SlickRiptide

[ QUOTE ]


It was a great costume,


[/ QUOTE ]

Nobody has said otherwise.

[ QUOTE ]

(which I might add that only those folks that submitted entries, and took the same potential risk, would even have a right to comment, the rest of you really need to shut it)


[/ QUOTE ]

And you'd be wrong. Everyone has a right to comment. It's not something you earn.

[ QUOTE ]

And ultimately ... SO WHAT if it doesn't perfectly follow the letter of the rules ...


[/ QUOTE ]

Aside from the strict legal requirements that surround any sweepstakes, rules are in place to describe what and how you participate. What if a player had a kickass Knives of Artemis costume in her closet but she didn't use it because she followed the rules? How would that make HER feel about someone else breaking the rules and winning?

The judges in the very first contest were sticklers. People were disqualified for taking pictures indoors in their homes instead of going out in public or for not putting "City of Heroes" on their costume. (That's not a requirement any more, it seems.) This year's judges were not as strict or were not trained sufficiently to realize how strict they were supposed to be.

[ QUOTE ]

Besides ... Have you remotely considered that the person has been reading your, less than flattering, judgements about her efforts ??? Or are you just not caring how she might feel about it ...

[/ QUOTE ]

I care quite a bit about it, actually, so smeg off, eh? The plain fact is that the costume breaks the rules. It's a great costume and I hope that Nepharim takes pride in it regardless. Nobody is dissing her efforts. That doesn't change the facts, though. Contests aren't about making exceptions for people in order to avoid hurting their feelings. Contests of any sort are all about following the rules to get a reward.

Oy, I hate to be the doomsayer but I agree with Avonlea. Nepharim's costume is great, no question. It's not a copy of one of her characters, though. I'm really surprised that the judges let this one through. The caption on the website even acknowledges it as a Carnie costume.

I hate being a bad guy but this costume should have been disqualified. I'd be happy to be proved wrong but I don't see how that could possibly be a player villain costume.

Marisa definitely had the best overall. That power armor was a really great job.

[ QUOTE ]
They gonna give out the free respec?

[/ QUOTE ]

No. There are no power changes big enough to justify a free respec and veteran rewards include as many as three "free" respecs.

They are giving out some more free costume tokens, though. No specific date has been announced on that yet.

[ QUOTE ]

If anyone did the Posi TF while I8 was on Test, they haven't said so.

We still have time.

[/ QUOTE ]

I posted a thread about that particular topic and Lemur Lad asserted that the task force is unchanged on Test. I don't know whether that knowledge was hearsay or personal experience.

I'd certainly like for the final mission to take place at the dam. It'd be a lot more satisfying that running to a random office building door in Perez Park and pretending "oh, yeah, this is an electrical substation, yep, yep!" Not to mention that a substation in Perez Park (which seems like a pretty strange place to put one) has little to nothing to do with the actual dam that the villains are supposedly attempting to sabotage.

[ QUOTE ]
(btw, I confess that many other games have the notion of personal property, but aside from Second Life, I don't think they offer as much customizability as our bases).


[/ QUOTE ]

I'd agree with the exception of SWG. Yes, the floor plans of the houses are fixed in Galaxies, but your ability to utilize the space within along with the sheer number of objects that you can use makes Galaxies the premier "Home decorating" game.

[ QUOTE ]
In other words, they're more than willing to accept someone else's opinion in the group identity for their avatar appearance. Again, the primary difference is cost (I think).

[/ QUOTE ]

That's true, but it's because the members of the SG have a choice. You're never required to run with the full supergroup uniform. You can choose parts of it or none at all. The SG doesn't override individual expression.

The base architect is an all or nothing deal, barring a liberal leadership that lets everyone edit the base. You don't get a say in how big the base is, what's put in it, or how it's arranged. If you WANT a base of your own to decorate as you like, you can't have it without penalize yourself by leaving your SG and creating your own personal SG. This is one of the places where CoX really falls down in the "personal space" department. There isn't any personal space it's all group space. Every other game out there would let you own your own home without barring you from also belonging to a "guild" and using their "guild hall" as well.

Imagine if joining a SG meant that your costume parts (not just colors) became something that matched that of the leader, and that in addition to wearing someone else's costume you had to pay prestige for the privelege!

THAT would make costumes analagous to bases.

