If you haven't looked at the new Skulls, please do.

You want your nuclear wessels don't you?

Once agro'd, she runs off and he says:

Has this exchange been there a long time? Or was this recently added foreshadowing of the "new girlfriends" in i24? Serious question.

Nice deflection, but that does not change the fact that this MMO is based in a comics-style universe; and comics creators do nothing BUT recon, rewrite and blow **** up in an epic fashion - and they dont care if the fans like it or not, either. An example that comes to mind is Marvel's [fairly] recent doings re Asgard. If something like that was done to this game, you would have a coronary.

Those of us who actually read comics are used to it. We often dont like it, but we're used to it.

Hey, you are the one going Section Eight over a minor retcon to a relatively unimportant villain group, not me. Your posts generally tend toward bombast anyways, but just sayin'.

We'll probably be doing it until the developers bow the knee and agree to your demands. Which is probably gonna be a while, I'd guess.

I'm just trying to figure out this "Wictor" thing.

Oh god, please no. I'd really hate for this game to diverge so completely from super-hero stories into more broad Fantasy and Sci-fi stories and leave the idea of costumed crime fighting behind entirely.

It's one thing to have the option to fight gods at the end game, its another thing to only be able to fight gods.

eh, I'd much more prefer to just have more options to find "named" villains in the street than completely revamp perfectly fine gang-based groups into generic spandex guys.
.... Why?

I don't see why this would be necessary.

One - "That happens in comic book publishing all the time" is a crappy excuse for anything.

Two - Read what you wrote. The discontented forumites here "don't like it". The difference is that they have a forum for expressing their dislike whereas the comic book publishers are insulated by their letters pages.

Look at it this way - when comic books retcon things, angry fans write letters to the editor. ANGRY letters to the editor. So, this kvetching is just like comics, so that makes it okay, right? Standards work both ways. The only difference is that the comic book letters pages are a very heavily moderated forum compared to this relatively unmoderated one.

Besides, after reading some of the stuff posted to the DC forums when New 52 went into effect, I find the idea of comic book readers being calmly "oh, well, we're used to this sort of thing" to be a fairly amusing one.

Not to mention, taken to its logical conclusion, such an arrangement would prevent Natural origin characters to level past 20 as they're just "normal" folks after all.

A lot of people feel that way now, just because The Family have Tommy guns. I hope the future direction of the game doesn't indulge such people.

I've argued since 2005 that telling story well - without the inconsistencies and half-retcons - is a form of reward stream for players. It's just not one that this group of devs cares to use, and like any disruption in the reward stream, it merits criticism from the player base.

I'm glad we're getting to color our powers these days, and that we're getting so much of what we've asked for. But consistent lore is not one of the things we're getting yet.

Somehow, "things have always been bad like this, so they should continue to be bad like this" doesn't strike me as very compelling reasoning.

Slick here has apparently pre-hacked my brain and reworded everything I would put much more better.

Saves me having to try and post it

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

You'd be amazed how often people try and use it, though...

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Absolutely.
The thing is, if you expect either response to make any significant difference in editorial policy, my (pessimistic) opinion is that you're deluded. They'll keep doing things the way they want to, fan outcry be damned (or rather, simply ignored).

This is the second time someone has thrown an underhanded "The devs won't listen to the players" remark into the thread. I fail to understand how anyone could take that standpoint given the current developer team and what they've been doing for us.

If that's NOT what you mean, please correct me.

You're correct, mostly. This studio is actually pretty responsive to player input.

After eight years there are dozens of "hot buttons" that get pushed all of the time around here. For every one, there are a bunch of "usual suspects" that can be expected to have opinions on them. I am not unaware of the fact that I qualify as one of those "usual suspects". Given that, I don't expect anybody to take my opinions as any kind bellwether of the state of fandom.

