TrueGentleman
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:The popularization of science fiction as "sci-fi" was pretty mainstream in the 60s, so yes, those spy shows, along with The Avengers, count. (A staple of the subgenre was of course the super-genius scientist with a sci-fi invention.)Originally Posted by Scene_EU
Indeed there were quite a lot of "Sci-tech" things going on in The Prisoner, but to classify as Sci-Fi, would also suggest that The Man from U.N.C.L.E and all the James Bond movies were too IMHO.
The Prisoner compressed a lot of science fiction elements into its setting, and many episodes revolved around sci-fi tropes, e.g. brain-scanning (A. B. and C.) and artificial intelligence (The General). And satirizing the Surveillance State decades in advance is a pretty good trick.
H.G. Wells wrote a time-travel short story "The Chronic Argonauts" in 1888 (and then obviously his novel The Time Machine several year later).Quote:Originally Posted by docbuzzard
Heck, I don't know if there was a time travel story before A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but that certainly wasn't Science Fiction. It could well be the grandaddy of the time travel genre. -
Quote:It's weird that anyone would argue a show that was nominated for 48 Saturn Awards and won 13 was either not science fiction or "sucked hard".Originally Posted by Starflier
The 'Is Lost Sci-Fi or not?' debate completely misses the fact that the show sucked hard.
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Quote:Blake's 7, which predated B5 by more than a decade, would merit inclusion by those criteria (although the arcs of its individual series were more thematic). Also, it had the hands-down best final episode of any science fiction show, ever.Originally Posted by TerraDraconis
Babylon 5 really should have been on there. It had a huge impact in how shows could be done. Before it aside from soap opera's there wasn't many if any shows that did an overall story arc and kept internal consistency.
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Quote:Lost's finale did some serious damage to its already wobbly science fiction credentials by (spoilers, sorta) concluding the "flash sideways" arc with a New Age-y reveal and culminating the mysteries of the Island with a "cosmic plughole".Originally Posted by VoodooCompany
Ignoring the list itself and whether people believe it should be on this list at all, I'm utterly baffled how Lost is being denied as Science Fiction status from various people
Anyone tuning in to the three seasons would have had no trouble classifying it as "sci-fi", but the woo-woo element was present from the beginning. After the fans grew impatient to get answers and the writers went on strike, the show tilted toward the pseudo-mystic since it's the easier route to tie up loose ends. ("A wizard and/or smoke monster did it!") -
So, nothing animated on that list? No room for Aeon Flux, Cowboy Bebop, Futurama, or Ghost in the Shell?
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Quote:Absolutely. Community advertising would be an enormous boon to the playerbase, to say nothing of the anticipated newbie influx from CoH Freedom.Originally Posted by TonyV
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.
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Quote:Nine, but it felt like at least ten! But I came back after allOriginally Posted by Ironblade
Oh, right, gone for 8 days or something.....
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I'm back! Did I miss anything?*
* Besides George R. R. Martin's latest Song of Ice and Fire installment getting leaked, Gene Colon, Peter Falk, and Marty Greenberg passing away, our distinguished competition online opening a cash shop, J. K. Rowling not announcing a Harry Potter ARG, the Avengers movie boycotting Comic-Con, a certain war-torn online world announcing an endless trial period, Monty Python's surviving members collaborating on adapting the posthumous one's autobiography, the adventures of Cimmerians springing their switch to F2P to today, and Baskin Robbins giving away free Super-Soldier Swirl ice cream. -
Quote:Don't make it sound so long. Think of it as "less than a week and a half"Originally Posted by Ironblade
We'll miss you . . . um. . . for 9 days.
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Yvonne Craig, of course.
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As it turns out, since my subscription is up for renewal tomorrow and not yesterday as I'd thought, I have a chance to vote with my lightweight wallet on the announcement of City of Heroes Freedom.
First, though, it's more important to say thank you to the folks of the Infinity server for all the good times (likewise Champion, Virtue, and, most recently, Union, but cross-posting might go against 'netiquette). Infinity was where I started out with CoH, and it's the server I associate as home in the game, despite my sporadic playing lately. Inifinity's organized task/strike force runs, costume contests and other player events/competitions, PUGs, dedicated channel chatter, and more are a credit to CoH's esteemed community. It's been a pleasure to have participated on even a small scale in them.
As for the hiatus, barring unforeseen circumstances, I hope to see everyone again on July 1st, when our subscription money will count for the accrual of "Paragon Points". (The cognitive break between exchanging tokens for money and rewards for tokens is another basic marketing tactic, and when combined with an a la carte content shop, it's intended to encourage spending sprees.) We'll see how things turn for CoH F2P, but whatever the case, I've had my fun here and am most grateful to you all for it.
