SlickRiptide

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Just one Q, with the screenshot, does that need to be printed or can we bring it in on a cd/usb device?

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I'd imagine that you can bring it any old way you want as long as David's able to look at it. I wouldn't bring it on a CD expecting him to have a laptop handy to view it with.

If you insist on bringing it electronically then an iPod or some other media player that also displays photos would be the safest bet.

The maps did evolve as time went on. In the beginning, there was something like 3-4 office maps that were combined in various ways for any particular mission. It was predictable enough that you could, for instance, go into a mission you'd never seen before and immediately know where the boss or the mcguffin was located based on the layout of that floor of the building.

Thankfully, the devs responded to that complaint once Issue 1 was out the door, though it still took several issues before we got the variety of maps that we enjoy nowadays.

Most notably, the storyline missions got a face lift around the time of Issue three, I want to say. Nowadays, a storyline normally includes at least one unique mission map. (Usually the climax.) Lou's garage used to be a generic office map. *heh* The low-level superadine story used to take place entirely in generic warehouse maps. It was pretty cool when people who were used to that suddenly found themselves in a huge laboratory, with vats of 'dyne boiling and even status effects happening from breathing the vapors of the vats!

A lot of the quality of life things that people take for granted nowadays were actually added after the fact, once the dev team had the game stable enough to put their fire-fighter hats away for awhile.

Yeah, someday talking to newbies about the "old days of base building" is going to sound like "walking uphill, barefoot, in the snow, both ways!"

Did you know -- Vanguard origins

Anyone who reads the backstory of Paragon City is aware of the importance of Vanguard in global affairs, particularly related to the Rikti War.

What you may not know is that the heroes who make up the current roster of Vanguard were originally featured in Alderac Entertainment Group's City of Heroes Collectible Card Game.

Their archetypes and signature powers as printed in the card game are as follows:

Dark Watcher - Illusion/Force Field, Signature Power: Dimension Twist
Lady Gray - Dark Melee/Regen, Signature Power: Aging Touch
Serpent Drummer - Martial Arts/Regen, Signature Power: Snake Spirit
Borea - Katana/Super Reflexes Signature Power: Chill Wind
Levantera - Katana/Dark Armor Signature Power: Cloud Strike
Gaussian - Assault Rifle/Energy Manipulation Sidekick, no Signature Power

First off, good on the photographer, Robbie Cooper. An excellent eye for subjects and for posing. I enjoyed this slideshow a lot. Every photo was interesting in some fashion and it was all very professionally setup instead of being the bunch of candid-style shots that I was expecting when I first clicked the link.

Second, I have a feeling that the reason that WoW is under-represented is simply that Mr. Cooper didnt' find anything interesting to relate to. One of the things that he's shooting for in this series, IMO, is the correlation between the player and the avatar. That's one reason Second life is well represented. The avatars tend to be direct representations of the players. The exceptions were a couple of photos intended to show a great contrast between the player and the avatar. That's what WoW was chosen for.

The subjects were well chosen. I loved the shot of the British mom and her kids alongside her Second Life avatar. Even though her avatar is physically different, you could really see her personality coming through in both of those poses. Likewise, I really liked the shot of Jason Rowe, not just for illustrating the breadth of the people who play these games but for the way that the armor of his avatar reflected the shape and contours of his real-life "gear".

I found something to like in every one of those photographs. What really impressed me was the variety of the people. All countries, all walks of life, all sorts of interests and all of it presented with a sense of humor and fun. I would gladly show that photo collection to any non-gamer as evidence that gaming is for everyone.

Nice to see CoH well represented, both in number of photos and in number of nationalities. Anyone seeing that slideshow might actually be disappointed to sign up for CoH and discover that the international guys are all segregated into their own servers.

Jack Emmert has stated in the past that he feels player-created content is a red herring because most players don't have the talent for creating good content. He wasn't slamming players; just acknowledging the fact that most of us don't have great plotting/writing skills.

In theory, the idea is wonderful. In practice, you have to assume that every player who builds custom content is doing so in order to benefit himself. "If my supergroup does this content 100 times, we'll all be level 50 with a full compelement of IOs!"

Ryzom's move made some sense for the company. They're small, have a limited player-base, and allowing the player-designed content cuts some of their development expenses. Even so, the biggest problem I heard about was simply that people would design their instances and then hardly anyone would find and use them. (In Ryzom, your custom instance is only active while you're logged in and playing. At least that's how it worked at the time the feature was introduced.)

Ryzom also built their development tools to be tightly integrated into the game. Most of the work (aside from the instancing) was just a matter of telling the game engine that players were allowed to use a subset of the dev tools. If Cryptic's development tools are primarily accessed outside of the game then you're unlikely to see them taking the time and trouble to develop new tools that ARE tightly integrated with the game engine.

