A Mild-Mannered Reporter: All the community news that's fit to print
In a city marked by constant alien invasions, assaults from an island controlled by a sadistic villain, rampant street crime, and various technological and magical disasters, there's always something to talk about. There's usually more than a few things for players to talk about on top of that, which certainly helps keep our interest in City of Heroes even when we're not right in the thick of things.
After all, whatever else you might say about the game and its flaws -- it's fun. It gives you a fun ride of being a superhero or supervillain. If you can't enjoy a conversation about that, really, you're just plain getting jaded.
Naturally, having discussions about nothing more than "it's fun" would get a little old, but that's certainly not all of the discussions about the game. Just about half. Today, we're taking a look at some of the other half, spotlighting some of the most interesting, though-provoking, or just plain funny discussions and threads coming out of the City of Heroes community.
Dealing with conflicting origins
One of the little questions that has no doubt been running through the minds of several players is how, exactly, we're going to deal with Masterminds and Corruptors running around on the Heroic side of the fence. This thread starts out as a discussion of one specific archetype, but spreads a bit to further discuss the general oddity of having archetypes on one side when they're thematically linked to the other.
Oddly, the epic archetypes have a bit of an easier time with this, since they're bound to a specific set of in-game lore as opposed to a general connotation. Soldiers of Arachnos might decide that they're heading for the hills after they've been trained, for instance, and there's nothing stopping a Kheldian from finding Earth society distasteful. Of course, you do wind up with evil Peacebringers sowing crime and mayhem... which brings us right back to the strangeness that is the archetypes versus the changing of faction.
Personally, I suggest incompetence. Your Dominator really wants to manage to take over the entire city, but somehow he keeps managing to be rewarded and recognized as a hero. He's really bad at this.
City of Heroes 2: The Citying
For a while, there was a persistent joke (in the "ha ha, only serious" vein) that we were going to be getting City of Heroes 2, only it was called Champions Online. Needless to say, that didn't quite pan out as planned, which means the question of what the sequel to the game would look like is still relevant. And if there's one hobby that game fans love to indulge in -- aside from playing games and then complaining about them -- it's figuring out what could be improved, added, or removed for the next time around.
One of the more interesting ideas that cropped up, at least for my sensibilities, was the idea of changing characters from the old game to the sequel. It's a known quantity that I'm a roleplayer, and I like the idea of turning a younger hero into an older mentor for newer heroes, or even just a grizzled old veteran. Of course, down that road lies The Dark Knight Returns being ripped off more thoroughly than it ever was in the 80s, so perhaps it's best that there's no talk of a sequel just yet.
Epic Archetypes becoming not so epic?
If you're on the same page as I am with the changes made to Epic Archetypes for Issue 17, your first thought was probably "oh, neat." That would have been followed a few minutes late with an "oh, the people who already have one are going to be kind of mad." I'm mostly surprised that the thread took this long to materialize, with one lone voice being rather firmly silenced by the rest of the forum's citizens.
Here's the thing: while I disagree with the premise that people who had a level 50 character should get something else to compensate, I can understand where they're coming from. Getting to 50 is not nearly as difficult as some people make it out to be, but it's still a long climb, and it's the sort of thing that it was nice to point to as a bragging rights reward. Moving them to 20 does take a little bit of the magic away, and while I think it's the right choice, I can still be a little sad about the loss.
Of course, it also means I can grab me a spider backpack. So I suppose I'm conflicted.
Derivative values for Dual Pistols DPS
With the new powersets on everyone's minds, it's a good thing to keep on the ball about what you can expect from the game's newest shiny. There's not exactly a horrible DPS competition at the upper tiers, but it's still a good idea to know what to expect. This thread crunches recent numbers and gives a good picture of how the powerset stacks up with comparably-enhanced other sets.
Spelling and grammar
The thread has been around for a while -- since December, even -- but as someone who spent four years in college studying this meandering nonsense we call a coherent language, I can't resist the opportunity to point it out. The comic at the beginning is funny, and the discussion that goes on from there includes several gems, such as the following:
"Surely you mean commas. I can't think of any situation where a coma should be used."
As has frequently been argued, online, no one has anything to judge you by save your words. All the more reason to pay attention to them.
Those are the community threads that grabbed my roaming eye this week, at least during the time not spent recovering from the various insanities that the week decided to inflict. (Seriously, Google? Locking me out of my mail? Not cool.) Since it's more than likely that we're not going to all suddenly stop talking for another month, expect to see this feature return again in the not-so-distant future.
Next week? Well, it's community question and answer time, and we can't do that without questions from the community. (Well, we can, but it's a pretty short column and it doesn't read very well.) So go ahead and fire off questions to Eliot at Massively dot com, and we'll see you back here next week.
