SlickRiptide

[ QUOTE ]

I don't see much meat on the bones of the "omg ae is ruining things' argument beyond a nostalgic fixation on how a lot of us veterans are used to playing.

It's new, it's different, and a lot of people prefer it to the 'real' way to play. That isn't a bug, it's a feature.

[/ QUOTE ]

Honestly, this isn't about approving or disapproving play styles. It's about the sovereign experience of a new player. A new player should feel like he's just stepped into a city with a history and a path to discovering all that the city has to offer.

A truly new wet behind the ears player isn't equipped to make the decision about whether spending all of his life in Doctor Aeon's plot to rule the world is a good idea or not.

What does he do after he's power-leveled to 50? Say, "What's next?" and the answer is either "Some task forces or more mission architect missions!" That player is going to wonder why the heck the world is so small. We don't have an end-game here. In some way, Architect Entertainment IS the end-game. You get the most out of it when you already know all about the factions and NPC's you might encounter inside of it. And that's kind of the point. You don't funnel the newbies into the end-game fresh out of the hatchery.

The fact that that you can take a level 1 into Architect Entertainment does not automatically mean that it's a good idea to do so. Newbies should be getting exposed to the breadth of the game, not place in a position where they can be immediately pulled into the very narrowest possible game experience.

You know, Goat, if I make a crack about the screen door on the MAGI vault, you're going to get the joke. It's completely conceivable that a newbie can land in Atlas Park, get sucked into the Architect, and come out WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING WHO AZURIA IS.

Moving the Architect out of the starting zones isn't going to inconvenience a knowledgable newbie any more than it inconveniences a knowledgable vet. Meanwhile, the real newbies will have the opportunity to experience the actual City and have a taste of the missions that inspired the Architect before they get sucked into it. THEN they'll have some basis for deciding how to divide their time between built-in content and player-generated content, especially when their first exposure to player-generated content has a high probability of being a farm team.

It's not about play style, it's about the initial play experience. That's what's going to determine whether a new player becomes a long-term subscriber or a short-term "I beat the game, time for a new game" player.

Is the AE going to be the only factor in that evolution? No, of course not. The initial impression, though, the sovereign experience, is going to go a long ways towards determining what a player feels a game is "about". IMO, we should try to preserve the "true" experience of the game for the newbies at least until they get out of the newbie zone.

It's good to see that a red-name is following this discussion and that there's some acknowledgement that it may be a problem (unless I read too much into Castle's post).

I'm with most of the posters in this thread. I don't think AE needs to be changed as much as it needs to be moved out of the newbie zones.

The biggest reason: When CO goes online, and later DCUO, there is going to be some natural churn from those games and that's going to give us a big influx of newbies that we don't currently have. I'm in total agreement that we do not want brand spanking new players to reach the impression that the AE experience is what City of Heroes is supposed to be all about.

It's incredibly easy for an experienced player to take a new level 2 character and run into IP or Steel for a costume change. Experienced players will suffer very little in the way of detriment or inconvenience if the AE buldings are removed from Atlas Park and Galaxy City. King's Row I'm on the fence about, but I certainly have no problem with the idea of removing that also. Leaving it where it is would mean that vets leveling lowbies would be able to exit the building occasionally to do their training and they could return easily via Pocket D, so the inconvenience would really be very minimal.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The point being that it's better to develop that new engine and incorporate it into the existing game than it is to launch a "sequel".

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not sure that's how it works. Even assuming you can "incorporate" a new engine into an existing game, that won't make it look any better.

[/ QUOTE ]

That depends upon the developers and their implementation. To draw on a real-life example: When Everquest introduced the Shadows of Luclin expansion, they also provided a new graphics engine for the game. Most players purchased the expansion and so acquired the new engine in that fashion. Players who didn't purchase it had it patched down to them.

As you say, this would not have changed the appearance of the world all by itself. As part of the upgrade, SOE created a whole set of new models that took advantage of the enhanced graphical capability of the new engine. For the sake of the players running on low-end machines, they also included a toggle-switch that allowed a player to continue to use the old models if the new ones proved too lag-inducing because their graphics card couldn't handle it. (We're talking DirectX v3 or v4 timeframe, IIRC, just for reference.)

These days, our machines are capable enough that we wouldn't need to worry overly much about providing such a toggle in the case of an engine upgrade.

