Trike

Not based on The Badger, but I do see the similarities to his original look. I wanted to make a character to get all the badges and I wanted to try out Savage Melee. I based his costume on my old character Mighty Lad (https://www.deviantart.com/dashmccool/art/Mighty-Lad-94031428), and “Badger Boy” just suggested itself.

I sense a Ratman and Bobbin duo in the offing.

I like the Monstrous hands for Savage Melee. It’s more Sabretooth than Wolverine, and they look cool. Subtle, but cool. My Savage Melee characters Badger Boy, Monster Detective and Sabretooth Tiger:

I just ran Frostfire with my Brute and then Tanker, to test my impressions. Salvage drops are the same at 6 pieces each, but the Brute got 4 recipes while the Tank got 0. I’ll do it again with whoever comes up next, but that’s in line with what I typically see. I’ve always just assumed it has something to do with damage dealt.

Dude, you literally called me ignorant. I know it when I see it. You made the assertion that IOs were the worst thing added to the game, and I countered that PvP is. Don’t know why you’re acting defensive about that. I already said I’m not anti-PvP, I’m just against it where it doesn’t belong. If it worked here then everyone would be playing it. I don’t see anyone doing it. If they are, it’s a tiny fraction, just as it’s always been. Ergo a total waste of time to add to the game.

Yet here you are, pro-PvP and insulting me several times, while I’ve kept my commentary on topic. Rather proves the point.

I must be a statistical anomaly then, because it happens regularly. Here are two of my most recent characters I’ve taken through Frostfire, a Defender and Blaster. Defender received zero recipes and few salvage, while the Blaster got 3 recipes and lots of salvage. This is extremely common; I have a LOT of alts and I see this constantly.

True as far as it goes, but they really seem to gravitate to PvP. In Halo Infinite you can’t shoot your teammates, but you can kill them with vehicles. Every few matches I see someone who starts griefing their own team by running them over with a vehicle or pushing them off a cliff resulting in a -100 “self destruction” penalty. No idea what’s going on in these people’s heads, if it’s because they’re children or just losers who simply can’t compete. I’ve never encountered a community as toxic as the one in League of Legends; it’s unbelievably racist, sexist, and just plain mean. It’s so awful that I don’t know why anyone plays that game. Compare that to any co-op game or PvE game, where by and large people are friendly and nice. Earlier today I was watching exchanges on Excelsior as people helped out a couple new players. You never get that in League of Legends. I’ve been playing video games since 1974 and online since the 90s; PvP is almost universally brimming with bad apples.

That vile behavior is why I mentioned that PvP dragged the community down. PvP brings out the worst in people, and back when it was proposed many of us warned the devs that would happen. No surprise that it brought tons of toxic people to the game, who then proceeded to trash everything before leaving for CoD or whatever. I still play PvP games all the time. I’m not terribly good any more, but I’m still plugging away. Mostly on Halo Infinite these days, but I’ve played all of them from Doom to Unreal Tournament to Quake and back. So it’s not like I’m anti-PvP; I’m just anti-PvP in games like CoH where it doesn’t make sense. The unbalanced nature of PUBG and Fortnite make them equally unattractive. For me, the original Call of Duty and CoD2 are the exemplars for PvP: everyone has the same stats, everyone has access to the same weapons, and there aren’t any power-ups to fundamentally alter your play. It comes down to skill. In my younger days I was regularly atop the leaderboards there, but there aren’t any shooters I’ve seen which don’t have gimmicks. In a superhero game everyone has to be the same, and that’s dumb, given the history of the genre. Superman versus Captain Marvel is fine, as is Daredevil versus Catwoman, but you can’t have Superman versus Daredevil. That’s why Injustice holds no appeal - it changes the characters too much in order to make it competitive. Without author fiat, there’s no way Batman could beat Superman, not when Superman could just take him out from orbit using a pebble.

