SlickRiptide

Okay, I've read through the new comic a couple of times and, a bit begrudgingly, I've decided that it's the best of the lot so far.

The Blue King comic never really clicked for me. The first few issues were the "villain of the month" with some unlikely matchups as well as some downright bad writing. War Witch sets fire to a warehouse full of people and all those superheroes we saw partying in background of the various panels were unable to save them all? Nine people die and there are no repercussions? To top it all off, we get one panel of remorse and her coven tells her "it's not your fault but it IS your responsibility".

Meh. Sorry, War Witch. It WAS your fault. If you didn't know how to handle that oversized match stick in a hazardous setting you shouldn't have been using it. If they had to use the "burning rave" story, then why couldn't we have focussed that issue on the efforts of the heroes to rescue the innocent party-goers and explain WHY nine people died despite the presence of some twenty-odd in-costume heroes?

The series picked up some with the jury duty story, then the Crey storyline (which to a great extent was just an excuse to have Apex's sister supply us with more T&A) went downhill again until we had the final issue and that "cute" hommage ending.

Anyway, back to Top Cow. Issue one left me a bit cold. My reaction was "However good this Mark Waid guy is supposed to be, he just doesn't 'get' Paragon City at all." I was willing to withhold judgement to give it a chance but I had a negative vibe fromit.

Issue Two has converted me. The story is compelling, the characters are believable, the interactions between the characters are dramatic without being over the top. I still don't much care for the setup of the story but now that we're in it, I really like the story-telling that's going on.

I don't imagine "my" Statesman to be a semi-arrogant boss who takes his leadership qualities for granted and who people look up to out of habit. I CAN, however, imagine that it could be that way. The sub-text, that Manticore himself is a natural leader being over-shadowed by the "hero-worship" everyone feels for Statesman, is an interesting one to explore. How many "natural" heroes are there out there right now who are realizing "Hey, I could be a FIRST stringer now!"? I can easily imagine Statesman, the best of the best, thinking that he has to solve the problem alone and acting accordingly. He wouldn't consider himself arrogant. He's got some 70-odd years as a Hero and is arguably the most experienced guy around at this work. He could probably use a bit of enlightenment as to how the younger generations view him and his work.

As for the last page, I'm betting that Manticore knows his mythology and is gambling that Prometheus did a "complete number" on "Zeus". We'll see what happens at dawn.

*sniffle* Now I feel all civic minded. Better go arrest some Skulls!

This looks interesting - Image Event

Primarily geared to hosting photos but they also host movies if you pay a slightly higher fee. The fee itself is not very exorbitant and they advertise "unlimited bandwidth" though there's the caveat that they step in if it looks like you're "abusing" the system.

20/21. A couple were educated guesses. (Captain Courage???)

A better question than "where" is "what". That is, what activities would you expect to participate in at a CoH fan fest? Who would you have as hosts and guests speakers? How much of it would be strictly City of Heroes and how much of it would be comics/superheroes in general?

A fan fest will need at least two days' worth of activities as well as some kind of banquet or party affair. Some panels, some participation events. A costume contest/dance? Other contests/competitions?

What activities would make you willing to spend $25 - $50 to register and a couple of hundreds or so to travel to it?

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Diamond is pretty cool, though, they lost their brand manager Raymond Lau and their lead designer Jeff Alexander.

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Dunno where you got the idea that Jeff was gone. He's still the lead designer as far as I know.

As for Ray, he isn't really "lost". He's actually moving over to be the brand manager for the CoH card game. If you liked him, then be happy about it.

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For anyone interested there is a press release floating around here: http://www.gamingreport.com/article....e=&order=0
announcing that Alderac has acquired the rights to do a CoH CCG.

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AEG is one of the finer CCG designers out there. I've played most of their games at one time or another. I was an L5R player for several years, in fact. If AEG is involved then it's a safe bet that the game will be a good one. The important thing is that AEG's strength is in designing story telling games. I'd wager that whatever they make will be something that will advance the story of Paragon City.

The really cool thing would be for Cryptic and AEG to coordinate their storylines a bit so that, say, a player winning the CCG World Championships at GenCon would get to name or design a hero that would become an NPC in a series of MMO missions.

At any rate, an AEG-produced CCG would probably get me back into the "cardboard crack" again. *heh*

*heh* While it looks funny, that's the token quiz question that makes it a game of skill instead of sheer random chance (i.e., gambling). You see that sort of thing a lot in contests of this sort that have to deal with all of the laws in different states, countries, and provinces.

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I think the problem is many people who play the game don't really want to deal with the challenges posed by hazard zones. They are difiicult to get to, inconvenient if you need to sell or go to the hospital, and hard to get around in

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You're partially correct. What it really comes down to is that players of this game just generally enjoy missions more than safari hunting. The hazard zones are setup for the safari hunters, and there were plenty of them back in the days when safari hunting was the most efficient way to level up. When the mission XP was cranked up the people doing the safari hunting all switched to doing missions instead.

There's plenty of street crime already for the safari hunters. There's no need to go to Terra Volta when I can XP just fine hunting Family in IP. I'd rather be following a story line, but if I feel like a change of pace, I can just as easily save people being hassled by Outcasts in Steel Canyon as take on packs of unlikely group villains in Boomtown. Herding and AoEing the huge mobs in the hazard zones is no longer optimal, so people have stopped doing it.

Basically, the Rikti Crash Site is the only hazard zone that has any real reason to exist, in a story sense. It really doesn't make sense that in a city of heroes, entire boroughs are left to rot and be taken over by thousands of gangsters. Especially when you consider that Faultline has the dam, and Terra Volta has the nuclear power plant. Are these really zones that the city would just blockade and forget about? At the very least, there ought to be signs of reconstruction in Faultline. Heck, the lights are still on in most of the buildings!

Anyway, the reason they're ghost towns now is that mission XP was made comparable to hazard zone XP so there wasn't any good reason to play the safari game any more. When the difficulty slider goes in there'll be even less reason. Basically, the hazard zones need a gameplay makeover at this point. They're designed for a style of play that, apparently, is only attractive to CoH players when it's the fastest way to level up.

Welcome aboard.

;thumbsdown - obvious
;taunt - Point and laugh
;maniacal - Hands in the air, "I'm King Of The World!" laugh
;curses - Fist in the air, other hand pumping angrily
;salute - Hand to chest, then arm extended (Typical villain salute but might smack too strongly of Nazi elements.)
;emphasize - Point, arms swing like explaining, then right fist slammed into left palm.
;dismiss - wave a "minion" away dismissively, "be gone"
;battlecry - Instead of kneeling and chopping with left hand, standing with fists half-raised, right hand thrusts forward. "Get them!"