As for making the world look better, I'm not convinced that a graphics engine upgrade would be inspired by a need to "look better". It looks fine now. I'm not sure how it COULD look better short of looking more "realistic". The improvements would be in the areas we've already seen - particle effects, water/shadow rendering, Physx, that kind of thing.

Oh, and character customization.

I may be a bit of a Luddite, but I've never found that the putty-faced "realistic" features in many of the newer games to be all that desirable. I actually LIKE the artistic sensibilities of games like CoX and WoW and Free Realms. A new game engine will happen, IMO, because of what it offers "under the hood" rather than because it's got a lot shiny new chrome attached. That sort of upgrade can happen at any time.

[ QUOTE ]
I would definitely buy "World of Heroes" if it ever came out. I already got a system that can handle 10 times the graphics CoH can dish out... I'm ready for an engine upgrade.



[/ QUOTE ]

Would you subscribe to both games at the same time? If the answer is "no" then you've just illustrated why there won't be a "City of Heroes 2".

[ QUOTE ]

Eventually, you end up with an archaic game engine, which can't necessarily support the changes you want to make to it.

[/ QUOTE ]

The point being that it's better to develop that new engine and incorporate it into the existing game than it is to launch a "sequel".

Game fans are attached to an IP as much as a genre and play style. If you split the IP, history has shown over and over that you split your player base without significantly drawing in new players. Guild wars may be the only game that actually succeeds at the "sequel" thing, primarily because Guild Wars itself is not really a MMORPG whereas "Guild War 2" will be.

In our case, the failure of City of Villains as a standalone property was a harsh enough lesson that the devs would be mad to create a separate stand-alone sequel game. City of Villains WAS "City of Heros 2". Just as there were not really thousands of people waiting to subscribe to City of Villains "because I'd rather play a villain", there are not thousands of people waiting to play World of Heroes "because I'd play if it had better graphics and a bigger world".

There is no "City of Heroes 2" and there should NOT be one. Everquest 2 was successful as far as it went, but its success came at the expense of Everquest. EQ's playerbase was cut in half in a short time, between the launch of EQ2 and the launch of WoW shortly afterwards. The only consolation for SOE was that EQ had some 400k subscribers to split on the one hand, and on the other hand a lot of EQ subscribers took the excuse to upgrade to a Station Access account (which at the time would let you play both games for less than the combined costs of the two subscriptions, along with Planetside and Star Wars Galaxies and EQ Online Adventures).

The whole fifth column thing is a question of back story colliding with game mechanics. It should hardly be surprising that the result is something of a train wreck, though primarily because game mechanics didn't support a dynamic back story.

The whole business happened because Cryptic tried to create a dynamic storyline while still supporting a static game world. This was exacerbated when they put new hires in charge of much of the grunt work, or at least that's how I understood the explanation of things like the story of Atlas being ret-conned.

Actually, I think that the some of the devs back then may have just believed that the players didn't give a hang and just wouldn't notice that Atlas had gone from being a Big Damn Hero to being a guy who saved some lawyers from COBRA.

In a static world, there was simply no room for both groups, and rather than throw away all of the fifth column missions and replace them with new ones, they ret-conned them to Council missions. That's the only explanation that's neccesary, really. It totally screws up the back story but the leadership at the time was okay with that in lieu of investing time and money into what might have amounted to a couple of issue's worth of new backstory. The new backstory effort was put into Striga Island instead.

Leaving the Fifth Column missions in the game would have been confusing to a lot of people. It was a no win situation in a lot of ways, which is to say it was a poorly planned way of trying to tell a dynamic story.

Despite what might sound like a critical tone here, I applaud the devs of the time for attempting to make a dynamic story. I'm just sorry that it worked out the way it did, especially since it seems that the experience convinced them that a dynamic story was not worth or not possible or both. After Calvin Scott and the Council War, we've had to rely on the comics for our dynamic story and now we don't even have that.

Anyway, looking for anything about the Council/Fifth Column to make sense is simply fruitless if you try to do it while ignoring the meta-game considerations. We can at least be thankful for the bits we've gotten in the meantime that show the Column doing what they do best; i.e., hiding in plain sight, waiting for the signal to re-emerge.

