Does anyone here even LIKE comic books?
By
Adelie,
Posted on: 2011-01-13 16:15 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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i did bug for guitars to be used as war maces based entirely in haruko, the jacket would be an issue as well, nothign quite fits her jacket. i dunno if the review entirely gets it, flcl does actually mean something, just nothing that happens directly onscreen, its all about gibberish that makes sense.
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Originally Posted by seebs
I once read an extremely accurate review of FLCL that highlighted this.
Excerpt: I have watched the show, and I have read the review, and the review is a good way of determining whether or not you will like the show. Which causes me to realize: It would be awesome to do a FLCL-inspired character. But when will we get Incoherence Control and Vespa Assault sets so I can make the character properly? |
Just going to hit on the main points.
- The community here is no better or worse than the community in any other MMO I've played, including WoW.
- I read comics back in high school and for a few years thereafter. I gave it up when they went into reruns. I started picking up the JMS issues of Superman and Wonder Woman but I've been out of the habit of reading comics too long and have fallen behind. I ran a tabletop supers game for many years and across several rules systems (V&V, Champions, Superworld, GURPS) because I like the flexibility in character types and literary themes. City does a reasonable job of portraying a comic universe; part of that means allowing character conceptions that aren't going to work for everyone. The solution to that is also the solution to....
- ...getting bent out of shape over the lack of "real" gender-neutral pronouns in English. People who are annoyed by the generic use of the masculine pronouns should be annoyed at every opportunity, if only because it's fun to watch them boil. Alternately, they could heed the advice of Marcus Aurelius: "If we are troubled by any external thing it is not the thing itself which troubles us but merely our estimation of it, and this we are free to revoke at any time." Or the short version by Don Henley and Glenn Frey: "GET OVER IT".
- I don't as a rule correct peoples' bios. I just laugh at them, sometimes "out loud", i.e. in chat.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
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Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
To elaborate, I didn't just play the JLA: Act of God card lightly.I feel it's quite appropriate to what you always seemed to champion and part of what's wrong with the game: Blue Blue powered down, useless and ineffectual with his ideal **** upon. A gigantic swooning love letter to how 'awsum' Bat-Scrapper is while basically flipping off the Atom, Martian Manhunter, the Flash and other heroes. A massive mishandling of a cool idea that had potential.
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Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things
I'm sorry, it looked like you needed that.
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They works way better then using he and his all the time. If I'm having a email conversation with someone about a third party and that someone is throwing he and his all over the place, I make then assumption the 3rd party is a man. If they were being used instead, it would be easier to tell the person I'm communicating with doesn't know the gender of the third party.|
Originally Posted by Rodion
To be honest, I find them distracting and silly. A better choice is the much more naturalistic third-person plural, "they." It already enjoys wide currency, and though it is not (currently) grammatically correct, because of the disagreement in number, language is all about utility,flexibility and change.
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They works great for phone calls, "Excuse me, I'm looking for the owner, can you tell me if they are in" works way better then "Excuse me, I'm looking for the owner can you tell me if he is in?". If the buisness owner is a woman and you are looking to sell something or apply for a job, getting the gender wrong starts the whole process off on the wrong foot.
Having to enjoy western styled comic books is not a pre-requisite for subscribing to a superhero themed MMO. Having money is.
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The ironic asymmetry here is that I can't point to what you champion as being bad for the game, because the game doesn't contain anything you champion. Conversely, I can't point to the best examples of what I champion as being good for the game, precisely because it does.|
Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
To elaborate, I didn't just play the JLA: Act of God card lightly.
I feel it's quite appropriate to what you always seemed to champion and part of what's wrong with the game: Blue Blue powered down, useless and ineffectual with his ideal **** upon. A gigantic swooning love letter to how 'awsum' Bat-Scrapper is while basically flipping off the Atom, Martian Manhunter, the Flash and other heroes. A massive mishandling of a cool idea that had potential. |
But I'm ok with that.
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I can never totally trust someone who doens't like capes and spandex |
Originally Posted by baron_inferno
Having to enjoy western styled comic books is not a pre-requisite for subscribing to a superhero themed MMO.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Unfortunately, that character was probably in violation of copyright.|
Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
The best character I have ever seen in this game was Time-Travelling Teddy Roosevelt FROM SPACE. Seriously the best thing ever.
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I believe that's Edison in the time chair in the background.
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Originally Posted by Jade_Dragon
Seriously, you can explain any background in this game. Call it alternate universes, or clones, or deals with the devil. It's not like those kinds of things never happen in comic books.
