UberGuy

Except pure additive change is frequently wishful thinking. Think LFG queue and the Winter event. Think impact of adding iTrials to number of people rolling new low-level alts, and therefore impact on forming low-level teams. "If done correctly" is a qualifier of Jovian proportions.

Yep.

That wouldn't be bad. I on the other hand think that the Cathedral of Pain should be put in the queue. The way you are forced to all the team captains be in the same SG for that is really, really dumb.

So, what, exactly, do you think happens when a bunch of non-leaders form a team via the LFG queue? They start looking for a leader. Yeah, sure, they can end up deciding what to do by committee. How much longer is that going to take?

When two (or more) people who have ideas about running both end up in the queue together, who gets to be in charge?

I believe it's big practice versus theory gaps like that which are a big part of why so few people use the LFG queue as a truly random team/league formation tool. People form a league and then (maybe) let other people join it. Which greatly cuts down on how many people who might be in queue can actually be serviced by it, which is incentive to ignore the queue and just go broadcast for a team wherever people normally form them.

I did. I'm familiar with the story. It just didn't convey much personality to me, somehow.

When I think about it, almost none of the hero characters have had much character development in game. We actually get far more development for Lord Recluse and his lieutenants. I have an immediate mental image what the personalities of LR and his four top cronies are. Heck, I have a pretty good mental image for the cronies of his cronies! (Ice Mistral, Wretch, Silver Mantis...) But I don't have a very clear mental image of the personalities of either the Freedom Phalanx (except for Statesman) or the Liberators.

Most of the image I do have of Statesman is from the free comics rather than the game. (Note: I never read the novels.)

I'm curious to hear how it goes for you. I'd probably do it too, but I just have too many Regens already. I feel the need to diversify more.

And, for the UGT, whether they have Clarion.

That is likely the other part of the problem - the load balancing bug. Between web page hits, it could be sending your request to a different server. That server doesn't recognize your session, decides it's crap, and tells your browser to nuke it. Voila! Instant unhappy forumite, just add logout.

This is, in my experience, always because you zone with it active.

That's where people having level shifts come in. With the Alpha Slot shift, the worst case effect is of fighting +3s. While that's still harder than +2s, they're still noticeably easier than +4s.

Part of this is that even if you set it to get 53s (which are +2 to someone with a level shift) you still get 50%-ish chance of 54s. Sometimes (depending on map) you get more 54s than you get 53s!

This is why, once I got my level shifts, I decided to just go with 54s full time. Aiming at 53s still got me 54s some of the time, so just going with 54s all the time actually made my survival and DPS targets more consistent.

This is baloney.

By your measure no one should play anything that doesn't contribute AoE damage and kill rate. And by that metric, there are whole swaths of available powersets and even whole ATs no one should play.

Bunk.

We can't ignore either that there frankly are biological differences (on average) or that those differences only affect (but do not absolutely dictate) behavior. Both things are true. There are hardwired differences in the way women and men view certain things, but those biological influences cannot be assumed to be absolute limits on what women and men will think and do within some gender-specific boundaries. There is overlap.

Clearly, we must be on guard not to let ourselves fall into the false notion that gender tendencies are the whole picture and we therefore are safe to pigeonhole individuals into limits defined by their gender. But neither should we, in our efforts to avoid that trap, deny that any real tendencies toward differences really do exist. The truth, as with so many things, lies somewhere in between the extremes.

Oh, I agree strongly. However, I begin to wonder when you have a book with multiple female characters who all spend a lot of time functioning as fanservice if they all are also going to be strong female role models. I don't know that I can justify it objectively, but there's something about that I find hard to reconcile.

Basically, there's something about spending every image frame with your rear hiked up in the air (yes, an exaggeration, but not that much of one) that doesn't jive well with notions I get from my female friends about what a woman they would look up to would be doing. One of them? Sure. All of them? That's a stretch to me.

Let's fact it, those characters were being frequently being visually depicted as sex objects. Now, let me be clear, I'm not mentioning that because I object to it, per se. I just find it hard to believe that most women (assuming most women would read it to start with) would consider that a depiction of something to look up to.

I have to say, this prompts me to mention that I found it amusing to have Gen-13 mentioned as an example of a comic with lots of female leads in reference to lack of female role models in comics. I suppose the characters as written may have been OK as role models, as I honestly have only vague recollections of anyone's character in Gen-13. (I was much more into Stormwatch and early Authority.) But I distinctly remember the art. No matter how their characters were depicted in the writing of the stories, they sure weren't depicted visually as what I would think of as a female role model. Well, unless you think female role models should all look like very rather athletic Victoria's Secret models, poses and all (but with more bad-*** outfits). It's not like I think a female role model has to be unattractive or something, but there's no way that art wasn't fan service for the boys.

Interesting. I don't really play any of my Regens in what most people would consider "normal" situations - everything I do solo is pretty stressful. It's not because it's productive, but because I enjoy the challenge. So, running with IOs and Incarnate powers, I'm playing against level 54s on x6-x8, depending on what I'm fighting. One of my Regen Scrappers is DM/Regen/Soul, so I have no redraw and I have Shadow Meld. The other is DB/Regen/Nada, so no Shadow Meld and definite redraw. I feel I just have a rhythm down, where I fit heals in where it makes the least impact in my attack chain. Sure, sometimes my hand is forced and I have to pop something right then, rhythm or attack chain be damned, but it really doesn't bother me.

And trust me, there's not much more stress to be found than playing a Regen on 54/x8. Especially with no Shadow Meld, you really need to win the DPS race against large spawns. Dual Blades is a big boon here, because Sweeping Strike backed by the recharge you give a high-end Regen is fantastic at clearing the minions out of even +3 spawns in a hurry (with some help from Typhoon's Edge).