Which makes this current Reichsman story pretty rushed out - They're covering story that ought to be told over the course of weeks or months instead of in two task forces. And, sadly, it's not likely that this is going to be dynamic either. Ten years from now, Reichsman will still be just waking up and trying to take over the city, just like he is today.

This reminds me yet again why I like Dean Cain despite his mainly appearing in a bunch of schlocky B movies every since "Lois and Clark". He nearly always manages to rise above the material in some fashion.

Vibration was the first thing to occur to me as well. Sonic is just kinetic energy imparted to air molecules. A hyper scream would be a natural thing for him to do as a blind/deaf person. When he gained some sensory input and and training in the true nature of his powers, he'd advance to more typical telekinesis and inertia-dampening abilites.

I'm not sure that I'd tie him into any particular Arachnos character, unless you know for certain right now which patron he'd eventually like to have. Otherwise, I'd probably have him be "discovered" by some one like Burke, who cultivates useful connections, and gets him introduced to the culture of Mercy Island.

The business of a sensory helmet that prevents him from knowing that he's doing evil is a bit weird. It suggests that he's being manipulated by a sinister force, though I can see in that case why you picked Dr. Aeon. I agree with the poster above, though, who said that Aeon is the prototypical mad scientist who is way too involved in his fringe science to be someone who is using another unsuspecting dupe as a tool to achieve an agenda.

If that's really the back story you want, then I'd just invent the villain(s) using your character in that fashion. I'm not sure how you'd deceive them like that, but if your character spent his whole life marginalized as a burden on society, then maybe he's simply never had an moral training and doesn't have the emotional basis for asking the moral questions that would indicate "good" and "evil" intent.

Maybe he even thinks of the world as a kind of movie or video game or virtual reality and his controller encourages him to believe that. The Ender's Game gambit, basically. "Joe, thank you for volunteering to be a test subject. During the course of our testing of this new sensory technology over the next few years, we'll be inserting you into a simulated world to judge how well the equipment responds to your nervous system." If you kill someone in a simulation, what's the harm?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I've run a real CC one time.

[/ QUOTE ] I've done it once too, but I've run fake ones about four times.

[/ QUOTE ]

Is this a troll? If it's really true, I'd be really curious what the point is in doing that or, for that matter, why you'd admit it in a public forum.

[ QUOTE ]

Nonsense.
If I say "Stalin was a murderer who killed millions of Russians", there is no hate involved, it's a simple statement of fact.


[/ QUOTE ]

So, context has no influence on whether the statement is carrying any emotional baggage? Delivery has no effect? Really?

I guess that's why I'm the only person in this thread who thinks the OP might have brought it up for some reason above and beyond reporting the facts that at least one person was angry at Jack for not acceding to their wishes. Too many dogs and too few bell-ringers in the audience, I guess.

[ QUOTE ]


If it didn't make you angry, gratz. The statement remains true.

Accuracy is not hate.

[/ QUOTE ]

As long as a single person hated Jack for "not giving them what they wanted" then you're correct, it IS an accurate statement.

As a general statement about the playerbase, it's less than accurate, but I'll accede that you are technically correct.

Regardless, a statement doesn't lose its hate simply by its accuracy or inaccuracy. If you are somehow are evincing a philosophy stating that only inaccurate statements can be considered hateful then, we're living in different worlds and I'm afraid we have no grounds for a discussion on the matter.

The accuracy of said opinion is open to debate.

In any case, the thread wasn't about Jack, and bringing him up was entirely irrelevant to the question posed by the OP (despite it being the OP who brought him up).

[ QUOTE ]
anyone remeber jack emmert and how people disliked him because he made the game into his vision rather then giving players what they wanted?

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow, you managed to turn it into a Jack Emmert Hate Thread in only five posts. Well done!

Just wanted to say, Sean, that most of us who have expressed doubt about the state of the story bible in the past have done so primarily out of frustration about how stingy you guys have been with the backstory rather than out of a true sense that it was vaporware.

That said, thanks for the glimpse inside. It would be really nice if y'all actually published some kind of Handbook of the City of Heroes Universe that would cover the known lore as well as the kinds of stuff that a "real" resident of Paragon City would just know, like the history of Miss Liberty (no, the single fact that she is Statesman's daughter is not a "history") or the stuff you mentioned about Doctor Science in your latest posting or what the world outside of Paragon City is like.

