A Mild-Mannered Reporter: We are gathered here today
As suggested in the title, we are gathered here today for a purpose: To celebrate the community of City of Heroes and all of the discussions that they've been taking part in over the past several weeks. (What, you thought it was for Terry? You clearly haven't been following along.) After several weeks with almost non-stop activity, the past couple have been fairly silent, with only a few tidbits off of the official Facebook page to discuss in any depth.
But that hasn't stopped anyone before, and it's not likely to stop anyone now. After all, we've got chatter about when you've played far too much City of Heroes, the day that Mystic Fortune killed someone, and Santa as a crossdresser. No, really. So as long as you don't mind a somewhat more irreverent week of community discussions, click on past the break. (If you do mind it, well, we had a very serious illustration back around here. That's almost as good.)
...then you just might have been playing too long
There are some memes that almost transcend "meme" status. It helps if the meme has been around longer than the popular concept of "meme" had really penetrated the consciousness. So here's one of those proto-memes for our beloved game, complete with almost every joke you would have thought of and a few that you most likely wouldn't have come up with yourself.
My personal favorite is the Boresight joke. Not because I've done that, but because it's an acronym that I can't seem to see any other way. Occasionally someone is either selling or looking to buy one, and for a brief moment before I remember what I'm playing, so much of human life makes perfect sense.
Platform shoes and enemy uniforms
When you're designing a game, you want to make sure that enemies and other important elements are easily spotted. You have two options: make things stand out in terms of color or in terms of size. And in MMOs where colors can be all over the map, you're left with making any mobile points of interest larger than normal. We appreciate the fact that Council bosses in their black-and-brown uniforms are larger than usual in a black-and-brown warehouse, but it does raise the question of what in the world they're feeding these guys.
Leaving aside obvious suggestions relating to some villain groups and genetic engineering, the game's heights are all over the place, albeit not approaching the horrors of World of Warcraft. (I was always amused by dwarves that were taller than humans because they had taken their Important Plot Character pills.) The problem is that the game provides no form of scale when creating your character, nor is there any real external scale to go by outside of real-world heights. But a 5' 8" man will look really short in-game most of the time.
Mystic Fortune is imbalanced
Design stories aren't funny when something goes wrong and it gets fixed. They become funny when something is wrong, gets fixed, and people are upset with said fix. Which is then reversed and met with outcry that they un-fixed what they fixed before. Mystic Fortune can kill you if it's cast on you mid-fight, because the screen of useful information will be replaced with a screen asking if you want your fortune read.
Of course, the biggest problem that Mystic Fortune has is that some of its "buffs" aren't. Since it's completely random what you get, your odds of giving someone a useless or outright harmful "bonus" is unpleasantly high. A better build might be to make it self-only if we truly have to retain the randomly crap fortunes, since that at least takes away the potential for a well-meaning team member to screw you. This having been said, it is pretty appropriate to have villains doing this to one another.
Winter Event 2010 in June
I'm not entirely sure if it's accurate, but it's proposed in this thread that the names of random NPCs on the street are pulled from US census data. That's just crazy enough to be brilliant. Unlike many of the threads I highlight here, there's nothing terribly significant going on here -- I just found the screenshot amusing enough that it's worth highlighting.
Wonderella discussion, or teams discussion? Or both?
Here's something that's either hysterical or interesting depending on your disposition. On the one hand, you have the Wonderella comic linked in a satirical fashion that points out how teams can be a bit more sparse on the red side of town. On the other, there's a massive thread derailing that discusses one of the (arguable) thematic failings of CoH, that your heroes and villains wind up being pretty low on the power scale overall.
Now, the idea that the player characters are down at the C-list level of power is kind of unfair. Personally, I've always seen my characters as being solidly in the second string of characters, the sort whose power level varies drastically depending on whether they have their own book this week and who's on the writing duties. Some weeks you can take down Doctor Vahzilok pretty easily, other times you get your head handed to you by one of his leather-bound minions.
I will contend, however, that the task forces do constitute a major-level threat. Essentially, you're either in one of those huge crossover events that spans seven books and has its own logo for about a month, or on the villainous side you're the nefarious Sinister Six or Brotherhood of Evil or Yellow Lanterns or Mike's Dry Cleaning and World Domination. Major events in comics don't necessarily result in inflated power levels, just in overly large storylines.
That's all of our community spotlights for this week. As always, I can be sent comments, questions, future thread suggestions, or the prelude to a long series of replies about whether or not the Phoenix Saga had the slightest thing to do with the X-Men. If you'd prefer to eschew the comment thread, you can send mail to Eliot at Massively dot com. Next time? It's time to start declaring some loyalty, and we're not starting where you might expect.
