the game or improve the setting of King's Row? My personal opinion is that it does not improve it. It reduces the Skulls into something less interesting to me, not more interesting. Your mileage may vary.

At least they got their masks back, and the devs have already said that they're dropping the Boris and Natasha dialog.

If they were supposed to be an ethnic gang all along, then this is just another case of the devs hoarding "vital" information about the game's background instead of giving it to the players who ought to have known it.

I'll spare you Lore Rant #3. ;-)

Demonic sticky buns? Holy Baker's Dozen, Batman!