SlickRiptide

I'll say this for the Rogue Isles - When I play in that setting, it generally induces a state of mind in which my characters feel an utter contempt for the Islands and all of the people inhabiting them. From a certain standpoint, that could be considered a successful design.

If there's a problem with redside, I think it's that it was designed entirely as a setting for the Destined One story where Paragon City was designed as a place where ordinary people would want to live.

Supposedly, the Rogue Isles are a country with an economy and social services and maybe even a U.N. presence. Supposedly there are people living and working there voluntarily; raising families. For Scrapyard to become the socially conscious hero of a worker's revolution, there first had to be some workers to organize.

We don't see any of that because the game world visuals in the Rogue Isles are so tightly focused on our characters' rise from trash heap to top of the heap, that it never bothers to depict the "real" Rogue Isles. Blueside, the city is strictly backdrop; it's not window dressing to the story of a hero starting on the streets and ending up as an object of wide acclaim who has mastered a laundry list of evil-doers and is even saving other worlds and the future itself.

In other words, in Paragon City the zones each tell their own story where in The Rogue Isles the zones are all subservient to the character's story and their appearance is skewed heavily because of that. In a sense, we've never actually seen the "real" Rogue Isles.

If it needs a revamp, that's what it needs. A visual representation that depicts why anyone who was not a Destined One would bother to live, work, and procreate in such an apparently horrible place. There needs to be some sense of history of the life that went on before Recluse arrived and of the life that continues to go on in spite of his rule and neglect.

Frankly, I would have preferred the Rogue Isles to be a lot more like Praetoria. Shiny on top; dark and brooding underneath. Recluse's playground would have made a lot more sense as a Road Warrior/Thunderdome take on life after the Hamidon Wars. That's me, though. I know that many redsiders like their setting. I just think we need to see a bit more of what the ordinary people of the Isles see instead of the exaggerated cesspool that our characters see.

Was I in Cleveland when this happened?

I'd put a Lorax in every forest.

I'd see what was happening in the Universe Next Door and invent that universe if it didn't actually exist.

I'd time travel and become John Titor.

I'd leave the Earth to its own devices and go out and see what's up in the other eleventy-billion galaxies out there.

• I'd watch Lauren Bacall without a prize.

• I'm interested in gauging attitudes, not making a suggestion. I believe that Paragon Studios is already well aware of how their competitors incorporate advertising.

• The commercial would be voluntary. "Click here".

• I had a different example game in mind than Gaia Online, but it's interesting to know that more than one company is using that method.

The more general question, perhaps, is this:

How can you leverage your non-paying players to generate revenue?

A successful free to play game will end up with some large percentage of players (Group F) that don't spend money, some smaller percentage of players (Group P) that occasionally spend a few dollars, and the smallest percentage (Group V) that are either subscribers paying monthly or premium players who regularly purchase game currency in large amounts.

Group F is not contributing to your bottom line directly. However, they ARE a self-selected audience targeted around your game's theme. That's a marketable quantity. If the method of marketing them is non-intrusive as far as your paying customers go, then where is the harm in marketing that pool of "eyes"?

I think we've established that in-game billboards were a mixed bag. The fact that so many of us still remember the shoe ad is, in one sense, a measure of its success, but that was the exact opposite of non-intrusive.

The optional launcher commercial works well for the game I mentioned. Each game is different, though. Hence, my curiosity about attitudes here.

Likewise, maybe to broaden the question - If you were tasked with marketing your thousands/millions of free players without intruding on your paying players, how would you go about it? Google ads? Market specials? Keep in mind that you don't want to alienate your Group F players. One reason the Pavlovian "watch a commercial, get a reward" model works (inasmuch as it does actually work) is that the Group F feels appreciated afterwards instead of exploited.

Yeah, Sally Field. My bad. I've gotten those two mixed up since I was a kid. *sigh*

Sony "tweeted" them today (well, yesterday now that it's after midnight). New or old beyond that, I don't judge other than my having not seen them before.

Informal poll time.

How do you feel about sponsored content? As an example, a competitor of City of Heroes has a mechanism in place where you are offered an in-game item in exchange for watching a commercial. This all takes place outside of the game, in the launcher, before the game is launched but after you've logged in.

