temnix

The Masterminds

I have shown this character, Aegelmere, before, but now I am trying a new format - animated gif.

From recent developments.

That's lovely! Here is one from me: Boko Haram. It is not a character I am going to complete and play, only a costume.

@Crysis You wanted hair from inside the hood (a small hood here, too). Try tweaking some of the colors of her face and the Thorn shoulders. If you can get them to a similar tone, you can create an illusion of a cascade, The Face color is probably something you don't need when the face is covered by a mask, so use it with something like Neck Cover or some pattern that will show outside the mask and appear as outflowing hair.

Try Swabbie in Hats for falling hair. Or Matey. One of those. It won't be a pointed hood, but see how you like it. If you want cat ears, you can put them on top of the Swabbie hat. For armor - Circle of Thorns for Shoulders, Celestial for Belt, or possibly that one with the dangling front cloth as a sub-option, what was it called... Biolumo for the basic Chest and arms or else some Tights option with a Swirls, Lines or Google pattern, one of the end-of-list breastplate options in Chest Detail. The gorget is the least hopeful case, there are no tall armor pieces that protect the neck. Perhaps Mecha. Or you might have to content yourself with Victorian and Steampunk collars in the Detail 1 menu. And you can't get anything for clawed fingers. Is she to be Claws, Savage Melee? I have proposed on the Suggestions board that Claws Weapon options be opened to Savage Melee characters so that they have something to swipe with besides their frail fingers, but as always Homecoming ignored it. Also while it would be perfect to have so many parts at our disposal that we could make just what imagined (and the menus not mysteriously contracted for some combinations), with these limitations in place we can instead of following our dreams come up with new concepts. I so often find that I simply can't make the character I had in mind that rather than settle for compromises that would be like water to wine I invent someone completely different along the way. You might do the same here.

Testing whether the board supports gifs. It does. I might post the next character as a slideshow.

TiggerOverride

@ChzBoi Forgive me if I don't watch the Mario Kart video. And replying with this kind of crap, making me look, is a pretty sorry way to use the quote feature, don't you think?

First of all, why? I described an entire new occupation for visiting, risk-taking heroes and villains on both sides: saving or killing/kidnapping innocents. And all you can think of is that PvPers would come in to hunt other players? But if that proves to be the case, then the PvP component can be cancelled anytime. It's not like an idea has to be implemented in a perfect and eternal form or not at all.

That's a small-fry suggestion. Basically a suggestion that definitely nobody will want to implement, because it would be a good deal of work for no appreciable amount of interest as payoff, whereas my idea would be a great amount of work for a great amount of interest.

I like the area design of the Rogue Isles a great deal, but what has always put me off, besides the eternally overcast skies, is that they are kind of small. Areas in Paragon City or places like Croatoa extend forever, while the Rogue Isles, each surrounded by water to boot, have to cram interesting corner next to interesting corner. Why not raise them all from the sea? Say that the descendants of Mu have finally gotten their magic together and the islands have started to rise one after another. Volcanoes erupt, sea becomes swampy land crawling with Coralax and exotic monsters Homecoming can design, more landscape floats up with caves, holes and mission doors, ferries are grounded (no point to them anyway with Trump's tariffs). Gradually, at the speed at which Homecoming can handle them, the islands merge in a new land mass. Meanwhile, as this crisis goes on, the United Nations decides to intervene and declares a humanitarian emergency on the Isles. They become open to heroes without changing alignment. Arachnos rejects this help and their drones still guard all hospitals, Arbiters and key points, shooting at heroes who approach. Heroes only get limited facilities and helicopter pads. A retaliating Arachnos begins attacks on American soil and Paragon City becomes open to villains. For heroes the task is to rescue as many civilians as possible, running up to them and treating them with a special power that causes them to be teleported to safety (they respawn elsewhere in the area). For villains the task is to kill the maximum possible number, using any attack powers on them, or possibly to kidnap and teleport them away to toil for Recluse's Project Fury. Both earn points that unlock, for example, special titles or badges. PvP is allowed only against heroes in red zones, not vigilantes, and villains in blue zones, not rogues.

Кого еще затронули манипуляции Роскомнадзора с Cloudflare? Все известные мне геймеры в отпаде. Если вам удается сейчас играть в CoH, то каким образом? Я не могу зайти даже в списки персонажей без VPN, а с VPN меня выбрасывает в меню с экрана загрузки зоны. Those who are wondering what the heck this means can avail themselves of a cartoon from the British Spectator:

Those broken hearts don't even fall all the way to the bottom.

