Olantern

Of all the bugs I've seen over the years, this was certainly the oddest. When I opened my character select screen for the new Exalted server for the first time ever last night, I saw that the first of the twelve slots was already filled with a character! It was named "nezz" and had supposedly been logged off for 4725 days, but it was definitely there and occupying the slot. Its costume displayed as a male model using the new "blank" costume creator model display, the one that looks like a man made of very shiny metal with glowing, yellow eyes. I don't recall if its map location was identified. When I tried to log in with this character to make sure someone wasn't fiddling with my account somehow (not sure how this could happen, aside from the game getting hacked), I received an error message. I was able to delete the character without difficulty. I then made a new character in the slot and played it through the tutorial and into Atlas Park without difficulty.

All my character displays and lists on the other servers seem to be displaying properly and normally, as of yesterday evening.

Today, shortly before the servers came down, I began making a second character on Exalted, though I didn't make it into the game before the servers went down. I noticed that when I was kicked back to the character select screen after being unable to enter the tutorial with the character whom I'd been creating, the costume for the character I'd made in my first Exalted slot was also displaying as the "choose your body type" model, though his name and location displayed correctly.

So far, I haven't seen anything game-breaking or even anything that affects my actual gameplay with these bugs, but in case they are signs of something more serious, I thought it worth posting about them to let other players and any OCR/dev folks cruising through know about them.

Thank you very much, Evil_Geko. You are my fifteenth-favorite litigator. (Sorry I couldn't rank you higher; I have a lot of friends who are litigators. )

Neat. You had plenty of stuff to cram in there and managed to cover it all in an intriguing way.

Aside from the fine demoediting and shot selection (as always), I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the unsung people who help out D_R by appearing in her videos of team events. Some of the most exciting shots in this trailer, for instance, were simply of teams moving in a fairly synchronized way around the Underground Trial. Thank you to D_R and all her helpers for another fine trailer. (And something to watch while I wait for the servers to open up.)

Statesman. Everyone loathes him, and most of it seems to be due to the abrasive developer who used his name on the fora, plus the fact that most of the comic's writers used to him to vent their pent-up issues with Superman, neither of which were within his control, what with him being a fictional character and all.

Plus, he has to wear that funny thing on his head and listen to helicopter noise all day long.

I might make the odd alt there, but I'm not planning on "relocating" there ...

... provided that the culture of the "public" servers in general and my primary server in particular don't change dramatically once they become open to a potentially larger pool of players. For example, say that a server gets informally chosen by a few existing players and some newcomers as "the PvP server," and all that ever gets done there is some PvP, a bit of powerleveling (it'll always be with us in one form or another, no matter what system gets put in place to control it), and lots of smacktalking in Help and Broadcast. If that happened to my home server, I might decamp for other pastures. Only time will tell.

Wow. This is a surprise. But a welcome one!

Related question, about the "mirror self" arcs:

Are the "Mirror's Objective" objectives actual mission goals that you can complete, if you somehow trick or outrun the system (in the same way that people sneak into cutscenes), or are they just timers that list flavor text instead of a countdown?

I'm fairly sure Iratesman comes from Forum Earth. Or possibly Customer Service Help Line Earth.

It has been about six and a half years for me.

- I left a job I hated for one I loved.
- I lost the job I loved when the position was eliminated for budget reasons and now work part time full time.
- Apropos of all that, I've truly come to understand that not hating my job is more important to me than how much I earn.
- I moved from the city, which I couldn't stand, to what's essentially a town composed entirely of planned suburbs. Despite that silliness, I like it.
- Dozens of friends, some of them quite close, have come in and out of my life, in both the real world and City of Heroes.
- I've had two major articles and several minor pieces of work published, gone from never having taught a class to being able to do it in my sleep, spoken at many conferences, and mentored countless students.
- I've gone from being told by my dates, "You're, like, too young for me," to, "You're, like, too old for me."
- I've seen these fora cycle from a toxic slough of rage and entitlement-based whining to an interesting community and back again several times, though honestly, the "honeymoon" periods seem to be getting shorter and shorter.
- I've learned all about internet culture, mostly thanks to the fora. (I still don't understand why people think memes are funny ...)
- I've read literally hundreds of books, including some of the best I've ever read.

At this point, I'll be surprised if i21 goes live before mid-October.

I thought that was pretty well written for something done "off the cuff." Presumably, with the unexpected delays in releasing i21, someone wisely decided a live server event would be a nice way to calm things down, as well as test the new hardware. I'm all for this.

I have two observations, one negative and one positive.

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However, as this thread shows, it's little more than an opportunity for the Content Police to call the developers horrible writers, for reasons that still aren't too clear to me. Aside from one prominent exception , posters have repeatedly claimed they want "nuanced" characters with realistic motivations and that "black-and-white morality is dumb and childish," essentially a "City of Wild Cards" vibe. This is exactly what we've received with the Tyrant/Praetoria storyline. Tyrant, far from being evil for evil's sake, seems more like a thinly-veiled political allegory, and the writers have endeavored to give him some sort of motivation while still portraying him as an unmistakable villain.

