The Unoffcial City of Heroes Sourcebook?

This occurred when replying to a Hero/Villain Culture thread asking about the now-defunct City of Heroes pen and paper roleplaying game; I realise there are a great many online sources for information, most obviously this site and Paragonwiki, and for the Virtue continuity, the Virtueverse site.

But would I be alone in wanting to see an unofficial project organising the information in a book/PDF format that could be updated to cater for issue releases? I know a reader-friendly format tends to suck me in a lot and I like the accessability of a book where I can go 'oh, what's that thing I wanted to remember about Steel Canyon again?' and look it up in a general sense without needing to remember a specific phrase. And I like to be able to just browse a 'book' where I can just soak in ideas and facts.

Again, this might just be me, but maybe I can spark some interest out there....

S.

Sure.. I'd be interested in such a product. I'm too lazy to help make it though.

//Jack

With how much things change in the game so constantly, this would only work as a 'binder', so that you can remove pages and add pages. We saw how well that worked (they've tried it before: it was never updated).

Do you really want to buy updates to a book up to four times a year?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Prima was most likely faced with a simple business decision. The update had a lot of pages. That costs money. It would cost US $100-200 just to print it off at Kinkos, imagine how much it would cost to print on decent paper with quality coloring? To keep the bundle at a reasonable price, they'd need to run a very large quantity through the printers to keep the cost of production down. Since they didn't, it is very likely that the quantity of expansions they'd need to print to keep prices down was either too close or greater than the quantity of basic binders sold or made.I sure as heck wouldn't do it if I was in their shoes, either. They probably lost money on the whole deal.

NCSoft could have stepped in and subsidized some of the cost if they thought it would boost binder sales and make it worth it in the long run, but they apparently didn't think it was worth it, either.

Your biggest challenge is that an amazingly large amount of the source info is actually apocryphal. Paragonwiki is a great resource as far as quantity of information but as far as quality goes, it ranges from "good" to "guesswork" and pretty much all of it is uncited, undocumented, and unsupported. Large sections of it are simply wrong, because it documents what the contributor has deduced on his own or heard third-hand because the topic is something that isn't actually covered anywhere in either the game or the associated fiction.

There's no "rigor" and that's because there can't be. All we players know is what we glean from the game, the comics, and the website lore. A basic question like "Who runs Freedom Corps and what is its purpose?" is impossible to answer definitively without bugging the rednames for the answer. In the end, that's exactly what I mean by "apocryphal". You ask "What does Freedom Corps do?" and I say "They train heroes and act as a kind of super-powered Emergency Response Team." You ask, "How do you know that?" I say "Joe Morrisey told me."

Now, it's up to you decide whether you believe that I asked Joe Morrisey, that he gave me the answer I say he did, that I'm telling you what Joe actually SAID as opposed to paraphrasing it and then figuring out if you even know who Joe Morrisey is and whether has any background to be actually giving a definitive answer to the question.

And if all that adds up, then we're left with the situation where you know the answer, I know the answer and NOBODY ELSE KNOWS. Furthermore, there's no official documentation to back it up and if I lose or delete that PM I mentioned then any documentation at all is lost forever.

Apocryphal.

To my mind, this is an unconscionable state of affairs. One of the major reasons that WoW became the juggernaut that it is today, is that it had this humungous body of lore behind it AND EVERYONE KNEW THE LORE. More than that - If you don't know it, you can find it in the game! It's scattered all through the game world, and these days they even give you an "accolade" for tracking it all down and learning it.

This is why I'm happy about Manticore's Cannon Fodder thread and yet still unhappy about the fact that the powers that be seem to be satisfied with a game where none of the players really knows very much for certain about the world they're playing in. That's nice for them, I suppose, because it doesn't box them in if they want to change the lore or write story and make the lore a "surprise". It sucks, for us as players, though, IMO.

Let me state up-front that Paragon Wiki is a great service and it serves its purpose well. It's typically the first place I go when I want to look up something about the game world.

I'd be the last person to diss it, and that wasn't my intention.

The problem, such that it is, comes from the label in your signature, Tony - "Paragonwiki - Compendium of Official Information". It's labeled as such, and people treat it as such, to the point that people will quote "Paragonwiki says thus and such" in an argument and they just accept that whatever they just said is true, simply because they believe in the integrity of Paragonwiki.

That's okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly as far as people tend to think.

Case in point - Freedom Corps, since I brought it up earlier and I've had some input on that page in the wiki: It's a generally known "fact" that Miss Liberty founded Freedom Corps. So well known that it's just accepted as axiomatic by most people who care about these things.

Yet, there are no citations supporting that "fact" except the one PM from Joe Morrisey that I mentioned in the Freedom Corps discussion page. The only empirical evidence appears to be that she authorized Jingle Jets one holiday season.