Once in a while, "the usual suspects" bring an issue to light that attracts attention from the greater community. This is what happened with the CoT, for instance. When that happens, the studio sits up and takes notice; as they should. If I decide to weigh in on some topic like this one and anyone at the studio even notices, I expect that most of the time the notice amounts to "We can't ever make that Slickriptide happy, can we?" (I doubt that I'm even on their radar that far, frankly.)

However, if the topic generates interest from a dozen people who normally don't post at all, then I know I'm on to something real. I'm just as sure that Freitag and Zwillinger and the rest of the OCR team take note of those reactions and when Matt says "What are the native restless about today?" that one of them says "This topic here is generating discussion by more than the usual suspects. We should monitor where that one goes."

So, no. Nobody who comments here expects the studio to adjust the game to their liking and specification.

Occasionally, though, this sort of discussion does and has historically had an effect on the implementation of the game. It seldom derails and re-routes the train, but sometimes it results in the game taking a more player-oriented direction than what the initial target was intended to be.

Sometimes it's as simple as people complaining about having to "defeat" Sally to get a badge and an in-character article appearing in the Paragon Times that offers an explanation WHY Sally needs to be "defeated" over and above it being due to badge-awarding mechanics in the game engine.

Other times it has a larger effect like the CoT thing or the adjustements that some powers have had based on player feedback and such.

Bottom line, ;tldr summary - Nobody should expect the studio to act on their opinions but there's nothing wrong with civilly expressing your opinions or engaging in spirited debate about the proposed changes. Those debates do sometimes help the studio chart the course of the game's implementation.

I go by what I see.

Lots of people: Stop ignoring your own lore!
Current dev team: *continue ignoring own lore*

When do you expect this to change? Why?

Anyone may ask / demand answers of the gods. Getting them is another matter, and answers that aren't "no" still another.
The first of these is just shouting at the sky.

And on the numerous occasions when the Devs do acknowledge and utilize their extensive COH Lore, we get umpteen complaints about the people who don't like it/want it changed/hate how it affects their own personal stories in-game.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Oddly enough, I sort of believe that this current question about the Skulls is a case of the studio trying to make good on the lore. Someone said "Hey, these Petrovic guys are kind of under-developed story-wise. If we are dressing up King's Row and giving the Skulls a real story, then we should acknowledge that we have them written up as having ethnic roots."

The problem is that the "in your face" way they were going about it changed the character of the gang so drastically (in my opinion, anyway) that it became a different gang with the same name. That bothers some people and bothers others not at all. Your mileage may vary.

Is a level 7-20 gang that most people will skip through in a day really worth spending time and effort on making them subtly ethnic? I dunno. For my gameplay and immersion it is, but for the financial bottom line of the studio, it might not be.

I'll be happy in the end if they can swing it to acknowledge that they started life as an ethnic gang but became something bigger and possibly even better/stronger than they would have been if the War had not forced them to grow beyond their ethnic roots.

I'm with E-K on this one.

I think I encountered about 80% female Skulls. That ratio is weirdly high. (Unless there's a story reason for it that I didn't encounter.)

I don't know why the Skulls are getting revamped other than to modernize their look, but they are lacking that certain something which makes them stand out visually.

Seems to me they should make the Marrow brothers ethnic and everyone else just regular folks. Or maybe the various Bosses are all related to the Petrovics, while the soldiers are recruits from Paragon City. Because black people clearly aren't going to be Slavic. Well, not modern black people. ("I'll take obscure etymology joke for 300, Alex.")

TRENCHCOATS AND HOODIES! THEY NEED BLACK TRENCHCOATS AND HOODIES! Nothing says "I <3 death and stuff" like trenchcoats and hoodies!

Oh, also, as far as magajoule's comment: the real problem is also that devs are ignoring lore they further established... two issues ago I believe? Edit: though, on the note of their accents, I'm pretty sure the devs already said in the beta forums they were fixing it. And that's the only thing that out and out used to establish any of the none petrovich brothers as Slavic.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Maybe less than 245mb then