I understand why people dislike the Incarnate backstory, but I don't really get the hate for the Praetorian storyline, as expressed. Yes, I see flaws with it (I consider its entire premise, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem!", to be short-sightedly intolerant at best and appallingly savage at worst), but I don't understand others' complaints about it.

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Personally, the thing I love about all this is that Hamidon, my favorite archvillain, plays such a major role in it. Prior to the Going Rogue era, I was seeing more and more posters argue that the Devouring Earth were not only unthreatening, but also not just unvillainous but actually heroic (apparently because they "clean up" environmental disasters while mutating and dominating the minds of bystanders). Fortunately, Going Rogue has apparently changed that. While Praetorian Hamidon isn't really given the depth of characterization that he could have (he's a fanatic so self-absorbed that he wants to literally remake the world in his own image), at least he's being portrayed as a serious threat. I'd been concerned since I first read about Praetorian Devouring Earth that they'd ultimately prove to be just puppets of the Cole regime, rather than the monstrous, terrifying fiends they ought to be. Happily, that doesn't seem to be the case, at least not all the time.

As long as we aren't presented with a scenario where we have to help the poor, victimized Devouring Earth fight the Praetorians, then I'm happy.

I consider that design too dark. It looks as if it's trying so hard to be "serious" and "not some stupid, childish comic book" that it goes past "serious" and straight into "unintentional self-parody."

This is a Christopher Nolan project, so I suppose that's par for the course.

Actually, "Second Chance" sounds pretty good, though if it's going to show only things like Firefly, it ought to have a geekdom-related name.

Assuming it would show non-science fiction/fantasy cancelled shows, I suggest that it include my favorite TV show of all time, Remember WENN, about a radio station in the late '30's/early '40's. Its final season ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved.

For additional geektacular programming, I suggest a rebirth of that '80's classic, Misfits of Science. I wouldn't mind seeing more Sledge Hammer, either (though it'd be hard to come back from the finale of that show).

Edit: Another great show that I was too young to appreciate when it first aired but now I miss: Crime Story.

More frequent "stuff to do" releases, as well as other forms of content, sound good. I'll be impressed if the devs can pull it off; goodness knows they've been trying to release faster than they do over the years.

I'd like to know one thing about weekly purchasable-stuff releases, specifically costume pieces. We now know that some weeks, "a costume piece" will be added to the store, while other weeks, "an entire costume set" will be added. (Presumably, there'll be weeks when no costume parts are added, too.) Will the system be set up in such a way that individual pieces of a set will be purchasable before the entire set, or will things added as single costume pieces be one-offs?

To give an example, say that the Cyborg Pack items (a complete set), the Sharp Epaulettes (a single piece), and the Reaper head detail (another single piece) had not yet been released. Would we see a scenario where the Cyborg Cables chest detail was released in week 1, the Cyborg General shoulders in week 4, and the entire Cyborg set not until week 10? Or is the wording in the announcement meant to suggest something more along the lines of the Sharp Epaulettes being released in week 1, the Reaper head detail in week 4, and the Cyborg set in week 10?

This would be useful to know because, based on what we've been told about the price of, say, the Magic Pack sets in their entirety versus the cost of their individual pieces, it's cheaper to buy a costume set as a whole than as individual parts. Essentially, I'm asking whether it'll behoove us to wait on purchasing costume pieces for a while after they're released, in order to get them bundled. (Obviously, as a costume parts maven, I'd prefer to get everything for the slightly lower price up-front, but the whole design of a microtransaction system suggests to me that we might end up going the other way.)

I realize that there may not be an answer yet on this, or that if one exists, it might be secret for some reason.

"Tellurian," in the most general sense, simply means "related to the earth," and the term long predates Star Trek and the numerous other places it pops up in the world of geekdom. (A Tellurian plague specifically might be a reference to that or to some other specific source, though.) In-game, we already see this in the Legacy Chain's Tellus of Earth bosses.

This looks like an interesting encounter, though given that it seems to involve significant effort and coordination, as well as unresistable damage, I don't expect to see it run much once i21 has been live more than a few weeks. Personally, I hope I get the opportunity to run it one or more times.

For any OCR folks monitoring this thread for feedback to pass on devs (the art team, in this case), in order to avoid the sorts of complaints that are showing up here, I recommend keeping in what I call the "Rule of Clothing" in modern, Western society, the one that has produced most of your players: Both "male" and "female" styles of clothing exist. Men may wear the "male" style, while women may wear either "male" or "female" styles. (For the purposes of this game, I'd even extend the definition of "clothing" to cover things like musculature, size, and shape.)

I'm not commenting on the rightness or wrongness of this, but I think it's at the root of the constant player complaints of "why isn't this available for female models?", a complaint that has, historically, mystified the costume development team.

I would suggest that they avoid the forums, which tend to be an endless string of in-jokes and needlessly picky opinions at the best of times, a morass of cynicism and unpleasability most of the time, and a seething cauldron of pointless combativeness sometimes.