Yeah, PvP was hot for a minute, but then it just fizzled because it was broken. I don’t mean non-functional the way the arenas were bugged, but just fundamentally flawed from the get-go. In order to be fair and fun, PvP requires that every character have the exact same stats. PvE MMOs are never going to have that. If they do flatten out the characters so that a Blaster and Tanker have the same hit points and do the same damage, players will complain that their characters aren’t the same as they are in the rest of the game. CoH’s early PvP required crazy swings in ability as powers were altered once the rubber hit the road and we saw how everything worked. Like being perma-held by Ice powers in those early days, or chain-stunned so you couldn’t fight back, which is why Blasters ended up being able to fire off their starting powers even while immobilized/stunned/asleep. It’s dumb but necessary, but it was also too late. The PvP population, already a small subset of the playerbase, basically evaporated within 6 months. Over the past few years I have seen only one in-game PvP challenge being issued, and no one took the guy up on it. The fact I could take a level 12 character into several PvP zones and not even get attacked by the NPCs underscores that. Meanwhile, every night there are calls for Hami raids and SBB missions, as well as pretty much everything else. I maintain PvP was a bad idea that hardly anyone ever used, nor do they today. I’d bet real money that 99.9% of players would much rather have an Atlantis underwater zone than any form of PvP.

😮 You’re quoting me! That’s so cool! And feels a little weird, if I’m being perfectly honest. No one ever quotes me like that. Speaking of flying until the end, I made this back then: https://www.deviantart.com/dashmccool/art/RIP-CoH-336332244 https://ibb.co/vZcZ3Zd Here’s the only online pic I have of Monster Child, from an Ouroboros mission where he encountered his future self. https://www.deviantart.com/dashmccool/art/Not-The-Future-I-Wanted-151745611

I’m going to disagree with that assessment. On the list of “bad ideas added to CoX”, IOs are the opposite. IOs actually *add* to the game’s variety, because with them my otherwise quite-similar Brutes or Blasters or whatever can focus on enhancing different aspects of their powers. It’s fun to have a Fire Blaster who is a sniper specialist and a different Fire Blaster who excels at holds. PvP is easily the single worst thing added to the game, because that’s just not what this game is about. And the extreme variety of archetypes fights against the very notion of PvP, which has to be balanced so that every player has a fighting chance, and the way to do that is to ensure every character has the same stats across the board. IOs exaggerate those differences, making otherwise identical toons wildly uneven in gameplay. I recently wanted to get a specific title for one of my lowbie characters on Excelsior and saw that it was an exploration badge in a PvP zone. I entered with trepidation, but immediately discovered via /whoall that I was the only one in the zone. So I checked a couple other PvP zones, and they were likewise empty. The busiest server has PvP ghost towns. Which is what I saw back on Live, too, when only a couple people would be doing PvP. Has anyone used the arenas since the first few months after they were added? What a total waste of effort. We could’ve had missions on the moon, or in a desert, or undersea. Instead, they catered to a fringe faction for god-knows-why (NCSoft diktat?) who abandoned it, but only after dragging the community down. By comparison, IOs are manna from heaven, sent to give us more variety.

I’ve noticed that my Tanks get fewer drops of everything than Blasters. I really like Frostfire so I do that one a lot, and it’s not unusual for a Tank to get nearly zero rewards (recipes, salvage, enhancements), while a Blaster has an embarrassment of riches. Is this a general function of the game at large, or is it just part of special missions?

On live I used my beta toon, Ironik, as my forum name. But I first went online (such as it was back then) in 1985 when it cost money to send each character, so I used my real-life nickname Trike as my BBS/Usenet handle.

Well now I need to work on leveling up a villain! I need to see that.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and all that. I often admire costumes in game, frequently taking screenshots and sending the person a /tell in appreciation. Mostly it comes down to various semi-nebulous criteria like “creative use of disparate elements” or “really nailed the spirit of the idea”. I like most genres, so I also like most costumes. Superhero, epic fantasy, space alien, robots, pulp hero… it’s all good. Here’s an example of a subtly brilliant cape’n’cowl-style superhero named Mr. Victory from Seadevil on page 2 of the “fave costumes” thread. Seadevil combined two different patterns that work together seamlessly, added metal accents which have wings that can be read as the letter V, and cleverly used one of the cape styles to clip the pattern into a giant V. The three colors work great in this combination. https://ibb.co/zF916D1 https://ibb.co/QY2PbVS This character by Jon (pg 4) is deceptively simple, but look how he’s alternated the color of the glove and boot pattern and inventively worked in the chest pattern. It looks obvious, but few people can come up with such an elegant design. https://ibb.co/sqLkNVj First Player likewise made use of color and clipping for this one (pg 218) to come up with something minimalist and cool. https://ibb.co/nmbmKpz