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Here's a fun little story about my main, Lady Arcana. When I first rolled her my knowledge of the game's backstory was extremely rudimentary, and because she was my first character, I knew exactly zip about the game itself (my brother's first character was actually called "Patient Zero" and that set up a very funny moment when I first got the mission "find Patient Zero"). I did decide to invent a backstory and write a bio for her. I decided that, having read the origins section of the manual and wanting to have a little fun with that, that she would be the result of a secret experiment to combine magical energy and Rikti technological portals as part of some vague skunk works project (thus basically making her technically a magic/tech origin in defiance of the partitions: I selected magic). Over time, I refined that concept: she became someone from an alternate dimension where the Rikti had won the war, and these experiments were a last ditch effort to make magically infused soldiers to fight the Rikti. The experiments were trying to find a compatible person that could survive the experiments, so they found a suitable target and cloned her over and over again so they could reuse her. However, instead of the experiments destroying each test subject like they thought, they were actually transporting them to alternate dimensions. My character was one such experimental clone. I made the ultimate source of these experiments the only corporate entity I was really aware of at the time: Crey.
I thought that was pretty original, at least at the time. And then, of course, I ran the Revenant arc. Which is about Crey using cloning technology to make a super soldier army of Paragon Protectors. Of course, if you're going to use cloning in your backstory, you have to expect that's going to come up in the game some time, and Crey is the obvious target for conspiracy plots. What's that you say? Crey was experimenting with Rikti technoloogy also? And trying to replicate portal technology? Hmm. Well, I guess that could also be a coincidence.
Then CoX introduced doppleganger technology, and now there's a mission in which I meet an alternate version of me from an alternate dimension hunting down an evil clone version of me. This all meshes so well with the backstory I invented for my character over six years ago that its actually really really odd. I wonder now how many people put magic, Crey, Rikti, portal technology, alternate dimensions, cloning technology and multiple duplicate selves into their backstories and are now having the same sort of odd feeling I'm having. Maybe magically infused portal generated alternate dimension displaced Crey experimental clone copy is just a really obvious comic book origin.
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This is definitely me. We all play the game the way we like. I like best about COH that I can be fighting all sorts of things and no I do not care if they are super villains. I like the fight mechanics in this game, I like the stories people come up with. I do not read comic books in real life, and yes I would be happy to play this exact game with a whole other theme. Deal with it lol
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Originally Posted by PoisonPen
You could replace the supervillains with orcs or Imperial stormtroopers and I doubt they would even notice the difference -- or care if they did.
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What I sometimes wonder about some types of roleplay is whether some groups prefer not to acknowledge being one of many thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of heroes living in Paragon. Not that that's enough to handle the crime problem--anecdotal evidence indicates that villainous minions outnumber Earth's ant population.
Anyway, in this sort of world, it would only be so long before Lindsay Lohan, Marilyn Manson, John Waters, the Octomom, the cast of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, and this girl ended up with super powers. Look around any major city, picture what would happen if 1 out of every 20 people turned supe, and soon you'll have a whole worth of costumed crazies trying to out-promote each other.
And that's just talking about the humans. Let's be real for just a second here. We all got to this message board via the internet. We know that technology can be used for many wonderful things. But generally speaking people who hide in their basements building robots would NOT be building war robots. What they would be building cannot be posted here but is imminently linked to the statement about the internet.
Even the "mainline" super hero comics get this and showcase it from time to time. X-Factor has a hero named "Strong Guy."
Overall point: being a hero loses its dramatic-sunset-posing when the whole population are heroes. Suddenly even regular people are running around in overtight spandex (luckily our secondary mutations also make us all smoking hot!) If you want to ignore that very realistic consequence of a "city of heroes," that's fine, but don't throw out insults about stupid names or concepts just because everyone doesn't want to throw their shoulders back dramatically while a lamenting lost planets and murdered parents.
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Well, I can only speak to it from the side of villains, because I don't do a lot of heavy group RPing with my handful of heroes, but we generally operated on the assumption that there were thousands of heroes in Paragon, which was a large damper on how we would play in-game actions. |
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
What I sometimes wonder about some types of roleplay is whether some groups prefer not to acknowledge being one of many thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of heroes living in Paragon.
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This excuse, for instance, is how we explained fighting the same heroes (like the Phalanx and the Vidicators) over and over again - we would always pull the killing blow, or be thwarted the killing blow, so that the hero would live to fight again. If we actually went around killing heroes, instead of just "defeating" them, we'd quickly have the entirety of Paragon's hero population descending upon us to put us out of commission - permanently.
As powerful as we presented ourselves (at our height, we claimed to be on par with groups like the Council and Crey), we never claimed the power to take on a thousand heroes ourselves (eight, sure - we proved our ability to do that in game when we completed the LRSF.)
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I tend to take a middle ground, there are a LOT of heroes in Paragon City, but only a handful who are top tier heroes (i.e. level 50).
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Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
What I sometimes wonder about some types of roleplay is whether some groups prefer not to acknowledge being one of many thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of heroes living in Paragon. Not that that's enough to handle the crime problem--anecdotal evidence indicates that villainous minions outnumber Earth's ant population.
