Eva Destruction

Yes. Yes it does, because in a lot of the new text the signal:noise ratio is rather low. In other cases, where the walls of text are actually relevant, it creates a less immersive experience.

It was abandoned the last time, even though a bunch of people spent money on it. It's going to be abandoned even if people spend more money on it.

Yeah, and shelling out real money for add-ons to a broken product is just going to convince the devs that it's fine as is.

It is especially annoying when the default "voice" for speech is that of the "average guy." You spend a lot of time saying things like "Um...." and "I guess so...." The character responses to Dillo's dialogue were especially grating. We are aspiring supervillains. We're better than the "average guy," at least in our minds; that's why we're villains.

Yes. Yes it has. Missions should contain just enough text to get the story across. I'm guilty of excessive wordiness in my own arcs, but I'd never even consider using even a fraction of the amount of text Graves and Twinshot throws at the player.

It also doesn't take into account the way people actually play the damn game. People team. Somebody clicks through the dialogue before everyone has a chance to read it. Now nobody on the team knows what's going on. People stealth. This triggers caption dialogue faster than you can read it, and then you get a new objective and you have no idea why. Not to mention the dialogue overload that ensues when you have multi-page conversations with four or five people before you get to an actual mission.

Yes, I was referring to video games in the same "snobbish" video game sense. The players of these games are assumed to be men, so the games are marketed toward men, so they become popular among men. When people joke about "the rare and elusive gamer chick" they're not referring to someone who plays Bejeweled on Facebook.

Pretty much none, but that's a different discussion. There is nothing about Sister P's backstory or what little personality she has that suggests she should be overtly sexy; in fact, her most famous comment suggests that she's annoyed by people viewing her as a sex object. It's far more likely that David wanted to draw boobs and hers were the only boobs available.

It's not surprising that men try to sidetrack any discussion about women's issues with an argument that basically translates to "But what about the men? We have problems too! Now shut up and let's go back to talking about us!"

See, I can make sweeping generalizations too.

Of course she is. Drag is based around exaggerated femininity. Which is kind of the whole point of this discussion, isn't it?

Men play video games because they're full of stuff men like because men play video games because they're full of stuff men like because men play video games. When trying to attract female players it's just assumed that women will accept "guy stuff" before men will accept "chick stuff." If a woman sees an action movie it's mostly assumed she wanted to see it. If a man sees a romantic comedy it's usually assumed his girlfriend dragged him to see it. So people market most things toward men and just assume women will either take it or leave it...even in a game that tells you to dress up a virtual Barbie doll before you're allowed to start punching people in the face.

These films sell because that is what little girls are told is "normal" and "desirable" female behavior. In romantic comedies women do stupid and funny and cute things to land a man, and get a happy ending, while in real life women do irresponsible and dangerous and financially and emotionally damaging things to get a man and end up unemployed with three kids from three different fathers, one of whom is abusive, one of whom is a deadbeat and one of whom is emotionally twelve, but it all comes from the same kind of mindset. You're supposed to have a man. You're supposed to be popular. You're supposed to be pretty. Most women don't find them offensive because they portray women successfully achieving all the rigid and unrealistic expectations that real women consistently fail at.

1: She's one of the best-developed characters in the game. Furthermore, her character development comes early in a player's CoV career. She's a sad figure but she never comes across as whiny like Scirocco does, and she's evil but not "lol, look at me I'm evil" like Mako and Black Scorpion and Recluse.

2: Goth chicks are apparently "hawt." And by "hawt," I of course mean widely fetishized. Incidentally, Desdemona wouldn't look at all out of place at a goth club.

We're forgetting the men because they aren't being sexualized. They are clothed in a way that says "I'm a superhero in the classic cape and tights sense, and I'm only wearing this skintight outfit because it's easier to draw" and posed in a way that says "I'm going to kick your ***" rather than "look at my boobs."

No, they're really not. "Butch" women still have puny girl arms despite spending hours swinging a giant battleaxe around and "feminine" men are pretty limited in their costume options if they don't want to look like roid monkeys right before a bodybuilding competition. And they look weird. And they still have to have typical "guy" hair.

If you look at the game narrative there are way more prominent male characters than prominent female ones. The premier superhero team has two women, four men, and one guy who isn't techinically part of the team but hangs out with them all the time and is incidentally also the only minority, and the premier supervillain "team" has one woman and four men. But it's ok, because most of their sidekicks are girls, right?

Except it couldn't have been. If it had, then, going with your example, medications created to treat diseases more common in women would use women as the baseline and be "scaled up" for men. But they're not.

In an action-oriented genre like superheroes, it's normal for men to appear strong. It should be normal for everyone to appear strong.

I'm personally not holding out any hope. The splash page and promo art we've gotten lately has shown a very specific view of female characters. Highlights include Mother Mayhem's boobs, Sister Psyche's boobs, Desdemona's boobs, Desdemona's butt, and Desdemona's boobs and butt at the same time, which requires a pose that, while technically possible, is far from heroic and isn't a pose anyone would strike for any reason other than to show off their boobs and butt at the same time. T&A sells, so they're milking it. Of course, the video game and superhero genres are so saturated with T&A that the lack thereof is its own selling point, but it's always safer to do what everybody else is doing.