[ QUOTE ]

What is a problem, is that even in a trusting SG that hands out ranks like candy, you do not want more than, say 3-4 people working on the base. Any more and you're not going to be able to stay up-to-date with each other, and long term planning goes out the window as different people are deleting and crafting different items. Or you get the person who really doesn't understand the base editor and really does start messing things up.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is why we need individual bases. To reference SWG, again - You had guild halls, which were the equivalent of our bases and which were subject to the same sorts of restrictions as well as a group "bank" that corresponds more or less to the prestige bank we have. If guild halls were all anybody had, though, you would never have seen any development.

Of course, the motivations in SWG are different and this is where we get fuzzy. In SWG, a house has many uses. It's your living quarters; your personal space. It's a warehouse. It's a factory, where you put your crafting tools and organize your manufacturing facilities. It's a storefront, where you dispense the items you've crafted.

In CoX, the SG base is ostensibly a meeting hall, a transport hub, and now loot storage. I don't think you can reasonably call it a manufacturing facility; the only "manufacturing" that happens is for more stuff to put in your base. Even the invention system is something that takes place in another part of the game.

Individual bases have even less reason to exist, as the only reason a player would have one is because it's possible. There's no call to establish a storefront or support one's lifestyle in any fashion. It'd be strictly personal space.

Now, people in SWG have done some amazing things with strictly personal space. Museums, aquariums, fortresses, even caves and other weird interiors. That freedom to express one's imagination, however, is pretty unique to SWG and it's ability to put any object at all in any part of your house, and allowing you to custom create objects as well as collect a plethora of otherwise useless objects that happen to make good house decorations.

The other thing SWG has going for it is that houses are part of the environment. When you're running by a house that's marked "Entertainer's Memorial", you can step inside and see that it's a pretty cool shrine to hundreds of individual entertainers who have passed on their way due to deficiencies of the game. In Paragon City, you're never going to run by someone's museum or rec hall or community center or whatever, because it will always be an instanced zone with a "secret entrance" ala the base portal. It's not really a part of the city.

This was also my biggest complaint about personal housing in EQ2, despite the wide variety of furnishings and what not. For the most part, there was no reason to ever go up to a random door and look inside to see what the owner has done with his house.

Even if we get individual bases, or apartments, they're never going to be anything more than fluff pieces that nobody but our friends interact with.

What's really needed, as has been said many times in this thread already, is a reason to ever go to a base in the first place. Why aren't there missions that involve teams where part of the team is doing the muscle work and part of the team is in the base doing the support/leadership work? Why aren't there more base-specific missions, or more missions that involve using OTHER Supergroup's bases as locations? Maybe I can't really raid the base of the player group Super-Villain's Inc., but why can't I have an instanced mission that uses their floorplan as a PvE base raid?

In other words, why can't I get some motivation to visit not just my base, but the bases of other groups on both sides of the hero and villain fence?

In a world where I got any wish I would wish for, those would be my wishes for bases in this game. A reason to exist, beyond existing just because it CAN exist; an identity as an identifiable part of the surrounding city; and game-provided motivations to visit and spend time in my base and in other groups' bases.

[ QUOTE ]
The only rooms used are those that matter.. med bay, teleport room, storage rooms ect. Hardly ever is the prestige used to make a bedroom or a lab for example. Or even just a simple sitting room.

[/ QUOTE ]

In the year or so since CoV launched, I have yet to have any of my heroes join a supergroup where I was given permission to create these sorts of living spaces. As has been noted many times already, the biggest problems with bases is that the group leader is generally the only person who gets to have any of the fun of building them.

Star Wars Galaxies is the ultimate example of a "base building" game. Every player had the opportunity to own a house of whatever style, size, and floorplan she could afford. The ability to drop almost every piece of loot in the game in your house and assign it a position in space meant that everyone could be an interior decorator. People have built some amazing things in SWG, because they had the freedom to express their imaginations.

The closest thing I've seen in CoH is the Halloween Maze that was being built for last night's Halloween party on the Training Room.

You don't see that in CoH because there's no way to express yourself individually. We don't have apartments and single-user bases are prohibitively expensive. You can place objects in a single plane and rotate them in a single plane. You can't place them wherever you want or rotate them in three dimensions.

Instead, you're limited to providing the "financial backing" for someone else's vision. The base itself is nothing more than a place to pop into when you need a teleport or a quick rez and jump back to a hazard zone. It's not someplace that I'd normally spend any of my time just hanging out.

