SlickRiptide

I find that everyone on Twitter has their own idea of "what Twitter is about".

While I don't use it much these days, when I do use it, I engage it precisely as a chatty way to socialize with people. No offense to Zombieman - You can't please all of the people all of the time.

I've always assumed that the whole point of the Twitter account is to engage people who probably DON'T use the forums. As such, expecting it to be a vehicle for directing people to the forums is probably not realistic. It's an alternative to the forums, as well as a way to personally engage with some of the CoH_OCR team in ways that you don't typically engage with them on the forums.

I have a habit of being very verbose on Twitter. I am unabashed about this. The people who I count as friends in that medium are fine with it and engage with me because I am such. I have had at least one complete stranger tell me "Geez, dude, write a blog entry. Don't spam Twitter with all of these tweets." I laughed, literally. This was someone I did not know and who I had never engaged with or followed or invited to follow me. He probably just added me to his follow list based on someone's #FF or something. Anyway, I politely told him that he was free to unfollow me at any time and it would not bruise my ego one bit.

There are as many "ways to do Twitter" as there are people doing it. There's no right or wrong way, only the ways that are effective and enjoyable for you. Which is to say that if CoH_OCR is attempting to generate buzz and conversation about City of Heroes on Twitter, that doing it the way Zombieman describes is the "right" way. If it doesn't sit well with people who prefer their Twitter to be basically a news stream (and there are a lot of people who feel that's what it SHOULD be, many of them vehemently, which label I am NOT applying to Zombieman; just saying that they are out there) then you just unfollow the ones you don't like and move on.

****EDIT****

All that said, I will add that I do find the practice of retweeting everything someone says about your organization or topic to be somewhat annoying. I mean, some people even retweet their own messages that another person retweeted. Retweets are best used to expand on something that a group is talking about, in my personal opinion. Hashtags are the best way to have a discussion and track it when your goal is to have a "thread" about some topic, plus the hashtags are searchable.

I knew she played and she'd even come back to the forums briefly a few months ago. I didn't know that she'd published any stories inspired by her CoH activities.

Check out the text in the red starburst in the photo.



Anybody read this story?

I have no particular objection to a redside zone being revamped as opposed to blueside. The important thing is not the fact of a revamp but the way it's being revamped.

The zones mentioned by VoodooGirl (aside from Atlas Park which is a newbie zone and whose mirror, Mercy Island, also got a revamp) are all common use zones. They don't belong solely to the "world" in which they are physically located.

If you want to remake Port Oakes, or any other red zone, then your pitch needs to be for something more than just giving it a "face lift". The real meat of any revamp is the use to which the new zone will be put by players of ALL alignments. That's just the reality of the development in the game these days. You might be technically correct to say "it's only fair to target redside for upgrades" but you won't get very far if your entire proposal is "make things nicer for red". Every revamp since Faultline (if you really want to see the Praetorian Wards as "revamps") is about multiple-use.

In my opinion, a redside pitch that has any hope of going anywhere is going to have to include the ways that the revamped content allows blue and yellow characters to participate just as much as red characters. It can't just be "it's our turn now".

I think the point was that HeroStats already does all or most of what Geko would like ACT to do. Given that, why not use HeroStats as opposed to re-inventing the wheel?

I am NOT attending the Plummit.

That said, I think there are two zones that are prime candidates for makeovers: Terra Volta ("Terror Volta") and Baumton ("Boomtown").

Terra Volta: The zone has never made much logical sense. It's located on an island that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Sam values that large capacity but the fact is that Terra Volta ought to be SMALL. Right now, that capacity serves no purpose other than to create a puzzle for non-flyers to work out how to get through what amounts to a three-dimensional maze in order to reach the reactor.

The reactor itself is supposedly powering the city, yet the zone is a wasteland populated by Freaks and super-terrorists bent on stealing its tech. There's no discernable staff working at the reactor and maintaining it, and there's no discernable way for those hypothetical reactor employees to get to and from work. Even the bridge leading up to the front gate is an unused mess of wrecked cars. In eight years since the end of the Rikti War, the single most important location in the city has seemingly gone completely unprotected and unmaintained except by random heroes responding to cries for help against the afore-mentioned terrorists and aliens (i.e., respec trials).