Now, Joe Morrisey is official but a PM from Joe runs into the same problem I mentioned upstream - It's apocryphal. There's no actual evidence that Joe told me that aside from the PM that might nor might not still be in my in-box after the big forum upgrade. What's more, before Joe sent me that PM, I could find no evidence AT ALL that Miss Liberty founded Freedom Corps, even though I found it mentioned in many places, including multiple mentions in the wiki.

On top of that, the current state of the Freedom Corps page is that Statesman and Miss Liberty were partners in its foundation. This because we have a statement by Jack Emmert (in-character as Statesman) that Statesman founded it, and a statement by Joe Morrisey that Miss Liberty founded it, and so, according to the last person to edit the page, the only "logical" deduction is that they both founded it.

And so, the game lore changes and a significant number of people assume it's correct based purely on the fact that it came from Paragonwiki.

This is the nature of wikia. It's not a slam on Paragonwiki. If it's a slam on anything, it's a slam on the way the people running the game have deliberately created this lore vacuum that makes a fan-run information website the primary compendium of "official" game lore.

Heck, since the website reorganization, the Paragon Times has vanished utterly. A huge chunk of Arctic Sun and Gilgamesh's lore is gone, except where a few people have managed to save their own copies of it. We're going backward lore-wise instead of forward.

It ain't no way to run a railroad.

What Aggelakis said. WoW essentially copied the badge/accolade game mechanic from this game when they did one of their big content updates last year. One of those "badges" is earned by clicking on all of the lore books in the game. Just as with the history plaques and badges in this game, players are free to ignore the actual text associated with them and NOT actually learn something about the game if they so choose. The important thing is that WoW has had the lore accessible in the game from the beginning, and as of the launch of achievements, they even give the players a reward for exposing themselves to it.

As for how little the initial player surge knew the Warcraft lore, I'd say you're underestimating just how well read that original foundation of Warcraft players was and how well-known and regarded the lore still is by the core players. The initial draw that pulled in all of those Warcraft players was the opportunity to play in the world they loved and knew inside out.

In their next big expansion, Blizzard is remaking the entire Old World. Imagine the Faultline or RWZ revamp on a game-wide scale. As part of that expansion, they're copying another trope from us and doing what amounts to Power Proliferation.

If you think WoW players don't know or care about their lore, then I'd recommend getting involved in some of the discussions over there about things like the rationalizations for Tauren Paladins and Night Elf Mages and where and how those concepts break the lore.

I daresay that most of the players of CoH know only as much about the lore as they learn by doing missions, and some never learn anything at all about the history of Paragon City and its heroes. That fact of life doesn't excuse the devs from keeping the lore deep, consistent and, most of all, accessible for those who DO want to learn it. There's no excuse at all for allowing parts of the lore to vanish entirely.

It feels sometimes like the devs have this attitude that "We have this big Story Bible and WE know the history so you guys don't actually need to know it."

One of the most important initial effects of the whole badge/plaque system was that it gave the players a connection to the history of the world. It gave the world depth.

Where is that depth now? We get it doled out in dribs and drabs whenever one of the rednames feels like answering a question and because of that many of those answers have been lost like the Paragon Times; deleted in forum prunings and vanished into the bit bucket as fansites have come and gone with the players running them.

The comic is dead. The novels are dead. There's no periodic fiction. There's no Paragon Times. The CCG died. The RPG was still-born. The official website backgrounders haven't been updated in forever. Occasionally, a new page is added to the player info section of the official website, primarily when a new issue comes out and then it's generally done without much fanfare and with vital information HIDDEN in it instead of it being a vehicle for conveying that information. (e.g., the business with Requiem locking himself behind walls of Impervium. The implication being that, looking back, we can now see that they were hinting at the rise of the Reichsman.)

Lore isn't supposed to be hidden and hoarded like a pile of gold coins. It's not supposed to be a game where you're solving a puzzle that you don't even know the goal or rules for what you're solving. It's supposed to be the background that makes a player say "Hey, this is cool stuff, I want to be involved with this stuff."

Anyway, enough threadjacking. None of this negativity is helping the OP with his idea of a player-made sourcebook. As to the question of whether such a thing is neccessary when we have Paragonwiki, I'd recommend considering the question that goes along with any wiki - Namely, how do you look for something in the repository when you don't know what you're looking for in the first place? The biggest failing of any wiki is that it's hard to just browse for information like you can browse through a book.

A sourcebook or "Handbook of the Paragon City Universe" would have its own uses as an additional resource in conjunction with Paragonwiki and Vidiotmaps and Red Tomax and the rest.

Y'know, Slick has a point. This game's lore shouldn't be as hard to find as it is.

I just wanted to come back to this thread to clarify; I wasn't interested so much in a hard copy sourcebook but a softcopy that could be updated, just in a 'ready to print' format such as a PDF. Easier to maintain, easier to update and easier to deal with all round.

The lore isn't hard to find, it's just a matter of the way that it's presented that can provide a barrier.

S.