I TOLD you not to push that big red button, Amazing.

[ QUOTE ]


And it hurts to know that it will never be enough.

[/ QUOTE ]

I guess he IS getting to know how Manticore feels.

The European game is identical to ours, aside from the language it's presented in. You can check that yourself by looking at the Euro website(s).

Re: Paragon City - How does Paragon map on to the real world? I recall that someone (Jack?) once said that Paragon City is roughly the equivalent of Providence. Whether this meant that Paragon took over prominence from Providence (so Providence might still be the capitol, but otherwise a smaller city of less significance) or replaced it entirely is unclear.

Re: Croatoa - What are the roots that the Cabal are digging for so desperately? Sasparilla? Mandrake? Something magical? I can't find any explanation for this behavior anywhere in or out of the game.

Re: General Lore - While I'm the first to appreciate that the lore of the game is a complex tapestry, I'm of the opinion that when players find themselves unable to reliably answer basic questions about the setting such as "What is Freedom Corps and what do they actually do?" and others that are being asked/clarified in this thread that the back story is a bit TOO obfuscated.

This situation is exacerbated when a significant chunk of the lore resides on the website in the form of either red-name forum posts that are subject to deletion when threads are trimmed or entire arms of the website, like the Paragon Times, that disappear when the website is re-designed. What are the odds that someone will make the content of the "story bible" and other backstory content available as a kind of "Handbook of the 'City Of' Universe"? Is the Paragon Times gone for good or are the website people going to put it back online where it belongs?

Excellent! You've got a real knack for fleshing out your characters and bringing them to life. I've enjoyed both of these stories.

[ QUOTE ]


con's:
- not really a storyline when you enter the game, you begin
and just doing some quests to level


[/ QUOTE ]

There is no single core story to the game. There are several core stories, but they don't hit you over the head with them. You learn the details of them as you level up and those seemingly random missions begin to achieve a consistency that eventually leads to a story arc or a task force that is the climax of the story.

This model has gotten rather diluted over the years, unfortunately. With all of the bonus XP for newbies nowadays, you tend to blow by the early levels quickly. There's also a lot more alternative content that sets you up to skip the core story missions entirely.

If you really want to learn the story of the game, then here's my suggestion: Don't go to the Hollows except to talk to Sam Wincott. Don't do newspaper missions, except to team up with someone else who is running a bank safeguard. (Those are the missions that get you special travel powers and such.)

Talk to your initial contact in City Hall or Freedom Corps an follow the leads they give you. It will take you a bit longer, but you will begin to learn some things about the villains populating the city and as you level up you'll learn that many of them are not what they appear to be at first glance.

Do the task forces at the appropriate levels. Many of these are the climax of a particular villain group's story.

When you see a book icon next to a contact's portrait, that means the contact is offering you a "story arc". Go do that series of missions. It will teach you something about the game's backstory, show you some unique mission settings that you won't see anywhere else, and typically will also reward you with a temporary power of some sort.

There are zones in the game that have their own self-contained story. In level order, they are The Hollows, New Faultline, Striga Isle, Croatoa, and The Rikti War Zone. If you go to one of these zones, then I would recommend that you play them from start to finish in order to get the most out of them.

In addition, you'll also find that the Midnight Club has a series of stories waiting for you at different levels, culminating in one of the better task forces in the game at level 50.

All of these extra things will distract you from the core stories, and level you up past them. That is why Ouroboros, a time traveling faction, was invented. So you could go back and do story arcs that you missed on the way to level 50. Ouroboros also has their own set of unique task forces that reveal some of the backstory of the game.

In short, the reason it appears to be random at the beginning is that you are meant to discover the story as you go along. It isn't revealed all at once, nor is it spoon fed to you. When you discover the Clockwork King's diary at level 5, and it says that you remind him of the hero that turned him into a brain in a jar, you should be asking yourself who this Clockwork King is, and how his robots work, and what his goals are. The answers won't come to you immediately, but as you experience the story of Paragon City through your adventures, the answers will eventually present themselves and some of them will surprise you.

[ QUOTE ]
Do you put all the previous episodes into Ouroboros?

[/ QUOTE ]

That's what I would do, but I wouldn't put it past the devs to come up with a more interesting solution.

