SlickRiptide

Oh, man! It's been so long since I first did the RWZ arcs that I had completely forgotten about Sefu. That was a total WTF?/righteous anger moment for me, even though by level 50 I'd become accustomed to bad things happening to good people. I think it's because Longbow is so well staffed with horses arses that meeting an honorable man worthy of respect made it that much more of a tragedy.

(I'm one of the people who considers Longbow to be barely this side of being a government-sanctioned super villain organization. When I think of the average Longbow thug, I think of Dim and Georgie from _A Clockwork Orange_.)

For out and out laughs, the opening mission to the villain "Clone Wars" arc, where you go up against Ajax - "Wow, he really IS utterly invulnerable!"

I don't recall anybody mentioning the Calvin Scott task force except indirectly, so let me get a plug in for that; especially given that it was an experiment in dynamic story-telling that never went anywhere afterwards. I'm hoping that Freedom will revisit this idea.

This will probably sound a little weird, but my strongest emotional attachment in the game comes not from a story arc, but from a particular map in a particular story arc.

The arc is _The Freakshow War_. The map is a unique outdoor map called "Jacaranda Vista". The mission on that map is no great shakes. Just beat up a lot of Freaks and Council to prevent an alliance.

The map, though... The setting is a ruined section of city that has been through some calamity that left it half-sunken beneath the waters of the Atlantic. Maybe it was the War. Maybe it was something else. No backstory is given. No explanation is made for how that much of the city ended up below sea level or if it is even Paragon City at all.

The flavor is distinctly different from Boomtown. Baumton is an active zone. The fires are still burning. The gangs are picking through the ruins. The lights are on. Babbage roams the zone, venting its rage on any living thing it encounters.

Jacaranda Vista, by contrast, is a passive zone. It's quiet; even sepulchral. The only people there are the villains who have chosen it as an out-of-the-way meeting place. The buildings are dark. There's no hint of occupation. Only the Batman-like hero standing sentinel over the center of the zone, unnamed and unknown but still watching silently as the waves lap at what remains of the neighborhood that chose to honor him with a statue.

It's a place to pause and contemplate what it means to be a Hero when you're faced with a disaster that no single Hero or Super Group could possibly contain or rescue everyone.

How many bodies are there under those waves? What was it like on the day the water crashed in, smashing buildings and burying the neighborhood under tons of ocean? Where is the memorial commemorating that tragedy?

I sometimes wonder if that statue IS the memorial - a tribute to some hero who gave his all to try and hold back the waters and allow a few lucky souls to escape the clutches of the waves as they consumed everything and everyone in their path?

When one of my heroes cleanses the place of its Freaks and jack-booted soldiers, it's as much to prevent its defilement as it is to protect the city from the threat of a war between the Freakshow factions.

I suppose that to many people its just another map to beat up Freaks on, but for me it's a living, breathing, example of why my characters become Heroes, and a place to stop and quietly consider just what that committment means.

@#$@%@#$@#$!!!!!!!!

I am reminded once again how much I despise the short login timeout on this forum. GRRRRRR!!!!!! I guess that's a reminder that you NEVER take a significant amount of time composing a post without copying the contents and saving them in the clipboard before clicking submit and having it all vaporize because the forum decides you aren't logged in anymore.

Frag me, that is so annoying!

While I don't want to imply that harassment and assault should not be taken seriously, I have to say that parts of this thread are a bit of an over-reaction to something that is intended as a single-note joke.

I dunno, maybe there's a Architect mission somewhere in all of this.

Copied from the Humphrey Bogart Estate facebook page:

McDonald's made a deal with Maxis back in the early days of The Sims Online to add a McDonald's burger cart to the game. I don't know how well that actually worked for them as advertising but it shows they're not averse to trying such things.

With Freedom hopefully bringing thousands, perhaps millions of new eyes into Paragon City, do we suppose that the real-world billboard adverts will make a comeback?

I read today how a web-based game has started using ad-viewing as its death penalty. What do you think of ads in loading screens, for free players only, of course.

If there are ads anywhere then being a VIP ought to allow you to opt out by default.

Keep in mind that player-created channels are only available to VIP i.e., subscribers.

Premium players can join supergroups, so that would be something to educate them about.

