TonyV

Whenever I hear the words "Holy Roman Empire," I hear Burt Ward saying it. "Holy Roman Empire, Batman!"

I have a friend whose last name is Johnson, even though his dad was David. That's GOT to be awkward.

I know, right? The more I read about this stuff, the more nerved I become. If it goes much longer, I might just become totally combobulated.

It reminds me of this Cingular commercial from a while back.

Never say never! Oh, wait, you didn't say "never." Never mi— D'oh! Um...

Whoa... He respawned?

I disagree. I hope they never do it again. If they do it even one more time, then there's going to be a clamor to open the doors for every player who passes away to be put into the game. It's a no-win situation. You can't draw a line to determine who was "helpful enough" or who didn't quite make the cut. There would be very bad feelings all around. And I guarantee you that at some point, someone is going to fake their own death to get into the game. Yes, people really are that scummy.

Coyote is a nice, fitting tribute. Don't take him out, keep him in. But in my opinion, he should be a one-off special case, already established by history. It just wouldn't be the same if others started popping up.

By the way, a couple of details to mop up: Coyote's ("Kiyotee" on the forums) real name was Matthew Bragg, and the name of the random cop model he replaced was Detective Wright. I started around Issue 1, and I remember seeing him. I'll see if I can wonk up Officer Wright in a demorecord sometime using the original game client files in case anyone's curious.

I wish you guys would consider community-designed billboards. Not just the one-off contest, but on a regular basis. Let people submit them, put them in a pile, let the community reps and/or devs "vote" (or determine however you guys want) which ones make it in the game that month, and push them out.

In spite of there not being real-world product billboards, the technology is there to make it happen from when there were real-world product billboards. I'd love to see players come up with ads, as well as community advertising--the Paragon Wiki, for instance, or people's supergroups. I'm sure I could work up a Taxibots billboard, a Titan Network billboard, and someone should work up a PERC billboard. So does Rogue Magazine. City of Comic Creators. And so on.

We have public forums over at the Titan Network, home site of the Paragon Wiki, Mids, and Sentinel/City Info Tracker. Folks (including free/premium players) are more than welcome to come there and post, and veterans, of course, are welcome to come by and help out and join in the fun.

We're currently in the planning/early "working on" stage of a revamp of the Titan Network to make it more integrated and social networky. I'm hoping we'll have at least the first parts of it rolled out by the release of City of Heroes: Freedom. I'll let everyone know more as we get closer. If we can get it to the point we're envisioning, it should be a really valuable resource for free/premium/VIP players alike.

Such is the nature of the beast. If something is failable, it's too hard. If it's not, it's too easy. There is no in between. And there's always more than enough posts going both ways.

I'm glad I'm not a game developer. I'm glad that ours have thick skins and pretty much do what they want. Some people act like that's a bad thing, but it's times like these that hopefully some people realize that it really isn't.

No, it's just that it's not funny, it's dumb. The first time or two I saw a cutscene crashed (back in ITF days), I thought it was clever. Then everyone and their brother started doing it. "Oh, look. Another cutscene crasher."

It's like a rickroll. Five or six years ago, it was amusing. Now, it's so old that it's lame. What's next, knock-knock jokes? At least with those, there's a punchline.

Also, there's the little fact that some of us actually like to watch the cutscenes. I know, a lot of you are jaded of the trials, but since I don't play them 10 times a day, I actually don't see them very often. What you're doing is irritating because you're basically talking while someone else is trying to watch television. Personally, I hope that at some point, the devs actually auto-suppress all player models to be invisible and silence all chat during cutscenes.

I had no idea that crashing a cutscene could actually cause a failure of the trial. Add me to the camp of people for /kicking people who do it.

That is one of the smartest posts I've read in days.

/e thumbsup

Are you talking about Belle? Did I miss out on a heated argument about this? Since this confusion keeps popping up about once a year even though it's been years since this issue was settled, here. I wrote a wiki article on my personal page specifically about it. Now instead of explaining all of this over and over each time, I can just post a link and be done with it.

We've uploaded a bunch of them to the Paragon Wiki. I'll check tonight or tomorrow into getting the new ones out there.

Since I'm not married, and last time I checked I'm not schizophrenic, I don't know.

Good one!

It's a bit sad to me that there are people so dug in here that they're probably asking that for real.

Was I replying to you in that quote?

I came in guns blazing because you put forth an idiotic contrived "test" based on playing the game in a way that no one--admittedly not even you--plays and made a demand that the developers changed the game based on it. It has little to do with how I play. Like I said, I don't even necessarily disagree with what you're petitioning for.

You know what I find really sad? How you keep trying to frame this as if I have some weird, deviant play style. I've got some news for you, bub. Most people do play the game just like me, and they're giddy with delight at all of the new shinies that we're getting. YOU are the one asking--no, DEMANDING--changes to the game based on a weird, abnormal, totally bogus way of playing that you have repeatedly admitted that you don't even play.

Do you even know what a straw man is?

YOUR "TEST" IS MEANINGLESS. That doesn't mean that the solo path is or isn't viable. That doesn't means I do or don't like Incarnate trials. That doesn't mean that I do or don't want a solo path. That doesn't mean that soloers are or are not left out in the cold. That doesn't mean that the devs do or don't hate you.

All it means--the ONLY thing we can infer from this "test"--is that you have no clue how to conduct a meaningful test. Any thought or sentence formed from the premise that "[Based on this,] you..." immediately becomes invalid. Not true, not false. Invalid. Undefined. Meaningless. Divided by zero.