So, for example, the competing game has a deal where you watch a Thundercats commercial and you receive a Sword of Omens or a logo tee-shirt or a logo poster to put on a house wall.

So, as a thought experiment and not as an indication of any kind of real-world example, The film _The Amazing Spiderman_ might offer an account-wide spider chest symbol unlock for watching a trailer of the movie.

How do you feel about that kind of sponsored content?

Wow, talk about a hard list to try and compile.

In the end, I tried to strike a balance between recent and classic fiction, sci-fi and fantasy, and to choose books that I still look back at today as something that made a personal impression upon me. There are so many that qualify from a strictly affected the world standpoint that it seems like a personal list is really the more appropriate one.

Even so, ten is way too few to have to choose. As it was, I had to make decisions based on things like "I already chose that Author once - I need to expand beyond one person's works".

My final list:

A Canticle for Liebowitz - I recently re-read this as an e-book and I was blown away at just how good this old classic is even decades after it's initial publication.

I Am Legend - One of the most often filmed sci-fi stories ever and the films still have nothing on the stark story-telling of the original text.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy - A lot of stories claim they'll "blow your mind" but Illuminatus! actually accomplished it.

The Lord of the Rings - 'nuff said

The Martian Chronicles - I break my unspoken rule above and have Bradbury twice. I read this in third grade and it opened my eyes to ideas that went way beyond just rockets into space. It's literally been nearly forty years since I last read it and I still remember parts of it vividly.

Something Wicked This Way Comes - This book instilled in me, or maybe brought out in me, a love of an entire genre that rotates around summer and lost innocence and the Americana that probably never really existed except in the popular imagination. This book may be prose but it's spirit is pure poetry, exceeded only by The Halloween Tree, another Bradbury masterpiece.

The Stand - King's greatest work, IMO, and one that manages to capture the spirit of The Lord of the Rings while still telling a believable modern-day story.

The Vlad Taltos Series - If my avatar doesn't already give it away, I am a big Brust fan and consider this series to be one of the best pseudo-fantasy series around. Or maybe it's a pseudo-sci-fi series. It sort of depends on your viewpoint, and Brust makes it clear that neither classification really matters. This series embraces the idea of the "unreliable narrator" and encourages readers to make their own conclusions about what constitutes "truth", particularly when dealing with history. Pretty much like real life.

The War of the Worlds - Another story that made a big impact on me and whose message, that man could fail while the most humble creatures on the planet could ultimately save us, made a big impression on a young impressionable mind.

Watership Down - This is hands down one of the best fantasies of any kind every written. Watership Down is so much more than just a "quest fantasy" with bunnies as protagonists. The proof of this is that so many imitators tried to duplicate its success and managed to fail completely. The mythology of the rabbits is every bit as compelling as that of the peoples in Tolkein's stories. I'd rank it as one of the best novels every written, frankly.

There are so many more great books on that list. It's a bit painful to have to choose only ten.

Eh, there clearly have to be limits and $5 to gain Premium status is clearly a small price to pay. I can quibble about what those limits should be but I have no problem acknowledging the above listed facts.

I will argue vehemently, however, with anyone who says "Free players are not customers and don't deserve consideration as customers." Even someone I have tons of respect for.

One of the worst side effects of a development staff with that attitude is that it gets communicated to the players, on both sides of the line. Two things happen.

One is that many of the free players end up leaving because they feel unappreciated and while you can argue that any of them are worth appreciating, you can't argue that each one is a lost sale.

Two is that development staff ends up loosening the restrictions and offering bennies to the free/premiums to stem the tide of their departure and the VIP's who have been accepting that they were second class citizens start getting upset that the freebies are being catered too now and treated like a valuable commodity; something that the VIP's thought of as their sole provence.

I hope for the sake of Freedom that the staff of NCSoft and Paragon Studios do not subscribe to the belief that free customers are not actually customers.

The FAQ at IMDB suggests that this is not actually a prequel to the most recent film. It's a reboot that's telling the story from the beginning instead of from the end.

There are no citations anywhere so it's not clear how much of the FAQ is fact and how much is opinion.

