Olantern

Additional terrible idea:

Lawyers and Lawsuits Online, in which characters write briefs and argue a lot. The scariest thing about this idea is that a few years back, someone suggested this as a serious idea.

It's discussions like the ones going on in this thread that convinced the developers that the players are a bunch of childish whiners who don't know what's good for themselves. The more people complain about things like this, more we get things like, "Of course the players want more mega-raids; the people who don't are just a bunch of whiners" (feel free to insert whatever development priority you dislike for "mega-raids" there if you are a raid fan in order to understand the sense of the sentence).

Maybe it's the involvement of money, even if people aren't actually spending it. Personally, if something isn't costing me anything (and this won't, if I don't buy it), I don't see what there is to be upset about.

I'm just posting to say that I hate TVTropes; it has rendered it impossible to write fiction for geeks.

Also, Antimatter's reactors are clearly not nuclear, but solar. This is why it's perpetually dark around them; they're sucking in all the sunlight.*

Positron has designed something similar, but his is powered by his own hair, rendering it of questionable utility.




*Note for the hard of thinking: Yes, I know solar power does not work that way. Lighten up, people.

Plants that move or make noise. This is just one of the reasons I find the Devouring Earth not only the most evil of factions but utterly terrifying as well.

It's really, really hard for me to imagine Wild Cards as anything but prose for a variety of reasons.

Earlier this year, when you couldn't take a step without tripping over someone talking about the HBO production of Game of Thrones, I wondered what Wild Cards would be like were that network to present it. I decided that it would lose a lot of the characterization and contradictions that make it good. I can imagine an HBO series dealing with, say, prejudice (typified by stories about Joker movements in Wild Cards, but seen elsewhere in the series, too), or with Cap'n Trips trying to grapple with his disillusionment, but I can't imagine one where a character asks, "Why are we still obsessed with the Sixties?" or one where The Radical turns out as unabashedly evil as he is. Other production sources would have other preoccupations that would shape and limit what they'd make into a Wild Cards movie. Unless it's somehow produced by a dozen different production units, some of them led by people who won't speak to each other for hostility yet still manage to create a single, coherent narrative, I don't see anything special coming out of this. There are some things that are just much, much easier to do in certain media.

At last, something that treats the Batman with the level of gravity he deserves!

With Help, an open, cross-zone channel, becoming some players' medium of choice, and with players who haven't invested (in a literal sense) in the community coming in as free players (and importing the behavioral norms of other communities with them), I've seen a bit more ugliness in-game than I had for years, but not much more.

The forums, on the other hand, are more savage and cynical than they have been since ED. And unlike the days of ED, we don't have a group of steady, experienced posters trying to calm things down. Instead, the established community members, with only a few exceptions continue to rant and rave about how terrible the game is, whether that means gameplay design or background writing or art direction or what-have-you. For instance, recently, I saw a player come right out and claim in no uncertain terms that a developer was lying. The last time I saw that sort of thing was back in the days of Statesman-hate, and I never saw anyone post anything so blatantly hostile as a direct response to one of his posts in the same thread. The way players treat each other on the forums is even worse.

It continues to astonish me that people claim this is such a "wonderful" community when it's impossible to suggest the slightest positivity without being called stupid or a dev apologist or dishonest, and where every single announcement or positive reaction is accompanied by a jaded, "This is a terrible idea!" from the rest of the players. The only place I see any positivity at all any more is the Art forum and occasional discussions of certain artists on the Comic Culture board. Things have gotten really, really ugly around here.

Ah, I was missing "talk to Devil Girl again." Thanks very much.

As mentioned in the recent Intrepid Informer dev interview piece, the Halloween Trial is supposed to contain an extra boss (or perhaps Elite Boss; I can't recall) as an "easter egg." How the heck do you get this thing to spawn? I've been told you need to speak to the NPC Devil Girl and then to the Bored Guy and Bored Girl, persuading them to eat the candy, but what else must be done? There must be more to it than that, since I have never seen the boss. Is this faction-limited, i.e., only accessible if you're playing the trial on a villain?

Two thoughts on this thread:

Re: Doom, what I've always liked about him is that while he is unquestionably a villain, in the sense that he's an antagonist to the protagonists of the story, and while he does certainly have wicked qualities, he also has good ones. Even if you hold to ideas of absolute good and evil, "hero" and "villain" do not necessarily equate to "good" and "evil" in every story, all of the time. Doom's redeeming qualities don't necessarily make him a "good guy," but they do make him easy to relate to. Note that I tend to lean toward the '80's/'90's Triumph and Torment view of Doom, the quasi-noble character, rather than Mark Waid's "he's an evil, self-delusional guy, self-delusion is inherently evil, and unless you're Green Arrow, you, reader, are self-delusional" interpretation that was apparently the last version of him to make a big splash. To me, what Waid told his readers should make them hate Doom is exactly what I like about him; everyone has egocentric moments now and then, and I don't believe that makes everyone a bad person (Waid has stated, in his writings on Irredeemable, that he does).

This brings me to point #2. Given the prevalence of a kind of jaded cynicism among geekdom, including comic fans, the question of "Why are redeemed villains so much more popular than fallen heroes?" is an excellent one. One would think, given how eager fans seem to see things fail and how quick they are to suspect ulterior motives, that they'd enjoy seeing heroes inevitably stumble, not villains rising above themselves. Anyone have any theories on this? (I have several, but I'm not convinced by any of them yet.)

Another trial in the continuing polemic that is Praetoria, a.k.a., "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, wretch!"-land. This one will presumably have some thinly-veiled references to real-world media outlets, and I suspect I can predict Maelstrom's dialogue now ... All that said, it might still be mechanically interesting, and new Incarnate abilities might have some potential. Also, "Media Blitz" is not only funny, but also one of the best issue titles we've had in a long time!

I don't pretend to have an answer on this, except to state that I'm someone who doesn't believe morality is genetically or physically determined. However, I get the impression that in educated professions, the attitude is coming back (if, indeed, it ever went away) that everything anyone might consider "wrong" or even just "unpleasant" is just a mental disease or defect that can be treated through psychotherapy or medication. (I say "educated professions" because I see this belief from lawyers, especially criminal defense lawyers, legal aid attorneys [those who represent poor people or social causes], and legal academics, as well as from physicians of a wide variety of stripes. Obviously, it isn't a universal attitude.) More often, I see it applied in defining personality traits, such as a short temper, as mental illnesses, than in defining morality that way. This whole question may be a moot point, since those who would be most likely to be able to develop a treatment for "genetic evil" are also those least likely to accept the notion of "evil" as a valid concept, anyway.

For an interesting and nuanced discussion of whether a "defect" affects one's identity, consider Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark. Particularly appropriate for this discussion is the ultimate fate of the hero's rival. (SPOILER: While the future society of this book is much like that of the real world, it appears that crime is treated as a mental illness.)