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I think that's just a standard conceit of MMORPGs. Why is Fantasy-ville being threatened by Level 2 goblins if there's Level 100 guards hanging around the gates all day and the "hero" population outnumbers the farmers & merchants 2000:1? Doesn't do you any good to think about it.
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Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
What I sometimes wonder about some types of roleplay is whether some groups prefer not to acknowledge being one of many thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of heroes living in Paragon.
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The Blue King comics claimed there were about 5-6,000 heroes in "the area", which might be anything from Paragon City to the state of Rhode Island (which in real life has a population of about a million). Of course, the same issue abused the legal system like a red-headed stepchild so make of that what you will.
I don't think it's any more reasonable to assume there are thousands of heroes in the city than it is to assume there are literally Skulls (etc.) on every street corner mugging someone.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
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And that's what I love about my language (Portuguese): everything has sex in it. It is like one big grammatical orgy with a few asexual entities thrown into the mix to spice it up. These last ones get a tag of male or female added to them when differentiation is needed, i.e. they swing both ways.|
Originally Posted by KayJMM
Portuguese also has gender for almost everything... using some of your examples:
Table = female Chair = female Knife = female Fork = male But then... there is also words that have versions for both genders and a few neutral... Knight has the two versions Ninja is neutral And I probably could make this even weirder... but enough about portuguese... |
Also, by default everything is treated as male. No one gets offended and strangely, it does not dehumanize anyone or makes them feel less as people. That's what our misogynist, homophobic and racist society framework is for. I mean women only got formally recognized as something other than a lesser human in 1867 and only started voting as of 1931 (but only if they had a graduate degree). Sexual minorities(Is it PC to call them minorities?) aren't recognized as humans and are frequently the target of violent hate crimes. And I do mean violent. As in beatings to death. And lets not forget the ever present racism, as it waxes and wanes permanently, spreading its oily hateful tendrils insidiously everywhere.
Oh, by the way, how myopic is it, when striving for the usage of other gender neutral pronouns in English other than "they" and "their", to chose TWO words instead of just one? Is the PC crowd just trying to confuse others or are they secretly sniggering when other people's backs are turned to them? Indulging in gleeful delight as they go "SUCKA!"?
I love comic books.
Rabbits & Hares:Blue (Mind/Emp Controller)Maroon (Rad/Thermal Corruptor)and one of each AT all at 50
MA Arcs: Apples of Contention - 3184; Zen & Relaxation - 35392; Tears of Leviathan - 121733 | All posts are rated "R" for "R-r-rrrrr, baby!"|Now, and this is very important... do you want a hug? COH Faces @Blue Rabbit
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Well, the game canon doesn't seemed to be setup as there being as many heroes as there are players. However, if you're going to RP, you have two choices...either you keep it within your small group, or you make more consessions to account for so many players.|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
What I sometimes wonder about some types of roleplay is whether some groups prefer not to acknowledge being one of many thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of heroes living in Paragon. Not that that's enough to handle the crime problem--anecdotal evidence indicates that villainous minions outnumber Earth's ant population.
Anyway, in this sort of world, it would only be so long before Lindsay Lohan, Marilyn Manson, John Waters, the Octomom, the cast of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, and this girl ended up with super powers. Look around any major city, picture what would happen if 1 out of every 20 people turned supe, and soon you'll have a whole worth of costumed crazies trying to out-promote each other. And that's just talking about the humans. Let's be real for just a second here. We all got to this message board via the internet. We know that technology can be used for many wonderful things. But generally speaking people who hide in their basements building robots would NOT be building war robots. What they would be building cannot be posted here but is imminently linked to the statement about the internet. Even the "mainline" super hero comics get this and showcase it from time to time. X-Factor has a hero named "Strong Guy." Overall point: being a hero loses its dramatic-sunset-posing when the whole population are heroes. Suddenly even regular people are running around in overtight spandex (luckily our secondary mutations also make us all smoking hot!) If you want to ignore that very realistic consequence of a "city of heroes," that's fine, but don't throw out insults about stupid names or concepts just because everyone doesn't want to throw their shoulders back dramatically while a lamenting lost planets and murdered parents. |
Small inclusive groups of 8 players can RP that they were in fact the ones to defeat Honoree in the LGTF. If you're going to RP with everyone who plays CoH however, you have to overlook this a bit.
I also figure that, no, there isn't crime on every corner of the city, that you see in game, or else you're character would be so busy, you'd wonder why they aren't just joining the police force and going.
Now of course being an MMO, there has to be crime on every corner so every player has the opportunity to do the same things.
As for Strong Guy, it's not that there weren't better names for him, that's just the name he picked for himself in the middle of a press conference, and even his team facepalmed on it.
