Ironik
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Quote:I'm not trying to force comic book characters into CoH molds, I'm just pointing to the ones which are most like the ATs here. As I said before, it's not a one-for-one translation from the medium of comics to the medium of MMOs. Based on what I've seen, the original intent of the designers *was* to allow people to mix-and-match powers to more closely emulate the comic book characters, but they fell back on classic MMO design. The explanation given at the time was that people were unintentionally gimping themselves by choosing power combinations which were weaker. I don't know how true that is since it's something that can be designed around if you aren't hewing *too* closely to the source material.Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
No. Both of those characters can deal substantial damage.
You'd have to be pretty ignorant of the character to think Juggernaut is low damage. He's fought and beaten guys like Thor and Hulk. He's well over the 100 ton range of strength.
And Ben Grim's very catchphrase is "It's clobberin' time!"
Not "It's time for me to stand here and be a decoy while Reed does the fighting".
I've listed the characters who are the closest to how CoH Tankers are currently. They're all joke characters or obscure nobodies because melee fighters who are poor at fighting aren't something most people want to read about. And if the popularity of Tankers versus Brutes or Scrappers is any indication, most people don't want to play one either.
Even if you point to specific, brief examples of "tanking" in comic, the fact is, at times, almost every super hero takes a hit for another. I can point you to panel of the Human Torch taking a hit for Iceman. It does NOT mean that is their primary focus above all they spend an entire fight doing to the point they're nigh useless for anything else.
Stop trying force comic characters into a stupid nonsensical design as rodeo clowns. That is the mistake the devs made. If you're going to evoke the genre, do right by it. They should have been trying to design the game to serve the needs of the genre instead of what they did in many cases, including Tankers. They beat the genre with a hammer and then mashed the square peg into their round design hole just to suit their ridiculous trinity and outdated fantasy gaming mechanics.
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The Thing and Juggernaut act primarily as Tanks most of the time. Yes, they can hit quite hard, but then so do our Tanks. Naturally, this varies by writer as he bends the character and the world to suit the needs of his story, but at the end of the day Juggernaut is a Tank, as is The Thing. Blob is even more so. I never said they were low damage, just that they act more like Bricks than Blasters. But as others have pointed out, The Thing frequently acts as the damage sponge, stalling the Big Bad until the Controller/Mastermind/Scrapper Mr. Fantastic can finish him off. -
Quote:The thing is, though, a good lawyer can argue the point that Mortimer was parody and nothing more. Larger issues of satire aside, if the character is *designed* as a parody -- and it pretty clearly was -- it doesn't matter a whit what *else* he's used for. Lots of people saw it as parody, so it basically comes down to who's arguing the case and the judge's leaning.Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
Careful not to slip into the "satire vs parody" issue there. Parody is considered "fair use." Satire is not. While volumes can be written trying to specify the difference between the two, the simplest (over)generalization I can think of is this:Quote:
Originally Posted by Ironik
My point is that companies have lost similar suits with even fewer points of overlap with existing characters. Heck, even Berke Breathed lost to Disney because his Mortimer Mouse was too closely related to Mickey, and he could make a fair point that he was protected under the parody clause of fair use.
Parody pokes fun at the original subject matter. It is protected fair use.
Satire targets larger social issues. It is not.
Often the two overlap.
Mortimer Mouse would often lambast political figures and ridicule social issues. Berkeley Breathed also created Mortimer's backstory to stress the parody of the character and the Disney conglomerate, so he tried to blend "parody" and "satire" together.
As Chase illustrates (thus saving me the trouble of looking at my old case law notes) with the John Deere suit about the color green, similar cases have been won and lost on far sketchier and tenuous arguments. Law doesn't always have to make sense, it just has to be convincing to the judge or jury on the day.
Radiolab did a piece on Marvel arguing which of their characters were "dolls" and which were "toys". Which is, of course, a completely ridiculous argument to the layman, since these characters are all dolls, but the terms "doll" and "toy" mean very specific and different things: a doll is a human, while a toy is not. It was vitally important for Marvel to distinguish between the two because it would save them tons of money each year. Anyone who is a fan of comic books in general and the X-Men in particular will enjoy this, I think. (Plus they talk about the larger issues of mutation and what is human.) And relevant to this discussion, characters such as Beast have far more human attributes than not, which means he's more doll than toy. But which side do you come down on? Human or monster? Doll or toy?