Actually, for me personally, it's not about replayability at all. It's about developing the lore and participating in building the history of the game world. People who are interested in replayability are the sorts of people who would be against episodic content, really.

Also, just to reiterate, I'm not suggesting that the entire game become dynamic. Just that, going forward, there should be some dynamic content alongside the static content.

Case in point: This new Reichsman task force. Sure, it's going to be interesting for a little while, and after that it'll go on farm status. We've got five missions or so on each side dealing with it.

Suppose, instead, that for the six or eight weeks leading up to it, there was a series of episodes that built up the story of the Fifth Column discovering the whereabouts of the Reichsman, explained why some faction of them would decide to release him, explained what Requiem is doing besides running and hiding, and that generally built up to a climax, with the new task force BEING that climax.

With the Architect in place, that kind of content is feasible. The biggest problem with the Reichsman task force is that, from a lore standpoint, it's full of question marks and outright contradictions. A series of episodes leading up to the launch of the task force would offer an opportunity to explain all of those question marks and build up the backstory at the same time.

To get past the "Players hate change" problem (or more correctly "Players hate to lose content"), Ouroboros would need to be re-worked a bit in the long term so that "finished" stories could be revisited via flashback.

I should clarify something - I'm not proposing that all of the content of the game become dynamic. I don't think that's either feasible or desirable. SOME of the game should ultimately become dynamic, though. How much, would really depend on just how "expensive" it would be to create and publish the episodic stories on a regular basis.

The suggestion on the table is simply try the concept with a single "Architect slot", if you will, and see how the concept is received. While I've kept the idea simply to keep it attractive, there are enhancements that could be added if it flies. (For instance, using the branching dialog to let players "vote" on the direction of the next chapter.)

Part of what makes the core game good is something that was brought up near the top of the thread, but it's something that proves my point, I think: The core story of City of Heroes is the story of your character becoming a hero. That is, there aren't 150,000 people defeating Doctor Vahzilok. There's just one - your character. S/he is the hero in his/her own storyline. Azuria doesn't lose thousands of items from the MAGI vault. She only loses one or two and your hero is the one that recovers them.

In short, the core story is your story, but it is also an episodic story. At entry levels you are introduced to the villains. You read the diary of the Clockwork King and discover that he finds you interesting and threatening. You learn the shadowy threat of the Vahzilok. As you level up, you encounter the organization and learn the goals of the followers of Doctor Vahzilok and you save the city from his activities and from Patient Zero, while discovering that in his mind, at least, he is more grey morally than black. You also investigate the Clockwork King, and you learn the truth about his "robots". Finally, you encounter Doctor Vahzilok himself, and put him behind bars. You also run the Synapse task force, fight through the entire Clockwork Court and finally neutralize the King.

At that point, you no longer encounter either of those factions in any of the core missions of the game.

Those stories, static as they are, have a beginning, a middle, and an end as you level up through the game.

Outside of those core missions, the game becomes frozen in time. What I would like to see (and I believe that others would as well) is a certain amount of content that is NOT frozen in time but that exists briefly and then resolves. The city is aging but the world it resides in is not aging along with it except haphazardly.

The beautiful thing about the Calvin Scott task force is that it is resolved and gone. It told a story, concluded the story, and changed the world as a result. An episodic story that resolves and ends doesn't have to be earth-shattering. It just has to add to the lore of the city and expand on it so that the lore can grow and develop. Instead of the story expanding in dribs and drabs of tightly focused content that then becomes a permanent part of the landscape, the story of Paragon City would become organic and would be in a constant state of expansion.

That's where I see this heading over the long term. For now, though, the suggestion is just to try it on a very small scale to determine how feasible it really is and how players would really feel about it. The rest of the game's content would stay exactly as it is unless some devs decided there was a benefit to advancing one of those static stories in this manner.

One of the problems with any game following the standard model of MMO game development is that content tends to be introduced and then never removed. The story becomes part of the lore of the world and so it becomes a permanent fixture. Three years or more later, Salamanca is still under siege. Nothing we do will ever change that.

The Reichsman is returning. Once he returns, we'll spend the next ten years defeating him and putting him to rest again. A decade from now, some goons from the Rogue Isles will still be just waking him up. Again.

And so it goes.