This despite the fact that the exploration badges and history plaques mark this island as one of the more interesting spots in the city from a historical perspective as well as from the strictly functional perspective of being (until recently) the sole source of electrical power for the city.

If any zone in the city needs to be brought "up to date" with current times, this is the zone. It made little sense for it to exist in this condition in 2006. It makes no sense at all in 2012.


Baumton - "Boomtown" is the poster child for devastated city zones. The precedent already exists for activity in this zone, given that villains have missions to interfere with redevelopment activities in Baumton.

Expanding Baumton is a way to continue to expand on the story of the city as it moves forward. What's more, Baumton can easily be expanded beyond it's current borders. The current zone theoretically has water access to the Atlantic Ocean via Baumton Canal. Some distance East is the Atlantic Shore itself, and the Southeast contains an (the?) airport, another vital service that has never been used or even mentioned.

New Baumton could encompass the blast zone proper and the surrounding areas that would be in more or less of a state of repair, and the efforts to rebuild or alternately demolish the existing wreckage. By bringing the coastline, canal, and airport into the zone proper, the redside players get some plausible access into Paragon City.

Whichever zone is picked, I think that the zone itself is less important than the use to which the zone is put. The devs rightly have been giving each zone its own story and for efficiency reasons they have made these "co-op" to one extent or another.

It seems to me that a better use of a rebuilding zone with open access to smugglers and infiltrators is a multi-use zone, where heroes and villains pursue agendas that are unrelated or indirectly related to each other's activities. It should be a PvP optional zone, where PvP is driven by story or by consensual challenge rather than by a zone-wide rule or state of war.

Basically, this would be a zone where the goals of the heroes and villains are less about saving the world and more about advancing their status and either helping or hindering the growth of the city. (Villains might well want to help the city if there was a profitable reason to do so. They might also want to blow it up just for the fun of it.)

If there was a place to experiment with a destructible environment, this would be the place. I would see the construction zone as being somewhat like Recluse's Victory, in that the state could change from one day to the next. More to the point, though, the goal of the PC's in this zone is not so much to level up as it is to raise their personal reputations in whatever fashion is most conducive to their alignments. The closest thing I can compare this idea to is the facton grinding of some other MMO's where you raise your reputation to a certain level and new opportunities become available at milestone levels; either loot or missions or costume parts or whatever. The mechanism to track such reputation changes already exists in the badge mechanics. Earning a "Savior of Baumton" badge would be no different, qualitatively, from becoming "Exalted with faction X" in some other game.

New Baumton is thematically a land of opportunity, and the missions, rewards, story and activities available would be all about taking advantage of opportunities for personal advancement along paths other than advancement in power levels (which the incarnate path already adequately handles).

That's my pitch.

RP Spam is a problem? Having never, ever, run into this problem, I have to wonder what server it is that has such a problem.

If the server in question is Virtue, then the most obvious solution is to play somewhere else.

Given that there's a universe where your Hero destroyed humanity in his or her or its bid to become ruler of the world, it suggests that there could similarly be a world where your Hero succeeded without destroying humanity.

Considering how the incarnate storyline has shaken out over time, it might be interesting to revisit that alternate universe and tie it into the whole thing somehow.

My favorite Buzz Lightyear TV show ep was one where Emperor Zurg was designing a new evil lair and he says "Wait! I want all of the ventilation shafts to lead to the incinerator!" At least one evil overlord took a lesson from the list, heh.

I wasn't really looking to literally require a space suit costume piece, though I'd be impressed at a mission that put a costume power on you as a temp power (like the various missions where you don a "disguise") to simulate it. (If your character can survive exposure to a vacuum, then just click it off, heh.)

Likewise, while the sci-fi pack was the inspiration I was thinking more generally about any classic theme. I think that after all of the doom and gloom, that I'm ready for just a good, old-fashioned adventure story and the retro sci-fi pack kind of clicked that for me.

One of the things that drew me to the game initially was that the game's content covered a wide range of themes and it put interesting twists on them that made them not-so-black-and-white once you knew the whole story.

I'd like to get back somewhat to short story arcs that deal with broad themes that make you sit back and look at the whole thing in a new light when you're done with it. Something like Ubelmann the Unknown. Specifically something that doesn't involve cosmic beings, the Well, or Praetorians.