Check out the podcast to hear the incredibly interesting story.
You're right in that there doesn't seem to have been a lawsuit, just the threat of one. This actually happened while I was at Lexis-Nexis so we talked about it at lunch, so I'm probably conflating the two occurrences. My bad.Quote:Disney threatened to sue, then acknowledged that it may be fair use, but "they would be watching." If Mortimer's content strayed from the "parody" too much, then they'd pounce.
I never heard of an actual suit for this. A quick google search just turns up the threats and bluster. I was a big Breathed fan and I always assumed Mortimer's departure was more of "not worth the risk" of a lawsuit than an actual "lost a lawsuit." This is how much of this muscling gets around-- not because of an actual wrong, but because of the COST that defending your actions will bring you. I never dug into it far. Do you have a reference? I'd love the read.
The first few pages of this PDF sum it up pretty well. This is a pretty good read about cartoons and fair use. -
Quote:It's going to be Nerd.Originally Posted by AzureSkyCiel
Actually, to play on the "Yin Yang" thing... "Yin" in the "Yin Yang" daoist concept is the "Shadow side" it is the Masculine, the Manifest, and the overt to "Yang's" feminine, the unseen, and subtle...
So perhaps her hero name could be "Psychic Manifest"? Afterall, one of the big themes of her has been rising up and becoming a very overt force of psychic power. A contrast to Sister Psyche before her who was a controller that works in subtle details, or a contrast to Manicore who's nature is working in subtly and unseen aspects. -
Quote:It's going to be Yang.Originally Posted by Lazarillo
Poor girl still hasn't managed to pick out a code name?Quote:Originally Posted by DarkGob
Her name is Penelope Yin
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Quote:Hey, you added stuff!Originally Posted by Thunder Knight
Superman is certainly great at offense, but the role he serves in the team is often - by his own admission - the guy who takes the big hits because he knows he can take them better than his squishier comrades.
That, to me, is what makes Superman a Tanker. Not that he can't dish out the damage, because he can, but because he considers it his job to take the abuse that his teammates can't.
The thing is, though, in CoX, those teammates often can take the abuse (especially when those teammates are any of the other melee classes, or the EATs, but even "squishies" can softcap their defense with a little work), and that's even more the case when you're dealing with Incarnate powers. That wasn't how it originally was, but it's how the game stands now.
So the problem should be attacked from the point of view of "what is a Tanker's role in a game where almost everyone can take the big hits?" rather than oversimplifying it to "why don't Tankers do more damage?"
That's why I think the focus should be on better aggro management tools (and better endurance management to make sure their defenses stay up), not just more damage.
I agree that Tanks should be the premiere purveyors of aggro management. As I said earlier, when a Tank is in the room, everyone should be focused on him. I've also been a longtime proponent of more endurance, because keeping their toggles up is vital. I think the classic motto of "First in, last out" is perfect for the Tank. When the mission goes south and everyone needs to catch their breath or visit the hospital, when they get back the Tank should still be standing there, trading blows with the bad guys, keeping them engaged.
It's just that this is the ideal and it's hard to get there given so many variables in so many different situations. -
Quote:I don't think intent is all that important. Superman's only true limitation is that he can't be in two places at once. A Tanker in CoH can't emulate the offensive capabilities of Superman.Originally Posted by Thunder Knight
Superman is certainly great at offense, but the role he serves in the team is often - by his own admission - the guy who takes the big hits because he knows he can take them better than his squishier comrades.
That, to me, is what makes Superman a Tanker. Not that he can't dish out the damage, because he can, but because he considers it his job to take the abuse that his teammates can't.
I also think that Superman is a terrible character because of the ridiculous amount of power creep he's accumulated over the decades. Even when they depower him every once in a while during a reboot, he still bounces right back p to tank-mage status instantly. That's why they eventually said that he's extremely vulnerable to magic, because even kryptonite can't really affect him unless you're standing beside him. With his abilities, *why* would he ever get close?