On a less silly note - Sean Fish, aka Manticore, is the head writer. They'd let go of the bottom rungs (apparently, Gilgamesh) before they'd let Manticore go.

Manticore is still around. He's just not posting on the forums. I made the mistake of confusing Gil and Manticore and mentioning that Manticore had switched games on the CoH:CCG forums. I was soundly corrected by Dave Williams, the CCG designer who happened to be a personal friend of Sean Fish. If they lost a writer and Arcitc_Sun is still around then it was, sadly, probably Gilgamesh. Sorry to hear it, Gil!

Manticore created all of the Freedom Phalanx characters aside from Statesman and Sister Psyche. (You can see the credits for this in the comic book credits.) That should give you some idea of his influence vis-a-vis the game heirarchy.

[ QUOTE ]
Sorry, but anything involving rubber-banding the mask back to Italy where it can be lost in time for Vanessa DeVore to find it again is just lame.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think you're missing the point that the whole Azuria thing is an in-joke that explains the mask turning up later. It's not supposed to be a credible explanation. It's just another case of somebody leaving the M.A.G.I. vault unlocked again.

[ QUOTE ]


So... Posi designed/made(?) the suits; Null was trying to save money and used a sub-optimal spinal-clingy thinger; Null went power hungry in a similar, ironic fashion as to resemble Green Goblin or Doc Ock and got stuck in the suit by his spine?

But Posi knew a major flaw in the suit reproduction spec's and changed the spinal thingy?

That sound about right?

[/ QUOTE ]

Keeping in mind that we're primarily speculating here on the basis of a single sentence of the novel, then yeah. That's about right.

*edit* I don't believe the novel explicitly says when Bein put the prototype suit on and got trapped in it. From Ray's dialog with Bein, he (Bein) clearly tried it on before it was completely tested. He was sloppy that way; a classic science villain mistake.

I would speculate (emphasis on "speculate") that when the shite hit the fan about the Revenant project that Bein attempted to steal the suit and use it as a getaway vehicle. Once he got away, he discovered the Awful Truth about what he'd done to himself. Thus was born Dr. Null.

[ QUOTE ]
Perhaps the fact that Null's suit functions the way it does made it the perfect alpha model for Positron's work.


[/ QUOTE ]

Technically speaking, Ray designed Null's suit. They have a bit of banter during their first battle that goes something like this:

Positron - "So, you corrected that dorsal vulnerability"
Null - "A flaw in the original design!"
Positron - "Yeah, but who was the project manager who signed off on that particular set of compromises?"
Null - "Fortunately, I am no longer concerned with petty budgetary limitations."

Ray worked for Bein aka Null, and built the prototype which Null is now locked into due to the usual sorts of mad scientist shenanigans that power mad people like Bein get into when they're left unsupervised.

The upshot being that you're correct, in a sense. Ray DID base his suit(s) off of Null's suit but only because both suits are his work.

On a tangential note, it seems that the big difference between the two suits is the user interface. When Positron offers to try and help Null get free of the armor, Dr. Null replies "I prefer not to risk having my spinal cord severed." Null's armor apparently uses some sort of direct neurological interface. He's in the same position as Doc Ock in _Spiderman 2_. The interface (so it appears) has become permanently welded to his neural system. Ray learns from Bein's mistake and uses some sort of retinal scanning input to control the Positron armor.

[ QUOTE ]


In the book it's being generated by the suit. Null is using basically the same suit and is also firing antimatter blasts. It would have (or should have, at least) rated a mention if Null was trying to ape Keyes' innate abilities.

Given Positron's comments here, the book is wrong.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, you're right. I'd somehow missed that Null was firing anti-matter blasts at Ray. Looks like Laws got the info wrong. Unless maybe you want to REALLY hand-wave an explanation that the industrial accident affected both of them. I don't seriously think that was Laws' intention, though.

Oh, well. Just goes to show the problems of keeping all of these different media in sync. It'd be interesting to get a hold of that story bible and see just what the original source material says about some of these things.

[ QUOTE ]
Interesting. Would that make him Mutant origin?

[/ QUOTE ]

No, the interview says it was an industrial accident kind of thing. Science experiment gone awry, you know how that goes. :P

I suppose that means that Positron is really a science origin instead of a tech origin like he appears to be.