It hasn't always been like this. Early in the game's history, a new issue meant that something changed in the backstory of the world. We got capes and a mission to earn them. Calvin Scott WON the battle to eject Sister Psyche from his wife's brain. Aurora Borealis replaced Malaise as trainer and Sister Psyche assumed her old station in her proper body. The Council went to war, usurping the place of the Fifth Column and purging them from their ranks, driving them underground.

At one time, there was a sense that the world was not completely static. Stories could come to a conclusion and that conclusion could alter the face of the game world.

Dynamic story telling was a short-lived phenomenon, sadly. It's true that we had "zone revamps" and those did change the world. It would be a stretch to consider that as "dynamic". The zones in question were hazard zones with no story of their own, created simply to fulfill a perceived need at the time for a "camping" zone. The stories added could easily have been added to a new zone instead. None of those new stories have been dynamic at all. In fact, they tend to raise a unanswered questions and add their own loose plot ends to those dangling about the rest of the city. In ten years, we'll all still be fighting to destroy the psychochronometron and Penelope Yin will still be age 14 and unaware of her true potential.

It's been said by Joe Morrisey, aka Hero 1, that the Mission Architect was originally conceived as a developer tool intended to make the creation or 'mocking up' of new missions easier and faster. It's been intimated that the developer tools that correspond to our player version of the Mission Architect are somewhat more powerful, or at least less limited.

The point being that the Architect is not just a player tool, it's also a developer tool.

The biggest arguments against dynamic storytelling have always been the big two:

1) Players hate change.

2) Resources are too expensive to justify discarding content after an arbitrary period of time.

Number one is certainly true. The number of people who still complain about never getting to play the Calvin Scott task force is a testament to how much players want to have all content at their disposal. I don't have any good answer to that except the old adage that "If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs."

If we agree that dynamic story-telling is a good thing, that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an END, then we are perforce accepting the premise that the content is eventually going to go away when the story is finished. It can't be helped, though it can be worked around if a mechanism exists for returning to old content via a flashback mechanism such as Ouroboros.

Number two appears to no longer be true. The whole point of the Architect is that basic content (meaning content that doesn't require special programming) is now INEXPENSIVE to produce in comparison the methods of the past. If a story is hooked up to an existing NPC in the game world, then the only cost is the time to write the story and bug-test it. This time is not free or neccesarily cheap, as anyone who has created an Architect mission can attest. It IS much cheaper than it used to be, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb by imagining that the process of adding it to the world is a simple one as long as no new contact NPC's are required.

It's easy for me to make my armchair designer pronouncements. However, it seems to me that it is also easy to test the truth of the matter.

My proposal is that the devs allocate someone to write and implement a new story arc using only the Mission Architect (dev version, of course) and hook that into the game world. Every two weeks a new chapter of the story would replace the current chapter, until it reached its conclusion and the story went away, to be replaced by another story.

Before anyone objects too strenuously, I'll point out that there are currently two task forces in the game and two more coming in I-15 that all have their roots in one of the few game-changing stories ever implemented in City of Heroes. Likewise, there are two signature heroes who would not be married today if not for a different game-changing story. In fact, any number of missions and task forces would at least look very different simply from having the Aurora Borealis model in place of the Shalice Tilman model. Not to mention, that the stories of the Top Cow comics would be impacted in ways both minor and major, depending on which story you look at.

I think it would be worthwhile to try an experiment on a small scale and then judge how the players react to something that lets them participate in the lore of the game and perhaps even influence it, even if the price is that the participation is on a limited-time basis until the story concludes. Once "Going Rogue" is pushed live, some of those designers may have a bit of unallocated time, and the curiosity, to devote to such an experiment.

The best solution of all would be to simply remove it and let the players be the judge of "profanity" via the report button. Unlike the trolls who enjoy making a level one to get attention in Atlas Park and then delete it, there's a real penalty in the MA for being reported - loss of a story arc slot.

If a word like "nip" is banned because it MIGHT refer to anatomy as a kind of slang or when it's wild-carded in a regex then we're all pretty much hosed anyway. Give us the entire English language to work with and let us decide if a word is "bad" or not.

Mind you, that's my pipe dream, not my expectation. I do think that a weekly review of the proposed thread by a community red name could pop up a bit of consensus from whatever chaos might ensue if several hundred people all posted their own individual exception lists.