Those are two options.

Vanessa DeVore possesses a centuries-old artifact and her powers are backed up by all her minions. That still doesn't excuse her suddenly getting this ability just because the writer had to ham-hand a conversation with her into the arc on ten minutes' notice, but it's still better than giving something similar to a nobody.

Besides, something that has always bothered me about giving NPCs "story-based" powers that can't be backed up by mechanics is that PCs will have different levels of resistance that can be backed up by mechanics and are conceptually fitting. Such as psi resistance. This is essentially the psionic equivalent of Reichsmann's "rocks fall, everybody" dies attack.

Actually, that whole shadow dimension thing could have been easily avoided if they had sorted out the CoX cosmology before making it central to any story lines. It also raises another question, of where exactly Infernal and Infernal and their demons come from, and the CoV arc with "our" Infernal's mom in it doesn't help matters.

War Earth is clearly an alternate universe, and I'd have to actually find out what those Underground Trial spoilers are before I decide whether it's an inconsistency or not. Even if it is, it could be written around.

The Center's super power is leadership. Let's keep it that way. I didn't like fighting Malta's directors and I wouldn't like to fight the Center.

No, and you don't need it to end with a fight against someone with AV level HP and damage either. Which it will, if we ever fight them. Which is why I didn't like fighting members of Malta's board of paranoid old men and why I wouldn't want to fight the Center.

Right, like the way every single new arc released in the last year has been geared toward 50s? Or how about that huge amount of content we've gotten lately that is geared toward level 30-49?

If your writers are truly creative they will find a way to tell this story while working within the existing canon. It'll make for a more cohesive game world in the end.

I firmly believe that both sides can co-exist. Neither side needs to dominate. In fact, they must coexist in a game like this, with a large chunk of the playerbase that puts so much emphasis on character, a large chunk that's content to roll up whatever the FotM is and farm AE until their eyes bleed, and an even bigger chunk that falls somewhere in between.

It was my understanding that RMT farmers share accounts and have quotas to meet. This would preclude using the market to generate inf as the guy on the next shift could then yoink all your stuff and sell it toward his quota.

I would honestly love to see some hard numbers as to how much inf has actually been sold by RMTers in the history of this game. I'm willing to bet it's a much smaller amount than the "RMTers are worse than farmers" crowd would like us to believe.

By sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalala I can't year you."

Yeah, I guess sometimes they don't listen.

Ah, you're hitting the cap long before you click out. Gotcha.

Ok, I see now that you have no understanding of how the game economy works.

And please, enlighten me on where you think the RMTers get their inf from. It should be good for a laugh.

Because her costume seems to have been specifically designed to look good on a booth babe.

Seriously? Yeah yeah, it's Oranbega. But the map itself is tiny and linear, and there are no blinkies hiding in the stupidest places. No, I didn't find the exit either, but still, of all the things to complain about.

If the overall arc levels up with you, I'm fine with it. If it's all lowbie, then yeah, annoying. We have enough lowbie content.

Sister Psyche seems to be permanently frozen in that ***-sticking-out pose with that permanent look of shocked horror on her face. This furthers my theory that she is lying about all that mind-riding stuff keeping her body young and the decades of plastic surgery are starting to catch up with her.

Edit: Oh, and BAB is on the splash screen, so I guess he's still in the running to die even though he's not a member of the FP. My money's on him again.

If you use the market, farming does affect you. AE farmers are pumping inf into the system at an exorbitant rate. Unless you somehow manage to play in a vacuum, any action large numbers of other players take affects you.

No rewards means no tickets.

Aaaand, we made it to page two before someone brought up that dead horse. Here's a thought for ya...where do you think RMTers get their inf? Hmmm?

This is exactly what they're doing. The BAF is the worst example of it, but the clone arcs and Vincent Ross are also pretty bad. Another problem is that these mechanics are simply overused. They are like a spice -- use a little bit of the right one and they can make a good story even better, but use too much and the whole thing just tastes like a million conversations strung together. Can I just click the blinky without talking to it, please? Thanks.

It's even worse now that you can beat him up in a tip mission before you do the arc. Why would I be scared of someone I just kicked that tar out of?

Some people play CoH this way too. That's why we have mobs everywhere waiting to be killed and why killing them gives you XP.

Yes, and if the CoH story wasn't important than why bother having arcs? Why not just string together a bunch of paper missions? They'll get you to 50 just as well as running arcs will.

Incidentally, I have never played a tabletop RPG where we never got into a fight. Even though combat wasn't the focus, it did happen. Video games are more limited though, in that you can't reward a player for "good roleplaying." You must progress through killing things. But that doesn't mean that killing the things shouldn't serve a narrative.

I've been asking for that for months.

By that logic D&D isn't an RPG either, since you can just go around smashing orcs and taking their stuff and acting completely out of character.