Good luck and good hunting,
This isn't so much a ragequit as max-min'ing self-interest. Same as Paragon. Excelsior! -
Hello! (I must be going.)
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Quote:Broadcast-wide chat channels are a fundamentally dissociated affair, like having an ICQ window open in the background of the main app or listening to a call-in radio show while stuck in traffic. It's better to get a sense of who's talking about what where, not tuning in to voices in the ether.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
That may be the case in other games but here in CoH the community's first impression is made in the Broadcast channel. Broadcast is zonewide while you have to be standing next to the person being a jerk in local.
I am an explorer, by Bartle test standards, so I move around lot while taking in my first impression - others' mileage may vary. Still, Barren's Chat <shudders>
Well, there's also the advantage of avoiding the reverse snobbery of those who somehow believe that wanting to be a paying customer and treated like one is "elitist". (It's fairly clear that this is going to be the holy war of COHF2P.)Quote:Originally Posted by TerraFan
The only reason that a person would leave their current community to move there is to be a snotty elitest who think that they'll contact leprosy from the unwashed masses of F2P people. -
Quote:We have difference preferences: I'm a gradualist, and you (if I'm characterizing yours accurately) would rather cut to the chase.Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
The point I was making was that it was a waste of time and money to have done it that way, because they are integrating anyway.
I'd like to put that to a vote, preferrably a poll attached to the launcher to gather the widest range of players possible.Quote:In any case, the playerbase here is NOT saying a resounding "NO WAY", so it seems even less warranted. -
Quote:Those shock moments, though, were all in the context of the overarching suspenseful story, something that the new Who achieved only occasionally with the use of the "Big Bad" trope.Originally Posted by Zikar
While I certainly agree with you to a degree, I'm not sure about your examples.
Dalek Invasion of Earth certainly has it's "shock" moments, such as the Dalek rising from the Thames (a truly iconic moment), the Dalek spaceship trying to kill Barbara in a van and the final assault on the Dalek base. Also, Genesis of the Daleks, ironically was barely even a Dalek story, with Davros completely stealing the show. The Daleks were basically just background props for that story.
In the case of Genesis, that's probably the best example of the show's use of suspense - keeping the familiar villain offstage for as long as possible while introducing a new antagonist for the Doctor. (It's only a shame that Michael Wisher played Davros just once as none of his successors were up to his performance.) As for the Dalek Invasion of Earth, the emerging Dalek was the cliffhanger cap on the eerie scene of post-invasion London, where it was clear something awful had happened but the Doctor didn't know what. Once the Daleks appeared, the question became what they were planning for the Earth and how to stop them. That kind of scenario becomes awfully compressed in new Who's single-episode doses, so consequently those have a lot more running and less investigating and planning.
Your summary of Daleks in Manhattan does at least fit it into the classic Dalek story structure, even if compressed into two episodes. Maybe I'll give it another chance. -
Quote:Unfortunately, the first impression a server's community makes on an individual player is often the local channel. Whether or not it's active, whether the discussion revolves around RPing stories or mix-maxing builds, whether the atmosphere is immersive or digressive - the ongoing conversation is very telling. If it's filled with gold-selling spam, however, that sends another message.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Because the free accounts only have access to local and team channels, nothing else. The local channel can simply be dropped from your chatbox and you'll never see any spam.
Spamloads of spam would of course be a huge spam impediment to building a spam community on a spam F2P spam server with a fried egg on top and spam. It would seem the devs are counting on the existing servers' established communities to be able to withstand the increased static. That they've left open the safety valve of a "VIP" server suggests that they're not wholly confident this will work. -
Quote:Perhaps. The semiotics of a top hat and monocle in my avatar do seem to have drawn charges of elitism from the start when the forums began discussing CoH F2P (The accusation of xenophobia does annoy me greatly, and I do not appreciate being baited.)Originally Posted by TerraDraconis
perhaps I am misinterpreting your concern but that is how it comes across to me.
As an aside, the great irony is that I have no interest in being a "VIP". "VIP" is often marketing code for "charging extra for things that should come with normal service". Instead, I wish only to be treated as a paying customer, which includes not having literally game-changing new policies issued by surprise and being consulted in some form about preferences for the game's future.
I'm surprised, and disappointed, that SOE extended the latter courtesy to their players when Paragon has not. -
Quote:I'm confused why you'd (mis)characterize my post you quoted or even my straightforward statement about my own plans for the "VIP" server and my general preference for F2P servers - which many players on the forums share - as being "bent out of shape" (or why the numeral "1" should be seven times larger than the rest of the text).Originally Posted by TerraDraconis
Frankly I'm completely confused over why you are all bent out of shape over the 1 lone single VIP server that is completely optional to use.
