SlickRiptide

Two points -

First: Manticore is Sean Fish, the original "story guy" and currently active again. Hero 1 is Joe Morrisey who is also the/a story guy.

Second: The quote you provided, Aggie, is about Longbow, not about Freedom Corps. Squares and rectangles.

It's commendable that Paragonwiki has that lore. It's also frustrating that you have to go to Paragonwiki or The Wayback Machine nowadays to get that lore. It used to be that even though it wasn't linked on the website, that you could still get the info from the official website if you knew the URL's. Now? It's been vaporized.

You could make a legitimate case that all of that lore is, in fact, NOT official lore any more.

It's puzzling. I've been in this hobby for many years now, and every game I've involved myself with was a game where lore accumulated over time. I've never seen a situation where the lore was deliberately sprayed out over a half-dozen different media, and then those media allowed to atrophy and shrivel away until you just don't have any lore any more except for that lore that's remembered by the most active fansites.

Maybe the best question of all is this: Where would we be if Paragonwiki folded tomorrow? How sensible is it that we should be that dependent upon a fan site for basic game information?

It doesn't make any sense.

That'd be funny if I wasn't able to remember watching Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral live on TV. *heh*

To get used to it, they would first have to be doing it. Except for very rare cases, the devs have not posted any game announcements on Twitter and the Online Community Relations team has posted such information simultaneously in both venues.

If you think it's breaking news that Matt Miller is forming a fantasy football league or that Bruce Harlick had a REALLY good dinner out last night, then you've got cause for concern. Otherwise, you can relax. In fact, by NOT being on Twitter, you missed out on being the butt of Chris Bruce's little prank today. Otherwise, you haven't missed out on anything directly related to City of Heroes and there are no indications that you ever will.

Basically: Don't sweat it. Have a cookie.

Starting next year, PAX is launching a spring convention for the East Coast if I understand things correctly.

Why not just buy a tee-shirt transfer at Staples and print your own? Granted it won't last as long as silk-screening, but how often are you going to wear and wash it anyway?

*Looks at P_P's rotating avatars*

Really? Whodathunkit?

Information wants to be free.

That's all there is to it. The fact that people use the conduit for boring, mundane stuff is simply a consequence of the immaturity of the technology.

When the world wide web expanded beyond its original intended purpose of making it easier to fetch academic documents remotely, it didn't immediately turn into the multi-media sea of interactivity that most of us incorrectly call "The Internet".

Commercial web pages were originally not much more than attempts to copy print material and publish it online. Personal pages were typically boring, mundane stuff like "I'm George and I live with five cats and this is my web page. Look! I have a page view counter!"

Myspace began life as a "social network" but it's evolved beyond that now to become a primary place for independent musical and arts performers to show off their work and gain the early recognition that can lead to that "big break".

Twitter is evolving into a way for "leaders" to immediately be in contact with their "followers" and influence them. Nathan Fillion is a good example of someone who has earned a fan-base through his acting work and who has embraced "social networks" like Myspace and Twitter as avenues to pass on his wit and wisdom to those fans and to organize them into an organized group to achieve a goal, whether it's voting him "Mr. Twitter" or raising $10,000 to support "Team Castle" and help fund a Children's Hospital.

The "problem" that a lot of people have with social networks is the implied hubris. If you make a Myspace page or startup a Twitter account, in the minds of many people you are essentially communicating that "My life is so important or interesting that other people will want to know about it and I therefore am providing a source to feed that need." The critics tend to overlook that the average non-celebrity Twitterer is primarily expecting that his friends and family are the intended audience. They see that the whole world COULD follow your life and so they make the intuitive leap that such exposure is the motivating factor of the social networker.

In a nutshell, the "point" is that some people are information consumers and social networks provide information for consumption. That's basically it. If you say, "But that motivation is no different than a forum" then you're right. It's just a difference of format. A forum is an exchange but it's not typically a network. You follow topics, not people. Social networks bend the other way. They promote a focus on individuals instead of on discussion topics. That's the "point".

And, as I mentioned, that is what irks so many critics. The idea that anyone who uses a "social network" is sending a message that they feel themselves to be "important" moreso than their "actual" importance. Those same critics are more often attacking the entire concept of the social network rather than attacking individuals on the actual quality of their information, based on the idea that it's somehow "bad" for individuals to believe in their own importance.

I liken this to the people who were raised by parents who taught that any exercise of pride was bad; even, or especially, if the pride is justified. If you don't think your life is interesting to put online while I think my equally mundane life IS worth putting online, then it's not seen as an expression of my fascination with modern technology and gimmickry, it's seen as a social statement that I think my life is more important than yours and my "social networking" is, in essence, a way of passing judgement on the inadequacy of your life.

Nothing could be further than the truth, but that doesn't change the feelings it inspires.

In any case, the point in the end is that I want information and that person has it, and social networks let me get it. In addition, the "network" lets me see where THAT person is getting their information and I can decide if I want some of what they're eating in addtion to what I've already ordered.

I guess we REALLY hate War Witch then, seeing as how she burned down a rave with her fire sword and directly caused the deaths of a bunch of innocent civilians, whereas these innocents killed by Statesman's negligence/incompetence/grandstanding appear to be mainly hypothetical...

The thing is, that isn't true in the general case. It's only true in the specific case of one or two three-issue storylines. If you go back and read the whole Top Cow run you'll see that only a couple of writers take this tack with him. Yet, those writers are somehow the ones who have defined his character for a lot of people, especially the people who hate Jack Emmert already.

This is why I have to wonder what happens when you take the comic out of the equation. The gimmick of having a half-dozen different writers was a cute gimmick but the result is that you have a half-dozen different takes on a character AND ONLY TWO OF THOSE WRITERS ACTUALLY HAD ANY INVESTMENT IN THE CHARACTERS. Those two being Troy Hickman and the team of Sean Fish/Matt Miller on the final issues.

And somehow, people focus on the drill seargent and ignore the guy who cared about his team or who embraced Foreshadow as a friend or who did any other positive and caring thing while leading the Freedom Phalanx.

So, yeah, you can't ignore the comics, but it seems to me that if you're going to give them so much weight that you ought to be spreading that weight around to the entire Top Cow run instead of letting a couple of issues of Statesman kicking Manticore's butt and Manticore mouthing off to him to be the defining moments for the character. Most of the comics might as well have been titled "Manticore (and friends)" anyway, for all the character development that the rest of the Phalanx got.

And if someone hates Jack Emmert and expresses it by hating The Statesman, then really, just let it go and move on already.

In a big way, this is really a failing of the game itself. It shouldn't be the case that the signature characters are blah nothings when you look only at the in-game material. The game itself ought to be the place you can go to judge what kind of characters these are.

People need to get over the fact that Statesman was originally Jack Emmert's character.

As for Statesman being "irrelevant and resented" I think you'd have a hard time proving either of those things. Especially the "largely resented" part, because it requires a majority of the playerbase to have some kind of emotional investment in the character in the first place, let alone a negative one.

The entire Freedom Phalanx is "irrelevant" to the game, in that they don't actually DO anything except hand out some task forces and guest-shot in some strike forces. Statesman is no more or less irrelevant by that yardstick than any other signature character.

Jack's gone. The comic writers who portrayed him as a drill seargent didn't "get" the character. Troy Hickman is really the only comic writer who "got" Statesman. In-game, he's anything but a hard-***, self-absorbed, self-righteous, drill seargent.

Move on already. Statesman's fine.