Stills from the upcoming film, The Amazing Spiderman

Yeah, that weird twitter-style title is meant to mean that while this is a Flikr photo album, the link came from the official Sony Pictures Twitter account and is presumably an official release of said photos.

I guess this film is a reboot of Spiderman instead of a continuation? There are no captions, so I'm completely guessing about the following speculations:

One photo depicts Peter with an older man (Martin Sheen) and woman (Karen Valentine). Uncle Ben and Aunt May? That would be a new take on Aunt May, though I can sort of see Martin Sheen as Uncle Ben given the right material.

Another photo depicts Peter's battle wounds being tended by young, blond girl who, based purely on appearance, suggested to me that she might be Gwen Stacy.

The costume is a bit more "movie superhero" looking this time around. He also has real webshooters instead of the organic webbing they went with in the previous incarnation. The webshooters look pretty authentic, inasmuch as you can use that word in reference to comic book weaponry. heh

I'm reserving judgement on the whole business of limiting communication and teaming ability on free accounts.

I personally feel it's a grave error; an opinion I base upon being a player of several F2P games myself and having participated in the associated communities. That is inherently subjective, alas, but I feel it is accurate in this respect, regardless.

If the point is to convert freebies to premium, then offering a lot of enticing, low-cost shinies to get them to spend that initial five bucks is the answer; not telling them "You can't team up unless you pay up." Limiting non-essential game systems is expected. Limiting essential quality of life game systems is extortion and will be viewed as such. Free players do not take kindly to being extorted into becoming paying players. Making the conversion of freems to subscriber a goal of your payment model is a mistake - it should be a consequence, not an obvious goal. Free players who feel railroaded are players who dig in their heels and say "Pancake you".

Again - I have no statistics to back up what I say; only life experience.

By the same token, if the goal is still some attempt to limit "gold farmers" then my response is "get over it". This kind of limitation punishes the legitimate players a lot more than it punishes the offenders. In fact, if "gold farming" is really lucrative enough to pursue the activity in the first place, then the farmers will have little problem forking over the five bucks per account to become premium members themselves and circumvent the limits.

Gold farming is going to be a consequence of freemium play. Get over it. Get past it. Don't limit legitimate players in order to target the smaller population of undesirables.

As for the topic of "villainy" - It's almost a pointless discussion because it means a dozen different things to a dozen different people. I have to shake my head when people complain about "not being villainous" because I find that most such people don't really think like a real super villain.

What they generally mean is that they want to engage in Grand Theft Auto petty villainy - hiring a prostitute and then killing her and stealing her money and dumping her out of the car and then going and doing it again for the lulz.

They want to run down the streets of Paragon City killing every civilian they see and laughing while they do it. They don't really have any concept of what they would do if they actually had free reign to try and make something of themselves as an immoral or amoral super-powered individual in a world that was theirs for the taking.

It doesn't help the villains are considered "rugged individualists", by and large. This is all the more obvious when you get all of the complaints about players being "lackeys" in Arachnos instead of feeling like Arachnos is a support organization that is grooming them for better things.

On the one hand, that's a problem with the design of Arachnos, but on the other its a sign of the unrealistic expectation of the players - namely, that there's space at the top of the villain food chain that is theirs by right and that there shouldn't be someone else already at the top who wants to keep their power and squash the budding villain like a bug before she becomes a credible threat.

There's a reason that organized crime is organized. It's because chaos is bad for everyone involved.

A procedural game with set resources, scripts and responses to player actions can't really simulate villainy in the way that it can simulate heroism. Not without making it another game entirely.

Maybe what's really needed is for someone to develop a super villain game first, and then add the accompanying super hero game on top of THAT. Maybe then, people would get the kind of game that lets them "feel like a villain".

I think a thread from two weeks ago is only Mostly Dead rather than All Dead.

On the topic, I'd say that changing archetype names to reflect alignment is muddying the waters for no particularly useful purpose. In a co-op zone you don't care and in an aligned zone you know they're the same alignment as you by virtue of their presence. Never mind the confusion when someone decides to change alignment.

"Pancake it! I'm a pancaking Brute, not a pancaking Gladiator! I was born a pancaking Brute and I'll always be a pancaking Brute!"