I'd love to be able to design my own missions, but I don't see that ever happening in CoX.

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Ah, I have no knowledge of your SCA... even vaguely wondered if it was an offshoot of the SPCA... which leads to some pretty odd thoughts considering the context of the post.


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Society for Creative Ananchronism

I remember way back when Denny's first introduced the Grand Slam Breakfast and you could get this huge breakfast for $1.99. It became a weekly tradition to play our D&D games until the wee hours, then trek down the road from the college dorm and spend more time chowing down on cheap food and coffee while recapping the night. I imagine the waitresses must have thought it was odd. I was usually too wrapped up in plotting out the next adventure to notice.

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Does the trial have thought balloons? I've only played a little with it, but didn't see it. I've already looked around town for a copy of the software , but no deal.

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There's a variety of thought balloons in content pack #1. I remember seeing the box at Software Etc some months ago but if you've downloaded the trial already then buying an activation code online is as good as buying the box. Unless maybe you want to re-download the Marvel version or something and buy that instead. Content Pack #1 is a free download that you could add on top of the Marvel box if you were so inclined.

The fansite kit looks to be the only source of logos and such right now. If there's supposed to be a CoX content pack, the people at Planetwide Media haven't brought it online yet.

Some tips for folks looking to create custom content packs - The "screenshots" folder should contain jpegs that are meant to fill an entire panel. The "clipart" folder should contain transparent gifs, sized up to something large. Clip art can be placed anywhere on a page and is treated as an object where screenshots are treated as a background.

While music isn't a criteria for judging the comic, the fansite kit DOES have a collection of music clips that you could toss in for atmosphere.

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Thanks, that one worked for me.

Now if only I knew why the "publish" option didn't... Grr....

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You have to buy a license code to activate the publish option.

However, you CAN publish to Hypercomics, which is all that's required for the contest.

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Gah! that comic book creator tool jipped me, apparently it didnt come with text boxes so my comic will be wordless!!



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The installation screen has several choices of extra packages. The word balloons and stuff are in the "Fun Pack #1 Content Pack". You have to install the content pack in addition to the main Comic Book Creator software.


If you've installed the content pack, then make sure that when you initialize a new comic book, that you choose Content Pack #1 as your content pack. If you choose the basic pack, you'll end up with the bare minimum content.

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Hmm, anyone else having problems with this link?



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This worked for me: http://d2.planetwidegames.com/cbc/cbc_standard_1215_en.exe but this link is for the standard version that doesn't have any CoH artwork in it. The other link, when it works, is supposed to have some CoH art in it according to Lighthouse.

Did you know... Inside jokes and references

A lot of the homages and inside jokes in the game are documented in this thread, but many others can also be found in the Inside Jokes and References thread!

Since April Fool's Day is around the corner...

Did you know... The Hidden Badge!

It wasn't long after CoH went live that someone figured out how the data files were compressed and went "pigg diving". With Issue 2 on the horizon, a lot of the upcoming badge info was dug out of the .pigg files and enough spoiler info was posted to the forums that the forum moderators ended up making it a bannable offense to read the .piggs and upload their contents to the forums.

In March of 2006, a new badge appeared in the .pigg files and got the "pigg divers" buzzing about an upcoming April Fool's event in City of Heroes. Despite the speculation, April 1 came and went with no special event heralding April Fool's Day. Positron got the last laugh when he revealed that the "April's Fool" badge was an easter egg inserted into the data files to tease the "pigg divers". To date, there's no way in-game to become "April's Fool".

(Note to self - Try /settitle just for laughs.)

Thanks for the entertaining backgrounder. Good choices on the testimonials and the "wrappers". There's a big faction of us who originally got into the game based on the story and it's been a long dry spell since there was any real addition to the back-story and/or in-game storyline. Thanks for an ice-cold drink on parched throat!

Here's hoping that I-10 really will bring the story back to the game...

I didn't see where these had been posted yet:

Mohinder's website and wiki

Hana's Myspace account

I'm afraid I have to give the event this year a less than stellar review. Not because it was significantly different than last year; it wasn't. It's because the participation was lower, no doubt BECAUSE it was substantially the same as last year.

That was a problem because the hero I wanted to grab a heart costume for, one that I designed specifically to use the heart costume, never got it. She was "gated" by a lack of any willing villains in Pocket D during the times that I had a chance to play her. My main hero got a couple of badges primarily because he still had a couple of snaptooth missions left over from last year.

Heart Throb, on Freedom (the highest pop server), was unable to get past her own co-op mission. She was never able to find a Scratch mission to help with. This was attempting it at a variety of times, and days over the course of a week or so. I was tempted to re-open one of my kids' currently retired accounts just to get it done, but in the end I couldn't justify spending $15 just to get a costume.

