vulpish_one

Other than CoH2? I'd sacrifice small animals to have a team like Paragon work on a Deadlands MMO. Shane Hensley, the creator of Deadlands, was even a former redname here (Captain Mako), so it's not as crazy as it sounds.

Now that I think about it, Wiggy the Brit was based on someone in the DL creative team, too.

Ditto. And the first of the month is a horrible time to be running on half a tank in my job. Still, I made it through and hopefully became stronger for it.

True--especially for those of us that indulged in the game's creative tools extensively, like AE or base editing. But I would deliberately leave that point out of my metaphor to avoid sounding pretentious around people that don't play MMOs. I was looking for an explanation they'd understand, not a perfect one.

To anyone that notices how I'm going to be feeling over the next few days, I think I've come up with a good metaphor that should get the point across.

We've all seen news stories about how the people living in Area City become heartbroken, loud, and--rarely--violent when Area City's beloved sports team moves away. It isn't just about the sport, of course; anyone can tell you that being a fan of a sport, and especially a fan of a team, is about being a part of a community. You don't go to a game to sit in the nosebleed seats and try to follow a ball that looks to be half the size of the head of a pin. No, you go because that's where the fans are. That's where your friends are. You identify with that; you're a fan yourself. When someone asks how the game went, you don't say "the team lost by 3." You say "we lost by 3." And you're just as crushed as if you had been on the field yourself. Even to strangers that you otherwise wouldn't associate with, there's an instant bond. That sense of belonging to a greater subsection of society appeals to something very human in most of us.

Now, imagine how the fans of Area City's beloved sports team would react if the team itself simply ceased to exist. Now, imagine the reaction if the sport in question ceased to be played altogether. Imagine if the only way to relive the feelings you had--watching the games with your friends on the couch--was to go to a local sports bar, change the station to a highlight reel, have a few beers with your fellow eternal fans, and reminisce about the good ol' days.

I'm seeing this sentiment in a few posts. If you didn't see a confirmation page ("Thank you for your email," or somesuch) it probably didn't actually send. The Captcha-style textbox seemed to cause my browser--and its operator--some confusion.

If I have a crush on the color green here, it's because I want to keep the theme of the "Avoids the Green Stuff" badge intact. I also forgot to mention that I unabashedly ripped both of the ideas I used in my post from other posters upthread.

Why be original? This is the internet.

To my mind, here's the dilemma: at high graphics settings, the relatively subtle "green stuff" can be occluded by Ice Patches, Tar Patches, Static Fields, Burns, and whatever else people are trying to use on Anti-Matter. At low graphics settings, the relatively subtle "green stuff" becomes even more subtle. After a certain point, even if it were the only visual effect going, the patch becomes hard to see. Green-on-pale-gray isn't exactly high contrast.

And colored pop-up messages? Those are barely one step above ad banners in my mental filter by this point. I see so many of them and they so rarely contain information that I need, I have to force my mind to process the information they're trying to convey. In the Keyes Trial, for instance, I'm pretty sure that I don't need to be notified of entanglement shifts every time they happen. I don't really have time to process what color I am and what color everyone around me is, and ol' Keyes himself has more than enough anti-clumping mechanics to keep me from standing in one spot anyway. In other words, I was already jumping around like a meth-snorting howler monkey on fire. I doubt I'll be standing near any one person for long enough for the debuff to have any meaningful effect.

But that's a sidebar. The graphics are why I got caught by the patch pretty often early on. Now I know to turn my particle count up for the Keyes. My computer has to suffer through it, but at least I don't get vaporized every 20 seconds in the last fight, and it's rare for me to get caught in the patch.

A green War Walker targeting reticle on the ground and a cylindrical effect--something that goes all the way up to the flight ceiling--would help.

I know I gave her a pretty tall order with my requests--detachable hood, arcane-trimmed cape--and she came through in a big way. If I can manage to take some decent pictures, I'll post them up somewhere for general perusal.

Quite. You see, the ancient Greeks were on to something I think was lost in America during the Golden Age of Comics, when Americans decided that their heroes "should be" morally unflappable. Positive role models, like most Golden Age superheroes, do serve viable social function: they teach us what sort of people our society would like us to be.

But relentlessly good heroes fall short as a measuring stick in one very critical way. Or I suppose I should say they're too good at what they do to fulfill their societal purpose. Imagine, if you will, growing up in a society with myths not unlike those of the Greeks or Romans. Now imagine that the heroes aren't flawed: Heracles lacks his rage, Odysseus his pride. Now imagine you're told, consciously or unconsciously, that these are people you should try to emulate.

You'd never really succeed. In fact, it'd be downright frustrating to try. Your heroes wouldn't have any room for your humanity, with its vagaries and imperfections.

The vices held by Beowulf and Peter Parker alike teach us more about being human than their virtues ever could, because those vices teach us that we, as consumers of media possessing our own flaws, can be heroes as well. That said, a character dominated by vice instead of virtue stops being a hero and becomes a warning instead: a mythic "what not to be," but that's another discussion.