I think I miss the days when Requiem was considered a big bad guy and a volcano base was considered to be a pretty nifty and fun idea. It might just be that my personal game has never really been about being the most powerful or about saving the world twenty times in a row. I'm more about the small stories that happen every day while the heavy lifters are out doing all of that world-saving.

I think what I really want, and what I probably can't get just because I'm jaded, is that sense of surprise when something seemingly small, leads into something larger and then something altogether unexpected that challenges my preconceptions. The stories in the original game were all about that kind of story writing, although some were more successful than others.

I'm ready for a good old-fashioned, pulp-style adventure where the settings are outlandish, the morality is clear cut, and the themes are painted in broad strokes.

Show me a Lost World, or Science Gone Wrong, or Hard-boiled Detective Work, just a Kitten Up a Tree. Flash Gordon? Sure. Buck Rogers? Yeah. The Shadow needs my help? I'm there! The Evil League of Evil is attempting to steal all of the ice cream in the city in order to make children cry? Lemme at 'em! (Sorry, bad guys, there are better ways to raise awareness about lactose intolerance.)

I'm ready to play some stories that are fun romps and don't necessarily involve any cosmic significance. Only one of my heroes is even level 50, and none of them have any interest in becoming a deity. It would be nice to accomplish something more down-to-earth.

tldr; - What classic themes/stories from film/pulp/comics would you enjoy seeing as storylines in CoH?

Look at the pictures of the upcoming Retro Sci-fi costume pack, I couldn't help but think "Wow, if only there was a story that required these outfits!"

It got me thinking about all of the really classic old iconic stories (helped along by the song implied in the title, heh) of the sci-fi and adventure genres. It was helped along by the fact that Dink was more or less caught channeling Ann Francis and Leslie Nielsen from Forbidden Planet in her designs. :-p

I would have a hell of a lot of fun playing out a Flash Gordon story arc, for instance. Something where it begins innocently, and then some crazy guy with a home made rocket who thinks he's the only person in the world who knows the truth about impending disaster ropes you into blasting into space (requiring those nifty space suits as part of the adventure) and then discovering that Crazy Scientist Dude really wasn't entirely crazy after all.

Implementing that in a way that was truly a surprise (and then preserving the surprise for new players) would be a monumental task, but hey we're just wishing here.

I've always felt that Holsten Armitage has been a character with some really wasted potential in this regard. He's basically Doctor Zarkhoff. He's the crazy guy with the wild hair and the outlandish claims yet he can prove enough of them that me may not be as crazy as he appears. He has a time machine in his basement instead of a rocket in his garage but otherwise he's a perfect launching point. You can't even say that he's wrong - his timeline may be a potential future or it may be a different dimension or something else entirely. Who can really say for certain?

Many of the big name villains at launch were created to be iconic of classic themes. Doctor Vahzilok is Doctor Frankenstein and, more generically, Scientific Knowledge at All Costs. The Clockwork King is Donovan's Brain reimagined. The Freakshow is your classic post-apocalyptic amoral anarchists, just moved into a pre-apocalyptic setting.

There's a ton of iconic literature, film and comic stories that are iconic of plots that drive a genre. I'm curious what iconic stories would get other players "fired up", so to speak, about seeing a City of Heroes adventure written along a similar theme?

Yeah, I know the lore, I just think it's bad lore. I guess I assume that some weaponry and a token standing army must exist even for a largely ceremonial fighting force. You wouldn't dismantle your military entirely after fighting off one of the strongest militaries in the galaxy (as the Batallion was purported to be). There might be another such power out there waiting to cruise through your solar system. Though, I suppose that the conjecture about the Lineage of War using the Nemesis attack as an excuse for a power grab is kind of interesting.

The stupid thing is that Nemesis ever attacked in the first place. He'd have had a much better chance of bringing his "upload my mind into the planetary mental network" plans to fruition if he'd just quietly gone about his business. If there was some good reason for him to start the war, I've never learned what it was.

The whole idea that "Even the War is a Nemesis Plot!" was a terrible one, IMO. The only thing that might save it is that the War was actually a conspiracy between Nemesis and the Lineage of War, and that each of them actually got something they needed from it. That would be truly horrible - that Nemesis would basically sacrifice the world to achieve one of his Machiavellian goals, confident in his hubris that he would just kick the Rikti out again at a later date.

Meh. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback but really, I have to wonder who greenlights some of these ideas.