In the future, I'd respectfully ask that the devs avoid creating missions that require a particular kind of teammate in order to advance to the end of the story.

Jesse - the menu choice for the Statesman Task Force is labeled "To Protect and Serve". Should oughta be "Breakthrough", I reckon.

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I thought that the Marvel MMOG fell through with first Vivendi

[/ QUOTE ] That's my bad. It was Vivendi. My brain just pulled out the first name it found in its files that started with a 'V'. Doh!

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As for the DCU, the speculation is that SOE accepted The Matrix Online from WB in order to get their approval for doing the DC MMOG.

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Oh, I have no doubt that's exactly what happened. "You want DC superheroes? Sure, if you take this boondoggle off our hands as well." That's not to say it was a bad move for SOE, neccesarily. Of all of the MMO companies out there, with their existing infrastructure and the Access Pass subscription model they were uniquely situated to be able to take a loser like TMO and get some value out of it.

As for MUO, it's vaporware at the moment so it's off my radar for at least a year. The interesting thing, really, is that DCO and MUO are on track to release at approximately the same time. I think it will be very interesting to watch that rivalry and see how the market responds to having two new major license superhero games to choose between. I have a feeling that SOE might launch first due to having a head start, but Cryptic has the foundations in place already. The determining factor might be that SOE is willing to rush things in order to be first out of the gate while Cryptic's mantra is more "Get it right, then release it." I wonder how much pressure Marvel and Microsoft are going to put on them to make launch schedules a higher priority than quality?

Well, at least one of the devs claimed Earth and Beyond experience. Hi, War Witch!

E&B was one of the most ambitious games ever from a story perspective, and I've always felt it was a great loss to the MMO industry that EA's purchase of Westwood turned out to be the death knell of that game instead of its rescue.

One of the reasons I played CoH faithfully the first year or so was the fact that the meta-story was progressing and it looked like there would be constantly evolving story content. (Calvin Scott task force as an example.) My first break from CoH occurred around the time that I realized that the "story" was becoming less important and that the game was becoming somewhat static. I'm hoping that the promise of I9, that we begin an over-arching multi-issue storyline, comes true and that we get a chance to feel like we're actually part of something other than a single story that gets played out from the point of view of whatever alt you happen to be playing.

Besides, the Tada-O corporation was a laugh a minute. Valentine's heart-shaped ship shields, FTW! With inventions coming, we really need a cheap cut-rate supplier of amusing less-than-super inventions around to help supply Paragon City with useless yet fun super hero gear.

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BUT, once you've gotten this far into any major project, given a chance to start it over from the ground level with an experienced and integrated team, more manpower and a higher budget, you have a lot of opportunities to really capitalize on any major mistakes and misteps you made on your first go round. So don't take it personally. This is just how the world works.

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And that is exactly why Marvel picked Cryptic to develop MUO. Cryptic has already made all of the mistakes and learned from them. Why pay some other software house, even SOE, to make those same mistakes again?

Honestly, the Marvel lawsuit was so completely frivolous from the get-go, that I've often found myself suspecting that protecting their IP was really the secondary goal. No other comic company has found it neccesary to threaten Cryptic about CoX in three years. My suspicion is that Marvel wanted a developer with a proven track record after the Valve deal fell through, and maybe SOE was already committed to DCO. If you can't have the biggest name in MMO development, then why not the established superhero developer? I suspect that the lawsuit was really a chance to get a foot in the door with Cryptic, and to bypass the whole "but your game would be competing with our game" business by framing it as a kind of "we can settle this amicably if you agree to consider our business proposal" thing.

It's paranoid, but it's interesting to imagine the maneuvering that would go into those sorts of machinations.

I haven't seen so much FUD since the NGE.

People, when you wonder "what will happen to CoX?", please keep this very important fact in mind - Cryptic is not self-publishing either CoX or MUO. They're a developer who's relying on funding from their publishers, whether it's seed money or subscription revenue.

Statesman said as much -
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NCSoft continues to fund a fantastic live team with lots of great stuff to come.


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We're not talking Sony Online Entertainment consolidating EQ, EQ2, EQOA, and SWG. They did that because they developed AND published all of those games.

The people working on CoX and the people working on MUO are seperate people with seperate budgets. That's why Cryptic is expanding - They need to hire new people to develop MUO. They're not splitting the attention of the development teams between the two games because doing so would be cheating NCSOFT. CoX is an NCSOFT game. MUO is a MICROSOFT game.

The fact that Cryptic is developing MUO has little to no impact on CoX as long as NCSoft is footing the bill for CoX. You need to get over this idea that Cryptic itself is the determining factor here. Cryptic is just a software development house that happens to be working on two games. If FASA had approached Cryptic about doing a Mechwarrior game, the end result with respect to CoX would be identical. People are reacting emotionally because the two games happen to be the same genre.