[ QUOTE ]

Of course matter and anti-matter destroy each other. Exposure to radiation causes cancer, but that never stopped the Hulk. All I'm saying is the reality involved in "infusing" someone with anti-matter (whatever that even means) is not relevant.

[/ QUOTE ]

Granted that we're talking comic book weird science, for me the process is what's important. A person can survive radiation exposure, and radiation causes mutations. It gives you something to hand-wave an explanation around. If the suit springs a leak, it seems to me that it wouldn't "infuse" Ray with anti-matter, it would consume him.

In any case, the published lore says that Positron summons the antimatter and lost the ability to stop summoning it due to his injuries during the Rikti War. No malfunction of the suit is mentioned. The novel doesn't address the question at all, taking place as it does a couple of decades before-hand.

The only point of contradiction is the question of whether the suit is creating the anti-matter or if it's being generated by Ray himself.

[ QUOTE ]

In the comics, he says he volunteered for testing or something.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmmm..., you're right. It does say that in issue one of Top Cow.

I suppose you can't help but get a few contradictions when you're dealing with disparate media. Now that I re-read the comic, I remember how much it bothered me that the Synapse's origin as listed in the comic was awfully, well, brazen. It's kind of like they all just take it for granted that Crey is an evil force in the world, which isn't the case at all in the game. Sure, we players know it and even trace the corruption as part of our storylines, but outwardly Crey has a clean image and plenty of plausible deniability. Why would they do something as unsubtle as take volunteers and torture them into having super-powers? Lawsuits galore, let me tell you!

I like Laws' version because it gives a justification for the whole business, a rationale why Crey wasn't condemned more thoroughly for it, and an interesting nemesis (as well as a foreshadowing of the Paragon Protector program).

If we have to pick one to believe, I go with Laws on this one. Maybe Sean Fish can weigh in with his take on the subject.

[ QUOTE ]

Hey Positron, now that you're around and all, got one more question. The book implies that Ray doesn't have any superpowers and the suit does everything. The game and comics imply that he has powers that are presumably being focused by the suit (and later contained). Am I missing something?

[/ QUOTE ]

If you read the back section of Issue 3 of the Top Cow comic, there's an interview with Positron in which he says that he has an innate ability to create anti-matter and the suit focused that ability.

Now, if you read the novel carefully, you'll see that it doesn't give any explanation at all for the anti-matter blasts. You only see Positron shooting anti-matter in the armor, true. When Ray faces, uhm, whats-his-name, the mutant at the novel's opening chapter, he relies on technology not anti-matter.

Does this mean the suit produces the anti-matter blasts? No, not without some explicit text evidence which isn't provided. Ray's failure to use anti-matter without the suit just means that he needs the suit in order to use the ability safely and effectively.

Keep in mind that a small amount of anti-matter can (theoretically, in the real world) make a big boom. Ray would have to have very precise control over how much and where it's directed in order to use it as a weapon the way he does without outright destroying himself, his enemy, and their immediate surroundings. Using the ability without the suit may be fatal to the people around Ray even if he's somehow immune.

This is all hand-waving, of course, but the point is that the novel doesn't explicitly contradict the previous lore. It even indirectly supports it, given that Positron's suit is based at least conceptually on Null's suit. You'd expect it to have a similar sort of energy burst weapon, not something as exotic as anti-matter. Ray's a certified (certifiable? *heh*) genius but even he would have a hard time building a super-duper particle accelerator into his gauntlets to create the anti-matter in the first place.

As a final note, the published origin for Positron makes more sense given his current handicap. He has to somehow be immune to his own anti-matter. If the suit is generating the anti-matter, there's no such immunity. If the suit malfunctioned and infused Ray with anti-matter, it wouldn't transform him into an anti-matter being. It would destroy him in a nuclear fireball. Positron as we have him today only makes sense if the suit is NOT malfunctioning at all. He's not a man made of anti-matter. He's a man who can summon anti-matter who has lost the ability to turn off the faucet. The suit is the finger in the dike holding back the flood.

In fact, Positron is really a danger to the continued existence of the world. If the armor ever fails catostrophically, Ray will become what amounts to being the core of an uncontrolled fusion reactor. The world, maybe even the universe itself could potentially be reduced to just so much background radiation and sub-nuclear particles.

Anyway, the novel and the published origin of Positron don't mesh perfectly but they don't outright contradict each other.