@Captain Electric I think that the strongest point of this game is its astounding area design, the attention to detail everywhere. When you see a dirty box left between two road signs on a safety island - which some designer had to put there - that is superb quality. I have very rarely seen this kind of dedication in any game, multi- or single-player. Newcomers should be able to appreciate that right away. They also, no doubt, subconsciously react to the more natural scale of architecture and landmarks here than the find in the real world nowadays. Though the tallest skyscrapers in Steel Canyon and Port Oakes may be higher than any real-world buildings except the record-holders, most buildings are much more approachable and friendly than the current cityscape of a place like the New York City, gigantic, inhuman and sleek. These modern erections have only been made possible by the same capitalist technological concentration that destroyed the fabric of society, they are monuments to dehumanization. Paragon City, on the other hand, looks like it would be a pleasant place to live - and so does Praetoria, let's not forget it. I wish I could get an apartment looking out on the People's Park. (For that matter, I wish Praetoria was an entire developed dimension and not three zones.) The textures that new players encounter should also pleasantly surprise them: all that rust, grime, peeling wallpaper... Poor Gen-Zers, they grew up among plastic. As for me, there is too much that puts me off in CoH's world now and not enough to draw me in (certainly not Homecoming's additions). I can no longer tolerate the Rikti or the Devouring Earth. They are really the worst two factions. I didn't care for them even in the old days, but did not run into either so often, and I paid attention to the good and ignored the bad then (which is the way to meet everything, but it only works if the thing is new). Now I feel short-changed of some alien faction I could respect and research and I refuse to spend my time beating walking mushrooms. On the other hand, I delight in running through the Council's fortress on Striga. That is the real deal.

DECIBELLOW Bio: "The most hated mystery of the Rogue Isles, DECIBELLOW appears to have dedicated himself (herself? itself?) to making as much noise as sound technology will bear out. He (she? it?) has been hunted by Family dons, Crey scientists, Longbow, and was recently made the subject of a special documentary on WSPDR. Those who have caught glimpses of DECIBELLOW before folding over vaguely remember a dumpster-dwelling, garbage-eating mutant or alien inaudibly chuckling away in an escort of floating amplifiers. Coralax have beached on every island where DECIBELLOW has moved his (her? its?) camp, while Freakshow have stopped inviting him (her? it?) to their parties to spin plates after they found themselves going deaf."

My question was about problems recently and of the type I encountered: failures to reach the servers. It doesn't help using this topic to complain about every connection issue encountered with CoH. And I think I have the explanation in my case: a number of Internet providers here in Russia have been subjected to DDoS attacks from Ukrainian hackers. At least one, in Siberia, is known by name, but others are probably either taking in some protective measures or they have been forced to restrict services by the security agencies. Nobody tells us anything, and nobody cares about the impact on users. First it was the mobile Internet that drones allegedly use to home in on targets, but it looks like this has spread to home Internet. Without a VPN many sites simply won't open and I still can't get to the character list, with VPN I DO get to the list and can make a character, a costume, but get kicked out to the main menu when trying to play, possibly by security measures inside CoH itself. Google and Cloudflare's problems might have exacerbated this, and again there is no telling if they are over and if not, when. What a civilization of shitheads.

It's nice for me too, it's just that nothing is happening. It's like being in the dead past in Stephen King's "Langoliers."

Over the last week something strange has been happening in my browser: some websites open very slowly, others only in part or require reloading, or just fail. I have seen no clear reason and attributed this to something on my end, although I had changed no settings. One of the sites affected had been a Chinese A. I. generation site I use. It had been struck by some kind of amnesia all the times I logged in, forgetting my history, favorites, and just did not work at all. I thought again this was all my fault somehow, but the other day it was up and running properly with an explanation from the administration that Google had experienced technical problems with some services or mechanisms that site depends on, and that those problems had been resolved on the Google side. I had not expected a Chinese website to rely on something from Google, but... Two days later the site is down again the same way. And all this time I have been having trouble logging in to CoH. I am currently stuck at "Retrieving character data from..." When I use my VPN, which might send the data through some different countries, rely on different providers along the way, I am able to get to the character list then, although everything is kind of laggy and loads in jerks and starts. On the web at large some familiar websites continue to open normally and quickly, others stopped, all of a sudden. Might this be due to some reliance on Google? Might CoH be dependent on its products too?