When you get right down to it, he makes every other character redundant 99 times out of 100. Properly written, the guy is almost literally unstoppable in any conventional confrontation. He doesn't even need to be close to you to take you out. He can toss a pebble at you from 10 miles away and sever your spine. That would render your kryptonite dagger/bullets/suit of armor useless. In fact, having all those more-vulnerable characters is actually a detriment for Superman. He rescues people in trouble, and that's the surest way to draw him in close.
Contrast to the Thing, who is very much a Tank in the CoH sense. He can hit you pretty hard, but he's not going to pulp you into a fine red mist when he does so. He's not particularly agile and he can soak up a lot of damage. Beyond that he's not much of an offensive weapon. He can tear up a piece of asphalt and chuck it at you (which Tanks can do) and he can make someone so mad that they focus solely on him (ditto). -
Quote:My point is that companies have lost similar suits with even fewer points of overlap with existing characters. Heck, even Berke Breathed lost to Disney because his Mortimer Mouse was too closely related to Mickey, and he could make a fair point that he was protected under the parody clause of fair use.Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
Except none of the elements you listed are unique to those characters. Even Wolverine's claws appear in other (less notable) characters of other characters. (ok, I used to think the retractable claw part was a stretch, but some comic fan pointed out even THOSE in other characters. If they had something that was distinctively and uniquely belonging to one character (or many characters from one shop) this would have been an issue.)
So, it can be argued that while none of the indivudual pieces you see as "iconic" actually are, they can be assembled into an appearance that IS iconic. Cryptic/NC argued that the character creator was akin to Crayola being sued for pictures people made using their crayons, and if Marvel was hellbent on stopping the infringement, they should target the actual person putting it together.
That sounds *somewhat* weak because, let's face it-- they'd at LEAST still be facilitating infringement to some degree. It shouldn't get them off the hook. Except-- how do you prove someone is facilitating someone else's infringement without first proving that someone else WAS actually infringing? This was actually a big hangup for Marvel. You'd have to essentially include the original infringer in the suit. Imagine the bad press if Marvel had taken this route- suing fans for making homages to their favorite characters in CoH. It was NOT something they wanted to do. In fact, to give you an idea of Marvel's lawyers' competency, this IS one reason they had several negative rulings before the settlement. Rather than use screenshots of other player' infringements ingame as examples (and risk having to bring them in as parties) Marvel had its own investigators make the as-close-as-possible replicas of their characters in CoH. NCSoft pointed out that, since marvel authorized these agents, they weren't actually infringements- they were authorized reproductions. That evidence was dismissed.).
This wasn't the entirety of Marvel's argument (there were also claims that Statesman's likeness was too close to the Captain America trademark, for example) and NCSoft wasn't in a totally-safe position, but a sizable chunk of Marvel's complaint had proven to have issues in just the preliminaries. It was far from a clear and easy win for either party.
The technicalities Marvel lost on are irrelevant: Cryptic clearly designed many of the costumes and powersets to emulate existing characters. Marvel bungled their approach, but their underlying complaint was valid. -
One of the reasons I think Tanks should have one powerhouse attack (fairly early in the builds) is to more closely resemble actual tanks. Lots of armor, a powerful but slow-to-recharge gun.
I do agree that Tanks should be the primary -- if not only -- aggro magnets in the game. If a Brute and Blaster are playing alongside a Tank, most of the bad guys should go for the Tank. One of the coolest experiences I've had in the game was using my Inv/SS Tanker to go up against a pair of bosses after the rest of my team got wiped. I managed to stand toe-to-toe with them and whittle them down while the team cheered me on. Took a while, but it felt epic. In a similar situation, most of my Brutes tend to die. That's pretty much okay by me.
I know it's not perfect across all powersets, but I do think the general scaling of powers is pretty good. In terms of defense, it generally seems to go (low to high) Scrapper -> Brute -> Tanker, while damage output is reversed. In specific cases this isn't true, of course, but overall seems to be.
I guess I'm saying I don't see a need for sweeping changes, just minor tweaks.