[ QUOTE ]
Umm...a few of the backstories kind of don't mesh with what they they seemed to be in other sources. (i.e. Synapse volunteering for the experiment that gave him his powers vs. Dr. Null forcing him to be subjected to it)

[/ QUOTE ]

Where'd you get the idea that Steve volunteered for the science experiment that made him into Synapse? The lore about it is pretty sparse and I don't think I've ever had the impression that it was "voluntary". In fact, the word "torture" tends to get used a lot which meshes just fine with the origin presented in the novel.

Did you know... Statesman's Statements

City of Heroes had a forum operating for close to two years before the game went to beta test. In the winter of 2002/2003, Statesman posted a series of articles talking about his views on comics, comics history, and the future of the genre.

Of the seven published articles, four are still available and have been re-posted on the current forum for the edification of the current batch of players.

Statesman's Statements #1 - Top Ten Trade Paperbacks

Statesman's Statements #2 - Top Ten Villains

Statesman's Statements #6 - Comic Book Camp

Statesman's Statements #7 - Comics and Heroes

[ QUOTE ]
I see no contradiction between Azuria getting the mask and it being found in Venice later.

[/ QUOTE ]

Poor Azuria! She gets no respect! I'm pretty sure that Laws tossed that in there as an in-joke to the players of the MMO.

[ QUOTE ]

In fact, Robin Laws doesn't play the game much, as I understand it.


[/ QUOTE ]

He said in an interview that he avoided playing the game while writing the novel to avoid the distraction and to avoid getting too focussed in on the in-game content. His job, as he saw it, was to use the story bible as a foundation to add to the existing content.

[ QUOTE ]
I wonder what the story bible says about Azuria.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd be curious about that also, actually. I imagine there must be an idea for a novel in her background someplace.

To be fair to Azuria, Sister Psyche just mentioned her in passing. We don't really know what happened to the mask after the story ends.

I liked the fact that Positron had his own mini batcave going despite having no visible means of support. I guess he must live off of patent royalties or something.

I think I already mentioned the fact that these guys should all be middle-aged or better in the current day. Sister Psyche is one sexy senior citizen!

Probably because the writing assingnments were done at around the same time, the novel conflicts a bit with the comic in regards to Protean's existence. The Back-Alley Brawler would have to have been really out of the loop for the last two decades to be surprised to find Protean alive in the current day.

[ QUOTE ]

Actually Pann is the lady on the right Sorry for not being specific.

Edit: did I just blow your mind?

[/ QUOTE ]

Some of us remember Pann from her Eve-Online days.

[ QUOTE ]


Not really, but I do find it amusing that most of NCSofts community coordinators seem to be women.

[/ QUOTE ]

IMO, players give women community reps an easier time than they do men. Whether it's something inherent in the female personality or some sort of chivalry/romance-fantasy on the part of the players, it's a trend that I've noticed on many different game forums. NCSoft has simply noticed the trend and capitalized on it.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
All the signature heroes left their respective pedestals and appeared in Atlas Park to honor the recently deceased Christopher Reeve. They all lined up and briefly saluted the real life Hero.

[/ QUOTE ]

Did this actually happen?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd like to think it did but I can't imagine it would happen and not be all over the forums. I've never heard of it before today. Unless someone can provide a screenshot (and there should be many available of such an event) I'd have to classify it as apocryphal.

It sounds like someone said "Wouldn't it be cool if..." and 4-5 repetitions later it had morphed into "Did you hear that...".

This is great! Thanks a lot!

You guys rock! Very cool way to make the CoH pet experience both different and better than any other game's pets, and add a strategic element to the minions at the same time.

Will this be a mastermind only behavior or will it work for anybody using a mastermind interface (like a Heavy in Recluse's Victory, for instance)?

Did you know... Theater Movie Marquee Contest

Have you ever run/jumped/ported/slid/whatever past a theater and wonder why they're showing that movie?

Originally, the marquee of every theater in town looked like this.

Thanks in part to the great interest in in-game movies that was taking place at the time, Cryptic announced a contest in March of 2005. The prize - To see your fictional film's name and the name of you starring hero up in lights above every theater in Paragon City!

On March 21, the winner was announced: Forum poster Zemeron's submission, _Rise of the Council: The Broken Column_ took it's place as the premier blockbuster of Paragon City and his hero Fractured Dawn was catapulted to stardom!