So there's got to be a matter of taste in here somewhere, because it doesn't get much hairier than that, and it works for me to lose that bit of my DPS I need to heal with and whatnot without getting screwed because I lost the DPS race with the spawns. If I can manage that, it just doesn't seem like it could be that bad.

Do note, though, my earlier concession that Regen's not an optimal choice for inspirationless soloing of hard targets. The DPS lost to healing which most Regens are going to need to use frequently due to inability to hit the softcaps is definitely a part of that. That said, my DB/Regen clocked about 200 DPS against a Pylon. (No Lore used.) Nothing spectacular to be sure, but given I wasn't shooting for single-target DPS, I was relatively pleased.

Yes, because that's not really the way the devs try to create content.

It is not a reasonable goal to expect that all content will be run regularly by everyone. However, content that is run by almost no one really should be viewed as a failure. As defined by this measure, there are many bits of failure to be found in CoH, but many of them are old and the devs are loathe to devote resources to changing them. They do not remain out of deference to the few people that happen to like them, but because it is deemed to resource intensive to make them more popular.

The other problem is that the iTrials are, by design, meant to be grindy. Everyone gets a degree of choice with respect to how much grinding they want to subject themselves to, but there is a certain minimum that you have to accept in order to expect to be functional in future iTrial content. Specifically, you need Level Shifts. It's fairly clear that lacking those is going to eventually lead to inability to contribute meaningfully on a league due to the purple patch. (Generally lacking high-tear powers, whether they offer a level shift or not, may ultimately represent a problem as well if the devs stick to mechanics like the Avatar fight in the UGT).

If you have to grind, and you are in the process of producing the new content that people are expected to grind through, what makes more sense for the devs to do: accept "failed" trials that aren't run by very many people so that the people only run the original trials, or give everyone they can as many things worth playing to at least give the grinding some diversity?

Your preference for a harder Keyes trial was sacrificed on the altar of the perceived greater good of the Incarnate system as a whole. The entire thing is predicated on mass participation - that's what large leagues and indeed the LFG queue assume. People get tired of grinding the same trials over and over. If they get new ones they hate, the participation in the system suffers instead of grows, the basic assumptions of large leagues and LFG queues break down, and the whole thing ends up in the bit bucket in the long term. That's not where the devs want it.

What we have in that post is one person's definition of just exactly how he defines a term in use. Do I think it's a good definition? I do, actually. Of course, as mentioned, I don't read into it what you do.

The whole point I am making is that he had to make such a definitive declaration because everyone else had varying takes on the what the same term meant. You have what you think it means. I don't agree with it.

Fundamentally, this is about attribution. People see this pattern whereby WiR Syndrome in particular is an easy trope to apply to a lot of comics, and perhaps in this case, to the SSA. What comes next is attribution: does this trope apply because the writers are revealing sexist tendencies (overt or subconscious)? Does it apply because the writers are bad, and only bad writers would use the trope? Or is the trope itself a more general symptom of other factors that reveal gender bias (which is not necessarily the same thing as sexism).

The differences in opinion about what WiR mean, fundamentally, come down to what each of us decides is the most likely correct attribution, which frankly is quite likely to have limited basis in logic, whatever position we each happen to take. This is an emotional topic, and human beings are not built to ignore the emotional meta-tags they attach to knowledge and memory when digging around in our minds in order to build logical relationships between new and past information. Anyone who tries to claim that we can decide how to interpret this trope's overall applicability or its presence in any given story base solely on factual information is simply ignorant of human nature or covering for an agenda they don't want to admit.

Your experiences and views on other people and their motives lead you to decide that this trope is evidence of systemic sexism in comic works, evidence of sexism in individual works, and/or both. You can point to the examples, the patterns they form, and all that, but they are evidence you interpret, not formal proof.

Your interpretation is different from mine. My experiences and biases lead to interpretations that tell me that other factors are at play. Patterns can reveal either a cause or a symptom, and I see a symptom and not a cause. MiR and sexism may be correlated, but causation is not universally shown.

There's an air of passive-aggressive intellectual superiority in the way that you post that serves only to harden me against your position. Your arguments suggest the self-evidence of your position, drawn so clearly from the musing of those writers/bloggers/posters from whom you draw your position, while I see it as subjective interpretation all 'round. This is not a topic for which absolute objective rightness can be declared. Only opinion, as you so literally (and crassly) illustrated.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/deconstruct

de•con•struct tr.v. de•con•struct•ed, de•con•struct•ing, de•con•structs
1. To break down into components; dismantle.
2. To write about or analyze (a literary text, for example), following the tenets of deconstruction.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/deconstruct

deconstruct — vb
1. to apply the theories of deconstruction to (a text, film, etc)
2. to expose or dismantle the existing structure in (a system, organization, etc)

Google "Define Deconstruct"

de•con•struct

Verb:
• Analyze (a text or a linguistic or conceptual system) by deconstruction, typically in order to expose its hidden internal assumptions...
• (in general use) Dismantle.

Yellow highlight for emphasis on the rather clearly recognized definition I was using.

Factually in error, or this conversation (the whole thread, not just you and I) would not be on the tack it is

Clearly, I do not add that extra meaning to it that you do, and I reject that the extra meaning it is clearly the "correct" interpretation.

Edit: From the opening comments on Brian's page, which you linked to for the previously provided quote...

Yellow emphasis mine.

Edit2: Whoops, in hurry and forgot to explain - I think this quote makes pretty clear that this "trope" is awfully mutable based on the perspective of the speaker, and arguing about what constitutes an example is going to lead to circular arguments. Which of course it already has here.