Distracted by Hatfields & McCoys. -
Quote:There are plenty of Tanks in comics. Juggernaut, for example, or The Thing. The Hulk would be more akin to a Brute. Godlike characters such as Superman, Wonder Woman, Thor, Powergirl, Omni-Man, Invincible, The Sentry and so on would be Tank-Mages when translated to MMO terms. Or specifically in CoH jargon, Tank-Blaster-Controllers. Iron Man would be a Tank-Blaster, who also has Stamina issues. So he's basically a Tank with ranged PPP. Apollo of the Authority also has Stamina issues like Tanks here.Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
I shouldn't have to justify why a comic book super hero game should reflect the respect the conventions of the genre it claims to be in. Especially when the developers claim they're fans of said genre, but their design decisions demonstrate they don't really understand or care about it.
And "translated" is a key point here. Although CoH is inspired by superhero comics, it's an entirely different medium which has different demands on it. Books translated into movies aren't one-for-one matches, so there's no reason to expect a book translated into a game be identical.
Tanks are actually a pretty good compromise between the classic MMO brick and the "take a ton of punishment" characters listed above. Personally, I'd like for Tanks to have one really hard-hitting power, but then I've been arguing for that for every AT over the years. -
Quote:I don't think they are universal. I seem to recall these can be tweaked on an individual basis.Originally Posted by Rangle M. Down
Not everyone agrees with this idea, so it's not 100%. I personally don't think it's "necessary", nor a "fix" to tanks.
I also believe that aggro caps are universal across all character, so if you raise the aggro caps for Tanks, you would essentially be raising brute, scrapper, blaster, etc aggro caps too. -
Quote:Yeah, you misread that, FP. He said that Tolkien used an old word, therefore Blizzard could use it, too.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Not relevant. My response to the person I quoted was directed at his statement that implied that Blizzard was using the word in question before Tolkien revived it in his works. I never argued that the word didn't exist before 1954.
Original quote:
Your response:Quote:Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU
As already pointed out, a name from mythology is not copywrited. The only reason WoW can have orcs is because it was a very obscure alternative name for an ogre before Tolkien revived it.
Somehow you transposed "WoW" and "word". Mistakes happen. Not sure how you read it that way, but we've all had brain farts. What I *don't* understand is your continual insistence that your interpretation is correct. It's not.Quote:Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Before Tolkien revived it?
Before?
Are you serious?
You do realize Tolkien published his books back in 1954 right? And Dungeons and Dragon was using orcs since 1974.
Blizzard Entertainment didn't exist as a company until the 1990's, and it's Warcraft series was released in 1994. -
Quote:I used to be an editor at Lexis-Nexis and, based on my experience reading thousands of court cases, I have to think that Marvel's lawyers were particularly incompetent to lose that lawsuit. (For various shades of gray to the word "lose", of course.) There is no question in my mind that Cryptic deliberately designed specific powers and costume pieces after Marvel characters. Even in the earliest days of this game, making an entire team of X-Men was absurdly easy. The Wolverine claws, the Cyclops visor, Iceman's... everything. Heck, even both of Marvel Girl's outfits, the black & yellow one and the green miniskirt one, complete with her telepathic powers.Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
Well, in this case, Marvel has trademarked a specific appearance for a character, separate from the name "Thor" but this, IMHO, is where Marvel's biggest problem with their Lawsuit could have rested:
They trademarked a specific likeness for many of their characters (and even used that trademark in the upper corner of the comic)... but then they started adding specific artists' variations of the characters, their costumes, their color schemes, etc, that NCSoft could have taken the "nuclear option" against them- arguing that since Marvel varied the "likenesses" so much, they destroyed any distinctiveness in the process... something trademarks required.
--
Anyway, again here, we get confused when we talk about powers. Trademark is about likeness. It doesn't matter if your big overmuscled shirtless green giant wearing purple pants is a superstrength brute or a mind controller. He's still a trademark violation.
What's interesting to me is that some recent minor Marvel characters are *clearly* designed using the CoH costume creator. I'd have to go back and find them, but there have been a couple times over the past year where I've read a comic and immediately recognized an outfit from the CC. Of course, since I've made so many hundreds of characters, I'm always on the lookout for new costume ideas. -
Quote:I can do 130 characters in my sleep.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
And going by your signature, Shellback, you're going to be quite busy
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Aside from graphical improvements, I'm not too keen on revamping Kings Row.