Strong Guy isn't exactly the brightest, and tended to be quite laid back and not usually that serious.He's also a mutant who coined the term GeeCee's instead of the term genetically challenged, another term the team facepalmed on.
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The BrandX Collection
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Originally Posted by Venture
I don't think it's any more reasonable to assume there are thousands of heroes in the city than it is to assume there are literally Skulls (etc.) on every street corner mugging someone.
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The only problem is, I've met them. I mean, I can see why someone would want to pretend there are only a couple of thousand heroes. But on a busy night in Atlas, there might be 100 people in that area, and I might recognize 5 if I'm especially lucky. Without actually counting, I'd guess I personally have 30 heroes on Virtue. That adds up to... a WHOLE lot of heroes over the course of a super career.
The number of super powered people in general, though, is staggering. A single mission at 0x8 yields about 16 x 20 = 320. In the space of 10 missions, I'd have encounter about 3,200 costumed minions of some kind. Maybe the whole thing isn't meant to be taken literally; but if it isn't, why are some people so worked up about other players they have to ignore and not the fact that game environment itself has to be explained away?
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I'd say you can't take everything on face value. Beat-em-up games, which is what City of Heroes essentially is, simply require many, many faceless enemies just to provide gameplay, so you're bound to see thousands of them show up even from groups that shouldn't really have that many members (the Knives of Artemis description says there are 100 of them world-wide).|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
The number of super powered people in general, though, is staggering. A single mission at 0x8 yields about 16 x 20 = 320. In the space of 10 missions, I'd have encounter about 3,200 costumed minions of some kind. Maybe the whole thing isn't meant to be taken literally; but if it isn't, why are some people so worked up about other players they have to ignore and not the fact that game environment itself has to be explained away?
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However, note also that our heroes never eat, sleep or poop, or indeed even sit down, that there are bus stations but no buses, that we heal from axe and gunshot wounds and grenade blasts by walking it off, that civilians are completely invulnerable and largely untouchable, and you'll soon realise that the in-game reality doesn't really have many pretentions to even fictional realism. The number of heroes and villains we meet is dictated by game necessity, but shouldn't be taken as canon in terms of storyline.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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It's usually considered "bad form" to correct someone's BIO. Not everyone is as skilled with the English language as you may be.|
Originally Posted by PoisonPen
The final straw for me may have been the exchange I had last night with a "50" where I sent hir a message that sie had a few typos in hir background, and helpfully provided the corrections. Sie replied that if sie wanted someone to edit hir background text sie would ask over Global, and that I was now welcomed to (and I quote) "iggy." I was taken aback by the sheer sour rudeness, and it ruined all my sense of enjoyment for the evening.
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Except... Well, I'm now going to point that one should not throw stones when one lives in a glass house, hence the highlighted words from your last paragraph.
If you're going to dictate English usage to someone, then you should use it correctly yourself.
@FloatingFatMan
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
@FFM... you didn't just go there.
Especially when about half the posts on this thread have been over those 2 gender neutral pronoun....
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I didn't bother reading the entirety of the thread. |
Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU
@FFM... you didn't just go there.
Especially when about half the posts on this thread have been over those 2 gender neutral pronoun.... |
As for "going there", why not? He's ragging on someone for poor grammar, then uses nonesense PC "words" that aren't even real.
@FloatingFatMan
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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Although the words are not in common usage, they are still as "real" as any other modern word (reading the rest of the thread and the confusion that has arisen would have clarified that for you)|
Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
It's usually considered "bad form" to correct someone's BIO. Not everyone is as skilled with the English language as you may be.
Except... Well, I'm now going to point that one should not throw stones when one lives in a glass house, hence the highlighted words from your last paragraph. If you're going to dictate English usage to someone, then you should use it correctly yourself. |
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Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
I didn't bother reading the entirety of the thread.
As for "going there", why not? He's ragging on someone for poor grammar, then uses nonesense PC "words" that aren't even real. |
No offense meant here FFM, but I think that if you bothered to read most of the other thread then pretty much EVERY single point you have made so far in this thread has been answered already.
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No, they are only "real" if one considers any made-up word to be real. The Oxford English dictionary defines "sie" as "tow or oakum used for caulking" or "to strain". "hir" can't be found at all.
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Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU
Although the words are not in common usage, they are still as "real" as any other modern word (reading the rest of the thread and the confusion that has arisen would have clarified that for you)
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@Doctor Gemini
Arc #271637 - Welcome to M.A.G.I. - An alternative first story arc for magic origin heroes. At Hero Registration you heard the jokes about Azuria always losing things. When she loses the entire M.A.G.I. vault, you are chosen to find it.
If Thor and Loki are allowed into the superhero comic world I don't see why ogres wouldn't be.
@True Metal
Co-leader of Callous Crew SG. Based on Union server.