The two are related, but there's not a direct cause/effect relationship there. Here's what it boils down to: I really like this game. That's it, it's that simple.

Because I really like this game, I pay for a service that I willingly offer to other fans. Make no mistake: Running the Paragon Wiki and Titan Network actually costs me money and an extraordinary amount of time. Thanks to some generous donations over the years, it's not all out-of-pocket, thank goodness, but if you think I'm making money off of the sites, you're mistaken.

Also, I'm genuinely impressed by all that the developers have accomplished over the years. Having been in development in the past, I know it's a VERY hard job. Meeting the deadlines that they do, having as stable a product as they have, and seeing that most of them actually still have hair boggles my mind. I've met some of them in person, and they're really cool people who love their job. All of that, especially paired with the fact that I really like this game, means that yeah, when I see baseless attacks against them, I'm happy to defend the devs.

Maybe you're under the false impression that I've never criticized the developers. Maybe you missed my threads back when they gimped the e-mail system. Maybe you missed all of my worries when Issue 9 was released that having a tradeable loot system was an open invitation to RMTers to bug everyone. (And boy, did they ever.) Maybe you missed a few threads way back when CoV launched of me complaining that I thought it was silly that villains were level-capped at 40. I seriously doubt you had access to the Lighthouse Lounge or City Scoop forums. *twitch... *twitch... You probably missed how I repeatedly blasted the decision to make these permanent costume codes only available to people who either have lots of money or who are lucky enough to be geographically close to a convention or meet-and-greet. Maybe you weren't in the beta forums and you missed the heated discussions I had regarding the decision to not give so-called "paladins" who never change their alignment some kind of award for staying true to their morals, something I still think they screwed up and that I'm not happy about. I think it was a hideous mistake to not follow through on their threats to nuke AE exploiters more than they did.

Of course, during all of my criticisms, I never cried DOOOOM!!! (at least, not that I can remember). I never demanded that the devs accommodate my will. I never conducted sham "tests" to support my position. I never threatened to quit the game. I've consistently criticized with the understanding that I'm never going to be 100% happy with the game, and that's okay. 97% is pretty damn amazing. Does make me a suck-up brown noser?

No, because "solo path" to Bill and a few others constantly griping here doesn't mean the same thing that it does to most people. To most people, "playing solo" is something you do sometimes. Maybe it's even something you do most times. It's not something you do all the time, to the exclusion of all else, going to great pains avoiding teaming up with anyone, EVER.

To most people, the shard rewards you get while doing "solo" stuff are there to supplement--NOT supplant--the rewards you get for doing incarnate stuff such as the Incarnate trials and Weekly Strike Targets.

Yet that's what this sham of a "test" is based on: the premise that you will never ever run an Incarnate Trial, that you will never ever--and that's the key, literally never ever ever, not one single time over the course of a hundred years--run a trial or strike target. That has absolutely zero to do with how people, even most self-professed soloers, even Bill, since I know for a fact that he has run task forces, actually play the game. I know it, you know it, the devs know it. It's the elephant in Bill's room that he refuses to acknowledge or talk about, and the straw man that he keeps building around it is designed specifically to hide the fact that it's a completely unrealistic expectation.

You absolutely, positively do not make game design decisions around such contrived shtuff. Will Bill's request eventually be implemented? Maybe. Hell, perhaps even probably, I don't know. But if so, I can guarantee you that it sure won't be because of stuff like this so-called "test."

Yeah, the purple recipe comments ARE a strawman, one I saw tossed about frequently back when they were introduced in Issue 10.

So we could keep starting threads with strawmen and throw them back and forth at each other, or we could get smarter and realize the simple truth: This is a non-issue. The vast majority of people are getting stuff they want and a select few are always going to be unhappy. The people who are happy are going to play the game without much stress or drama, the people who are perpetually miserable are going to come here and gripe.

This is probably the most insightful comment in this dreck of a thread, and it wasn't even made to disagree with the Almighty Bill. I am 100% sure that the devs do indeed data mine what's going on in the game, and that is going to determine what happens as far as shards and threads go. Not some silly contrived agenda-pushing test.

By the way, lest anyone confuse what I said, I'm not claiming that people don't solo. I'm not even claiming that people don't solo most of the time. Duh. What I'm claiming is that doing a "test" based on someone who literally refuses to ever team or run a task force or trial is as meaningless as running a test based on a role-player who never runs a mission. THAT is your strawman.

Why not instead run a test on an average player who runs a trial once or twice a week, and maybe a task force once every two or three weeks? Don't forget to add in the shards that he or she will get as normal missions and other activities take place. Oh, right, it completely destroys your argument. How inconvenient, those average players are, in making outlandish claims and demands!

I'm certainly not opposed to change, but demanding it after a foolish claim that it will take years to do something people are obviously doing in days is stupid. God help us, if the devs start making decisions taking such an idiotic, contrived, meaningless test into account, it really will be the end of the game.

Next up: Let's test how long it takes a team of five-year-olds with characters that have almost nothing but pool powers to get the Master of Lord Recluse badge. OH NOEZ!!! Something's broken, I demand you fix it!!!11!1!!!11!

That's what's so sad: I don't even necessarily disagree with the end conclusion; I have no strong feelings either way. But the methodology used to arrive at it and the tone of the demand hurts the argument way more than it helps.