My barbarian warrior, Dread Vilda, ready for action! https://ibb.co/X4YkwQm I know what you're wondering: what will she do once winter arrives? Never fear, she has a cozy winter outfit! https://ibb.co/hL972fV And for those fancy Christmastime soirees: https://ibb.co/gr0yk4p Plus super heavy armor for really intense battles: https://ibb.co/5KwZcMV

I swear I thought that said "Jump Roof". And I am way too old to try that any more. 😆

Yes, it was in Spider-Man: No Way Home and that was the rationale. I'm cool with that; I'm a big fan of Benedict Wong the actor and Wong the character.

I’m still surprised that they didn’t add a gorilla head back in the day, given the sheer number of gorilla-themed characters there are in superhero comics. That’s one of the few things Champions Online got right. Chimpanzees are probably a close second when it comes to sentient animal characters in comics. Even dogs come in a very distant third place. If making all-new animal heads is beyond the abilities of folks contributing art, maybe make a way to use the existing animal heads with hats and eyepieces and such. Probably just as much work, eh? But just look how cool they are wearing hats in the Blacksad comics: https://ibb.co/bH75BtP https://ibb.co/HFbz15X https://ibb.co/cFdW0bk

I would definitely like the option to make beefier-looking female characters. Using the sliders to get big arms makes everything else ridiculous.

I vaguely recall something from back in the day that the construction in Steel was going to end up straddling Boomtown and become a spaceport. Dunno if that was serious or a real dev plan, but it sounded cool.

Either version of that story works. One night stand during the 2-3 years Hulk was there that we didn’t see or starting it from the beginning, both would be fine. If I were given $200 million to make a Marvel movie, I would do a Savage Land flick because I love it, making the Macguffin a machine that has transplanted the Savage Land from another universe onto our Antarctica. So they have to shut down the machine to keep the universes safe, but the cost is that the entire place and all of its inhabitants will be stranded on the MCU Earth. I would throw in every dinosaur-related character from the comics, like Stegron and Devil Dinosaur, so we basically get Jurassic Park with superheroes. The stinger would be Moon Girl and Matthew (Ka-Zar and Shanna’s son) playing around the machine and getting bawled out by Ka-Zar because it’s dangerous. Shanna would remind him that it no longer reaches into the multiverse so he can relax a little bit. They leave the room and the machine turns on, materializing a large figure who is wielding and axe. The camera spins around him, revealing that it’s Skaar, who angrily demands, “Where is my father? Where is the Hulk?!” That leads directly into the comic book storyline where Skaar in his rage accidentally releases the Designer, who starts taking over people, unleashing a modified version of World War Hulk. Grr, argh, smash.

Prey is the best Predator movie since Predator. I had a lot of fun kicking the legs out from under the anti-woke incels claiming “a girl with no training beat a Predator solo!” Like, here’s a thought, watch the movie to discover that, in the words of Luke Skywalker, “Amazing. Every word of what you just said is wrong.” 😝 As for alien skull thing, the xenomorphs are not endoskeletal or exoskeletal: they’re mesoskeletal. Which means they’re both endo and exo. Mesoskeletons have never been seen on creatures on our world as big as the xenomorph, relegated to tiny ocean polyps found on coral reefs, but I would put forward that such things are exactly why Science Fiction is so freakin’ cool. Many moons ago when Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow came out, someone on Usenet was extremely annoyed because the aliens in that book were unlike anything that existed on Earth. I asked him why he bothered to read SF at all, if all he wanted was to see things from Earth except bigger.

If they’re taking a write-off on this, then the movie has to be destroyed and never released in any form whatsoever. That said, in recent days there have been multiple screenings for cast, crew, and executives on the WB lot, so I am 100% confident this will get leaked online sooner rather than later.