If players can overcome challenges which, for their power level, should be very steep or indeed impossible and do all those things like soloing Archvillains, what that tells is not how brilliant they are but how flawed the design of the game is and how poor its actual balance. Whether that is because Inventions are overpowered or because of set bonuses or there being overly useful, almost cheating powers, or all of those things together, the combined result is that system-hacking players make themselves almost into gods. This kind of mastery should never have been possible. It represents nothing in real life or in comic books. No Olympic athlete can hack himself to run at the speed of sound with any clever training techniques, Wolverine could not have boosted his regeneration rate to the point where he would survive an atomic blast. Both are bullshit. You've got something, you use it smartly and you take your chances: that is how it should be. Yet here in CoH, to respond to the demands of those min-maxing players and obsessed Veterans (as if power play is somehow a virtue instead of a freakish one-sidedness), the developers focused on the Incarnate system and content beyond the point where, to put it plainly, the game is over. Homecoming knows no better than do the same thing, cranking out high-level content while for low levels you can just go and talk to Matthew Habashi's wife on the communicator again. Why does this game and other games of its sort cater to the obtuse, the idle, the obsessive and the petty? In fine, what I'm missing here is not a reflexes mastery or a build mastery but an intelligence mastery: a real way to understand the enemy and ways to use his weaknesses and the environment against it while being, of course, fairly strong and competent. That is how fights and battles are really won: you strike hard in the right spot. Better yet, you outwit the enemy and win without a fight, which should be rewarded as well if not higher. Why must I have to grind meat in CoH's boring missions in order to advance? Why aren't there more opportunities to use Stealth? Thank god Stealth exists, to be sure, and that I can sometimes sneak to the glowing objective, click on it and obtain the cure, disarm the bomb, crack the safe. That is the actual objective of the mission. But its accomplishment is not rewarded. Beating goons is rewarded.

Azure Shadow

How would they do the impossible, if every encountered villain was a purple and had special attacks and intelligent scripts instead of standing there getting beaten up?

I used to protect girls from purse-snatchers too, and I still sometimes do, out of habit, but neither the game world nor the gameplay satisfy me any longer. Part of it is simply knowing them too well, though not exhaustively. I couldn't tell you where every badge is as so many others can. And that still allows me short periods of discovery, what I described in the head post. I'm not responsible for idiots seeing a complaint in that, when in fact I was celebrating a good time. But most of the freshness and mystery have long since rubbed off, and more than that: I outgrew this game. I outgrew the intellectual level on which those talented but pretty ignorant 20-somethings stood when they made it. They outgrew it too and went on, one hopes, to better things. And finally - the world in the which the game takes place no longer exists outside the computer. It never did literally, but still, there were buildings like that, offices like that, cars like that, suits and pants like that. Computers with tube screens left turned on and showing Windows desktops. You could hear music such as that playing in the areas on the radio, in clubs. Not anymore. That past is gone, though it has not been not outgrown, it was only discarded... humanity does not progress, it rolls sideways. And I miss even older ages represented by some relics for circa year 2004, most of all the tugboats and steamers. When I zoom over the Nerva Archipelago or Striga, I look with adoration at those wonderful little ships, like rusty wind instruments lying on the waves: part memories of real ship designs and part imagination of Cryptic. I think back to the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s and other eras that I know from gangster films and Chaplin films and not only from them, and I miss those times: their fashions, their bustles, their newspaper hounds... The suits of the Family. All of those are Echoes, one within another. And now the present of this game world is an echo too. The War Walls are still turquoise, the monorail is gayly trundling along, but it is impossible to continue all this, to pick up and develop that music, those fashions and architecture in some direction different from where they were pushed by the consequences of September 11th and the Iraq war, the financial crisis of 2008, algorithms, social networks and their moron spawn, the dumbing-down of society as a whole, climate change... So I can't get in character any longer. It would be to do quite monstrous violence to myself to pretend that I can still live the reality I find in CoH as I viscerally did in 2004.

@srmalloy What is that declaration you are talking about? I do agree with it. @Spaghetti Betty Thanks for the info on Dark Souls. Overall, increasing difficulty in ways that are possible in this game will make missions interminable. It also won't solve the problem of the gameplay not being... epic? I don't like that word, but there needs to be a serious challenge leading clearly and quickly to a serious result (saving innocents, disarming a bomb and so on). I don't think this structure is optional in a book, a film, a game or a life, whether or not a lot of people may enjoy wasting their spare time steamrolling, farming, collecting badges and otherwise doing familiar rotes. The concept of farming itself is strange and antiquated. I don't see a single reason, first, why a game needs to be an intentional time sink (and what moral right do any developers have to designing time sinks?) and second, why the time that IS spent in the game needs to be devoted to repetitive fights. If it is to be fights and not, say, dialogue, quests, choices, exploration, reconnaissance, resource-gathering, crafting, then, as I said, the time can be spent in killing three minions in a life-or-death struggle instead of thirty in a yawn. Wouldn't that be finer all around? CoH lacks everything but combat, that is one problem with the concept from the beginning. It doesn't even have an inventory. Life could be put on the line exploring, spying, but death doesn't come with serious consequences - and if you factor in patrol XP, with any consequences, so there was always little point to real risks. MediPort will catch you if you fall. Diablo II with a different skin, that is well-put. However, Diablo II does have a direction - through the Acts, towards its end. These old online grinders are like Diablo II looped. That is why I asked whether newer games use some different, denser formula. Dark Souls seems to have been a stepping stone to more substantial, deliberate mechanics, but if newer games are still about running around killing orcs or what have you, only with Poise, Stamina and some other bar to watch, then nothing much has changed. Shadow of the Colossus may have been a movement across the spectrum. A game where there are only bosses to fight.