The only thing I'd really change is to make Paladin a fight players should get invested in. Right now, there's no point to fighting him aside from the Reward Merit he drops. It's only stopping him from getting built that gives you any real rewards. But if Paladin gave up some serious goodies and only showed up every few weeks or so, it'd bring people to the zone.
I'd also ramp up the level in the back of the zone which used to connect to Galaxy City (no idea where that goes now) so that you can spend more time in the zone with no danger of outleveling stuff so quickly. -
I won't dispute that it would be nice to have *better* versions of what we have (I've long been on record as saying all the masks need to be gone over and improved), but SuperOz's OP made it sound like we don't have anything Pulpy. That's what I was responding to.
You can't make exact duplicates of The Shadow and Buck Rogers, but you can get pretty close. The Spirit and The Spider are pretty easy to recreate. I'd like better domino masks, too, but I'd prefer some new free stuff such as a variety of loincloths (long, short, tattered, leather, cloth, chainmail, etc.) than yet another variation on the fedora.
It'd be awesome to make a character who more closely resembles Solomon Kane with all his Puritan accouterments, but you can make a decent-enough facsimile at the moment. -
Quote:In a completely unrelated note, Positron bought a new Prius. And hired a chauffeur.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Estimated Value of Points: $375,000 - $600,000
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I would advise people not to get their panties in a bunch, but half of you don't get those, so....
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Quote:Yep. Some asymmetrical stuff would be boss.Originally Posted by QuarriosSoul
I'd be happy if we just had more patterns and chest emblems for the tights we have.
My wild-child character (Barbarian Boy) has needed a loincloth for about 7 years, so I'd like that. -
SuperOz, I'm curious what you consider Pulp/Golden Age costumes. Seems to me that most of the characters from the early days are pretty well represented in the costume creator.
Running down the list, I've made characters similar to:
G-8
Superman et al
Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon
The Shadow etc.
The Phantom etc.
The Barbarian set lets us make Conan/Kull/Bran and the new Retro Sci-Fi will let us make Captain Future and the like.
The only significant items missing are Doc Savage's torn shirt, Tarzan/Ka-Zar-style loincloths, jodhpurs and some clunky robot bits. -
Quote:Yes. Which sucked.Originally Posted by DreadShinobi
You're essentially describing pre i13 pvp.
If all powers did equal damage but retained their other effects, that might be a decent start. At the very least it would make things more fair.
But Travel Suppression is probably my single most-hated adition to this game. Not because it's in PvP. PvP was a waste of time from the get-go. But putting TS into the PvE side of the game? I don't know what idjit thought that was a good idea. It takes a good 50% of the fun out of playing. Being rooted for most powers is dumb (and pointless), but to be slowed for no reason? Idiotic. -
Quote:I know how to fix it and I've been saying it ever since PvP was first mentioned: everyone has to be equal. Full stop.Originally Posted by Coyote_Seven
Besides that, it's easy to say that it could be improved on just because other parts of the game were improved on. But the devil's always in the details. Exactly how is it supposed to be improved? The devs have already made several attempts to improve it and those have all pretty much failed. What more could they do? Give all PCs in PvP zones an equal number of hitpoints? I don't know!
Anyone who's played an FPS knows that's the only way to truly have workable PvP. Even in games like Team Fortress 2 where you have classes, each class has one specific advantage and one specific detriment to balance things out. And then you have equal teams. When they become imbalanced, there's a feature that switches a player to the opposite side to even things out again. Everyone has to be equal individually and each team has to be equal.
Problem is, almost no one wants that to happen in this game. People would have a fit if a Stalker and Tank had equal hit points and did equal damage, and people would further lament over their hero being forced to switch to villain and vice versa. I would happily play that way, but I doubt many others would.
All of which is why I say PvP doesn't fit MMOs unless the game was designed for it from Day One. -
Quote:Singling out a specific SG is not kosher.Originally Posted by Zwillinger
Loud noises are a deterrent to repeat offenders.
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Quote:I am going to get a stepladder and kick you in the shins so hard.Originally Posted by BackFire
Did someone say screenshots?
...oh wait, these are all made with EXISTING costume options! Can't wait for the new stuff!! -
Quote:I hope it's via slap fighting. I am fast and have big hands.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
They're making these T9 VIP assets available by another way later on
