SlickRiptide

Shocking, isn't it? Next thing you know, people like me will be complaining that there aren't any lakes within driving distance of Providence that are actually big enough to hold a lake monster.

Out of curiosity, and having nothing at all to do with any previous upstream debate, what lore are you referring to?

It's just a little bit amusing to see the "slippery slope" argument being applied in this fashion.

The issue at hand is NOT "sexy = BAD! No SEXY!".

The issue is that the track record is of a design team that believes that sexual objectification is the "right" way to do things. Whether it's the silliness of barbarian women in spike heels or the gratuitous conversion of Diabolique into yet another evil dominatrix villain or the outright absurdity of the female gunslinger costume bits (because clearly, men gunslingers dress in leather and dusters like cowboys but women gunslingers dress like dance hall girls).

Nobody wants to remove all sexual objectification from the game, so really, stop with the outcry of "protect our smexy before The Puritans get it removed entirely!" There are plenty of people who think objectification is a required element of the genre, and obviously our designers have been amongst them.

Here's the thing, though: As a player, the game begins to feel tired when you get the same damn thing over and over. How overused is the whole "men covered head to toe, showing off their chiseled musculature (because the clothes somehow contour to their Schwarzenegger-style muscles) and women covered in barely anything showing off their sexual attributes"? Pretty well overused, IMO.

When it begins to limit your choices as a player, it's most definitely overused. When the only kind of character you can make using some new costume bits is one that adheres to the rules of objectification, then it becomes a problem.

The plain truth is, that it's not even really about objectification. It's about freedom and variety. This issue is really no different than the rut that the design team was in for a long time, in which we got armor set, after armor set, after armor set. It started to look like CoH post-2007 was going to be City of Armored Vigilantes.

In the end, what people want is freedom. Freedom to use costume bits no matter the size, shape, or gender. Freedom to objectify one's hero or not. Freedom to realize the vision in our own imaginations and be as unrestricted as reasonably possible by some imaginary rules by the design team that say that "only X is acceptable or correct".

There's no slippery slope here to defend against.

Keep in mind that you're talking about a face-to-face discussion that no players witnessed. It's true that I used the word "casual" to describe " It was referenced from then on in during some of the early posts by Developers and Marketing Personnel." but that's because any such references undoubtedly WERE casual in nature.

For what it's worth, I was around the forums for the "alpha/beta" days and I don't recall any particular reference to toons by the rednames. Not that I particularly WOULD recall it but just saying, it wasn't some major thing, nor was it something that became widely adopted by the players at that time so that it became memorable.

Where did they get it from? I think we've addressed that.

However, if you want to restrict discussion to "toons in CoH" then sure, I've got no problem with anyone trying to track down a "toon zero" who was the first person to say it. I don't think you CAN track that person down but if someone wants to give Jack Emmert credit, I don't really care. The word was a part of the MMO lexicon before CoH was created. That's WHY Jack or anyone else would have used it.

My feeling about the topic is that no single person or single group is responsible for "toon" in CoH. It came here along with the 250,000+ subscribers that made up the original subscription base. Just like "mob" and "aggro" and "hate" and "glass cannon" and "hp" and "mana" and dozens of other words that were and are a standard part of the MMO lexicon.

It got here by osmosis. That's the answer, if there's any "right" answer. If you doubt that then remind yourself that the populations of players who read the forums is only a few percentage points. Most of the players who might be saying "toon" never had any exposure to any redname posts to pick the term up from.

Feel free to disagree, though. I'm okay with that.

So the problem is that I'm too Srs Bsns, not that you reacted to a claim of "special expertise" (cartography, perhaps?) that I didn't actually make? I understand. Thanks for the enlightenment.

It baffles me that taking issue with the anomalies in the map is interpreted as "being so upset".

Look; they've said that Paragon City is based on Providence. Is that good enough for 99.99999% of the players? Yep, because it never matters except that we can say "Yeah, that's plausible".

Here's the thing - The developers of the game are the ones that said "This is an alternate Providence." THEY are the ones who gave their make-believe city roots in the real world. The plausibility breaks down when even a tiny amount of fact checking reveals that it's nothing like the real world city. Suspend disbelief? Sure, fine. I watch Independence Day and enjoy it as an action movie without crying about the stupidity of composing a virus on a Macintosh and uploading it into an alien computer network.

And if saying "A town that has an ancient underground magical lost city underneath it and miles of sewers and mining tunnels and who knows what all else has probably got a different geography than Providence" does it for you then more power to you. I've no beef with that.

The problems occur when you try to put the place into a greater context than just "how do I get from Atlas Park to Steel Canyon?" If you run with the idea that Paragon City does, indeed, have roots in the real world and you start trying to make it mesh with the real world a little, you find out that it doesn't work without "suspending disbelief" which in this case means saying "Oh, it doesn't really have roots in the real world after all".

It only ever mattered to me because I wanted to visualize what the first day of the Rikti invasion was like. I wanted to know how people would get out of the city, where they would go, and what the congestion would be like. In that context, those missing roots became a problem. *shrug*

To each his own. In the end, it simply comes down to the original statement. "They didn't do the research." If you feel that they never needed to do the research and shouldn't have ever been required to do it because "it's fiction", well, there's no good answer to that. YMMV.

Except that I didn't say that. Maybe you should go back and read the original post again.

Or maybe you feel that fitting two puzzle pieces together requires special expertise. /shrug

You knee-jerked on the word "fanfic" juxtaposed near the words "trust me". The only reason I mentioned it was to explain why I was going through the exercise of trying to fit Paragon City into Rhode Island. If I had never said that, it would not have changed anything else I said about how Paragon City does not actually fit into Rhode Island.

Being someone else's mother trumps being your daughter? I really doubt that's true for everyone.

I sense a movie idea here, or at least a weekly TV show.

I assume that you deliberately ignored "to lead into the next chapter" in order to make your quip, as opposed to actually believing that the statement I made was about whether old dialog was "scripted" or not.

If the point actually requires clarification, I'm interested in examples of "being a dick" that don't involve the agenda of forwarding the SSA story plot.

*********EDIT*********

Tenzhi - I think your programmer is showing. "Scripted" in the post you replied to meant scripted as in "action to advance a story plot" not scripted as in "a list of computer language process commands".

Not to take "credit" away from the devs, but that PM was just a guess. As should be well illustrated at this point, the term "toon" has been in use in MMO gaming for many years. It "migrated to us", if you like, because many/most of the original players of CoH were veterans of previous games who had picked up the nomenclature. I seriously doubt that it had anything at all to do with a redname making a casual remark in a forum.

Eh? What's funny? The fact that you focused on "wrote fanfic" instead of the subject of the paragraph, which was "attempted to fit Paragon City into a map of Rhode Island"? Does it really matter why I was doing that or are you seriously suggesting that the point of my post was "I wrote some fanfic so that makes me an expert"?

Score!

Ignoring that it's scripting specifically to lead into the next chapter, as opposed to anything from the past eight years, and that it's description, not dialog - How does getting upset that your daughter was killed by what you see as your granddaughter's poor judgement make you an arrogant dick?

(Personally, I feel that the whole storyline of this SSA is a load of hogwash but none of the Powers That Be are knocking down my door begging for my opinion...)

Is there a particular reason why? I can't think of any dialog in the game that is written like that.