I've always been partial to The Vazhilok Plague because it was a bit of a reality bender for me when Doctor Vazhilok says "I'll clean up my own mess." and I realized that he was trying to stop the plague, not spread it. That's the beginning of the change from stories that are clearly black and white to stories with drama and stories that did not always have a clear-cut villain.

I've seen a few postings now where people refer to free players as "Freeks". While it's good for a condescending laugh, that's the real problem - It's a put down as much as it is a humorous nickname.

I wouldn't care except that sometimes these things have a way of catching on when you don't expect it.

I'd like to encourage some other nickname that is less likely to raise the hackles of a free player who eventually hears a subscriber refer to them using the nickname. Other considerations aside, we already have Freaks as a villain group in the game and calling free players "Freeks" is potentially only going to confuse them.

My suggestion - "Freems", which gets the point across and far from being offensive, is likely to amuse the target if you ever have to explain where the word came from. If you don't want to go into the whole "visual sounds" explanation, you just say "It means freemium".

You can then go with "Preems" for the Premium players if you feel the urge.

A lot of this is going to come down to "wait and see". You're entitled to your suspicion. I've been just a little surprised at how positively the forum community is taking the news, but certainly there is always cause for concern in a transition like this.

I hate to drag out an over-used term like "agile" to apply to this, but I think it does apply here. This strike team approach means that the focus won't be so much on "Issue XX" or "Booster Pack SuperStuff". Instead, it will be on smaller, highly focused end-products that will stand alone or in small packages. One benefit is that it will allow for faster distribution of the new content and less reliance on completing an entire package of goods before announcing and selling something.

There's plenty of room for things to go sour, but it's too soon right now to do more than speculate and hope for a successful transition for everyone; players and developers.

With apologies to Gabe and Tycho:

A naginata to go with the existing samurai armor would be welcome.

This year's Hollywood Walk of Fame selection committee chose Adam West as one of the recipients in the television category to receive a star on the Walk of Fame. (Walter Koenig was also chosen in the same category.)

Official Walk of Fame Press Release

A lot of people put a lot of time and money into making it happen and I'm sure there are folks here who would join me in congratulating Mr. West on being so honored.

The acceptance ceremony can happen any time in the next five years, and there are details like actually manufacturing the star tile and picking spot for it and installing it and what not, so I expect it will be a while before you can walk down the street in Hollywood and take a look at it.

If you care about such things, you can follow Mister West's official website for updates.

As a past subscriber, your wife will be a "Premium" player.

That means that she'll almost certainly have access to more than two characters, though equally likely that she won't have access to all of them if she is an altoholic.

As for your other concerns - You will encounter them to some degree, yes. It will almost certainly NOT be to a degree that makes you unhappy, any more than the current game's resident nimrods make you unhappy.

In the end, don't worry. Things will proceed as they proceed. The only answer to your concerns is "wait and see". My personal experience with freemium MMO's is that such fears tend to be much larger than any actual problems.

When another game company created a freemium version of one of their flagship games, they polled the current subscribers about mixing F2P players with the subscription players. The current subscribers answered with a resounding "No Way!"

That game company thusly created a single server just for the F2P players. Within a month, and pretty much steadily since launch, the subscribers from the flagship game have been copying over to the freemium server and setting up shop there.

The end result is that integration is happening on its own because the subscription-paying players discovered that the game was more fun with a larger population than it was being sequestered away from the F2P players.

As far as I know, the studio has never had any sort of segregation between subscribers and F2P players and I'm unaware of any major difficulties they've had as a result.

The VIP server is Paragon Studios giving the nod to the fact that some people simply won't mix with outsiders but that most of us either don't mind or will adjust quickly enough to the advantages of "mixing it up" that they'll regret having been sequestered.

If some folks really, really, want to be segregated, this allows them the option while the rest of us get on with playing the game with more people and a big flood of newbies to introduce to things like costume contests and learning to travel across the Hollows and the joys of discovering the world of Paragon City for the first time.

The only actual global benefit I can see coming from a VIP server is that CoH:Freedom becomes so wildly popular that every server has horrible lag and the VIP server is the one place to get away from it. If that actually happened, I trust that Paragon Studios would find a way to rectify the situation.

Seems like they ought to commemorate Dave Arneson as well, but I suppose Gary's descendants aren't that concerned about remembering Dave.

I salute that idea!

/salute