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Quote:That's a much better way of handling an F2P transition. Here's hoping that Paragon Studios will poll their player base to determine whether we'd prefer "VIP" servers or F2P servers to be launched with COH Freedom.Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
When another game company created a freemium version of one of their flagship games, they polled the current subscribers about mixing F2P players with the subscription players. The current subscribers answered with a resounding "No Way!"
That game company thusly created a single server just for the F2P players. Within a month, and pretty much steadily since launch, the subscribers from the flagship game have been copying over to the freemium server and setting up shop there.
The end result is that integration is happening on its own because the subscription-paying players discovered that the game was more fun with a larger population than it was being sequestered away from the F2P players.
The other benefit of this approach is that it leaves the decision up to P2P players about when to move to an F2P community instead of everything happening all at once. Conversely, it would be fair to allow F2P players to spend their Paragon/Reward Points to move to P2P servers. And in either case, actively committing to a given server psychologically encourages players to be good community members instead of taking things for granted. -
Quote:That's probably a thread topic by itself for a later date. A red name might be inclined to answer once CoHF2P has been successfully launched, but they're unlikely to make it a priority even afterward.Originally Posted by BrandX
So next question, if these players don't return, which is possible and even just a slikely they have no idea what their old account was, will they be freed up after a certain amount of time?
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Quote:Precisely. Peer pressure is the business model, and on a social network, it spreads rapidly. It makes regular broadcast advertising look like a mug's game.Originally Posted by MaestroMavius
The one thing that keeps me from even trying any of the FB games is the 'You must spam the hell out of all your friends daily' nonsense. I've even resorted to unfriending people that wouldn't stop pestering me to 'be my neighbor!!' or 'help me feed kitty!!' posts.
EDIT: Incidentally, I see another prominent F2P-hybrid MMO has a Facebook app specifically dedicated to getting players to recruit their friends to the game. Any bets on when Clockwork O1 announces the release of a similar one for CoHF2P? -
Quote:Indeed. This is just the kind of Have's vs. Have-Not's split that I've seen on other games that have introduced an F2P component.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
It wouldn't matter what it was called. The simple fact that it is going to restrict access to active accounts means it is going to garner backlash.
Still, for some people, the term "VIP" immediately conjures up the idea that there are "unimportant people". All those hours of stewing resentment behind a velvet rope of one sort or another as other people get into that ever-so-exclusive club come flooding back. -
Quote:As the disclaimer goes, "Your mileage may vary". For my former guildmate (beta-tester, lifetime sub.), it was. Incidentally, the problem of creating lore-friendly names there was noticeable enough to be the source of jokes.Originally Posted by lionheart_fr
As a Founder in that other game (been there since friends and family alpha), I disagree with your assessment. There are things about their implementation that bug me, but overall, my gameplay experience has not changed for the negative. It has certainly not "been ruined."
Since the omnivorous superhero genre can encompass both fantasy and science fiction, we certainly have a head start over games in those genres.Quote:I'm one of those of the opinion that there is no limit to "good" names and consider a name purge unnecessary. -
Quote:There's nothing in the CoHF2P FAQ about how either the existing "Refer a friend" or "Invite back a friend" offers will be updated for the new system. These kinds of recruitment bonuses are standard in marketing since a friend will always be a more sympathetic salesman to a potential customer than any company hire - it's a way to make peer pressure work for the company. Without naming names (thanks to the short-sighted new forum rules), there is an MMO that changed its referral system after converting to a similar F2P hybrid. It's just a Google search away for "Referral Program"+points+friends.Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
I'm not even sure how to respond to that except to ask, "Where did you come up with an idea like that?"
The phenomenon is called reverse snobbery (and is closely related to envy). Paragon was just asking for a backlash by employing the term "VIP", which some people evidently have a congenital aversion to.Quote:Originally Posted by Kelenar
Seriously, this. All of the 'well, I hope you VIP guys enjoy polishing your monocles in between ordering your butler to kick F2P players' talk is getting on my nerves.
I'd be content to be counted in the august company of Diogenes and Ambrose Bierce.Quote:so I can get on board with calling them Cynics, but Elitists is getting old.
So, cynic that I am, I expect to create some characters on the VIP server at launch as an escape route (besides, I try to have at least a few characters on each of the servers and like to lock in the names of some of my favorite existing characters). If the communities on any of these suffer after F2P is launched, I'll transfer my characters as necessary. -
Quote:Well, Paragon has gotten in bed with Facebook as far as an official page and FB-specific contests and prizes, so it's entirely possible that they've considered FB's massive population of casual players who've been conditioned by the "free" games on the FB platform.Originally Posted by DreamWeaver
Only thing I'm worried about are starting to get Zynga-like promos (recruit 5 friends to complete this mission..)
As for reinstating the advertising program, perhaps it would be possible if F2P successfully attracts enough eyeballs to make COHF2P an attractive venue. That's for the future, unless Paragon's marketing department is both really optimistic and aggressive.