Hell, Cryptic has less of a stake in MUO because they also own the IP for CoX. With MUO, their cut will be SMALLER than CoX because they have to share it with Marvel. The compensation will (hopefully for Cryptic) be that Marvel is a license with broader appeal and will hopefully attract an even larger audience than CoX and bring in the same or greater revenues despite sharing the revenue with Marvel, Inc.

On a final note - Back when I played EQ the boards were always full of FUD over the Next Big Thing. Didn't matter if it was Asheron's Call, or Dark Age of Camelot or whatever. The Next Big Thing was always going to kill EQ. Yet, EQ is still around and still doing pretty well by most standards. Why is that? Well, the EQ devs themselves always said that they welcomed new competition. The reason being that, although some of the EQ players jumped ship, a broader selection of games nearly always resulted in an expansion of the market as a whole, so that EQ's numbers usually went UP in the long run.

CoX IS the superhero market at the moment. Rather than predicting doom and gloom, I'm going to predict that there are going to be a lot of DCO and MUO subscribers who get tired of those games, but still want a superhero game and jump ship to CoX as an alternative to the big-name games that turned out to be not quite what they expected.

Calling CoH the red-headed step-child is just downright foolish. If you react with your heads instead of your guts and look at this thing from a business perspective, you'll see that it's really a GOOD thing, though it may take a year of MUO/DCO to fully realize the benefits.

In any case, don't worry about CoX being neglected. At least not until NCSoft decides to stop publishing it. As long as the game is based on a partnership, Cryptic is going to continue giving their first and best partner full value for their investment. That's business.

Did you know? -- Positron's Task Force

The following is quoted from another discussion about the Positron Task Force, in which Matt Miller aka Positron, discusses the origins of the task force.

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Yes, you have entirely -me- to blame for that Task Force.

Here's some (not so) interesting background tidbits:

* Task Forces were originally supposed to be "supergroup missions" where then entire SG could partake at once. We couldn't get the tech working in time, so we came up with the idea of a "mini-raid", where a couple people could spend an entire day doing missions together for cool rewards. This is why Task Forces allow you to go offline and return and still be in the TF. It allows players to say "let's meet up every night from 8 to 10pm and work on the TF", without having to start over.

* Positron's TF was the very first TF ever made. It was supposed to be the precursor to the (cut) Faultline Trial.

* Positron's TF was originally written as TWO Task Forces, but we didn't have the tech to have a single contact give out Task Force A and B, and only give out B if everyone completed A, so it was merged into a Single Ginormous Task Force.

* Positron's TF never got full benefit from cool stuff like custom mission maps, because it was done so early in development.

* I am still trying to get a rewrite of Positron's TF onto the schedule... but I want to know how you guys would feel about an "easier" or "shorter" TF? It would obviously give out the same badge as previous (or the badge hunters would have my head), but would that cheapen the badge for those that had it already?

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Positron
Lead Designer, City of Heroes


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Please note that I have quoted the entire post for its historical value, but that discussion of the task force itself (per Positron's questions at the end of the quoted text) belongs in the original thread. This is both to keep this thread on topic and also to make sure that your comments about the task force will show up in a thread that might actually be read by Positron occasionally.

Wow, nice catch! Wish I'd made the connection. It may say something about the mean age of the CoX population since it took this long for someone to finally notice and say something about it. I'll overlook the fact that the OP seemed to actually be remembering The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. *heh*

I agree that this info should go into the Did you know? thread and/or the Inside Jokes and Obscure References thread.

Oh, and thanks a heap for putting that stupid Flying Machines theme song back into my head after all these years!

Nab him! Grab him! Stab him! Jab him! Stop that pigeon, NOW!

If it's like most small one-player bases, it goes wherever she wants it to. You put in a single teleporter and then change the beacon whenever you want to teleport someplace.

The "hawt" centers of my brain were permanently burned out after the first costume contest where I commented on the "hawtness" of Avonlea and my wife looked over my shoulder and said "Uh, that's a guy..."

I'm also a bit more critical about these things because I've been annoyed by them in regular life as well. E.g., a woman friend of mine who went to a party dressed basically in overalls and "won" the costume contest over several more deserving people because she was the "hawt" girl and everyone there was a sex-starved BBS geek. (Yeah, this was back in the days of 1200 baud modems and the "internet" being an ivory tower thing that most people had only heard rumors about.)

"Cookie Girl" is, I imagine, well aware of her physical attractiveness. I imagine that she would be more interested in how well her costume was received than in how many forumites would like to buy her dinner and drinks.

I'd have to give Miss Cholera extra points just because her pic frightens me...