ShardWarrior

You must have watched a very different movie than everyone else. Looks like using magic and not needing a sword and armor worked just fine for her.

So for you it would be perfectly fine to re-cast Black Panther or Falcon as a dwarf of Arabic descent or an Asian and to re-imagine Wakanda as all Chinese?

That is fair. I never said the series is sunk, rather that I have my reservations about it just as I did with the changes Jackson and crew made for his LoTRO and Hobbit films. The series may be a smash success, it may not. From what I can see and have read so far, it is pointing to the latter. There is no harm in expressing concern nor is there any harm in objecting to changes to established lore. If this is the intent, then the production staff is not going about it the right way by berating fans who question their creative choices. As for appealing to different demographics, this is proceeding from a very false assumption there are very few women or non-Caucasian fans of the source material to begin with. Again, there is a vast amount of untapped material out there and opportunity for diversity in the worlds of me with the Haradrim, Easterlings, Northmen etc. This is false too. Were it true, creators like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Tolkien, James Cameron and countless others never would have had any success. Just look at the volume of characters and worlds created by someone like Jack Kirby and the success they have had over the years. Rehashing/re-imagining/re-booting the same material over and over is stifling creativity and a big part of why most of what is coming out of Hollywood today is utter garbage.

Circumstances are irrelevant. Quite clearly Tolkien had no problem describing characters wielding their swords. There are plenty of references to find. From the Fellowship of the Ring - If being armored up and wielding a sword is what Tolkien had intended for Galadriel, it would appear on the pages as such. Yes it was called making money. Christopher was not his father, so I personally will take Tolkien's own writings, no matter how brief, as the closest we will get to Tolkien himself. Sure, Christopher was privy to all kinds of knowledge the average fan did not have, however the material was still subject to his personal interpretation.

The fact that Megamind never got a sequel (or 10) is one of the great crimes of the 21st century, if not in all of human history.

Would it not be the published version that his son Christopher helped put the finishing touches on?

As @PeregrineFalcon said, this was canon to the books as written by Tolkien. If you can find a reference in any published work written by Tolkien that clearly shows Galadriel in full armor wielding a sword, I would be happy to admit I am wrong. To my knowledge, this was never the case for her.

^ The simple and elegant thing to do. Only 1 per power.

Being among - if indeed not the most herself - the top spellcasters in Middle Earth, she had no real need for sword and armor. I think this has more to do with wanting equity and equality over anything that can be found in the Tolkien writings.

I play STO fairly regularly. I have various alts from the recruitment events I am slowly working on as well as play the seasonal events daily. The free stuff from those are always nice. Mostly I am soloing story content, patrols or doing tasks for Endeavors. I dislike teaming for TFOs as the amount of VFX vomit is totally out of control there. It makes teaming near impossible as you literally cannot see what is happening due to the over saturation of VFX. Sad really, but Cryptic does not seem interested in changing anything about it. The newer story content has been top notch.

I fully admit I could be wrong as I have not read the Simarillion in quite some time either. However, from what I do remember Galadriel was never a decked out in full armor with a broadsword type warrior.

For me personally, it all depends on how far a departure the changes are. There were quite a lot of deviations from the source material in the Peter Jackson LoTR films. Some were unfortunate albeit necessary to keep the film to a reasonable length, some were true improvements, some were just awful in my opinion. I will say that from interviews I have seen, everyone involved with the Jackson LoTR films were very careful and consideration about the source material and keeping as close to Tolkien as possible. Many of the changes I am seeing with this Amazon series seem to be motivated by political correctness over anything else. I do not think that is a good place to start from.

I have seen those videos where the producers and writers are already insulting actual fans who are (rightfully so in my opinion) questioning some of their creative decisions. This is definitely a huge red flag for me. Honestly, I am no Tolkien scholar, however I do not think Galadriel was ever Galadriel Warrior Princess. This is just one of several things I notice so far. I get that there will always be some liberty being taken, however deviating too far from the source material is never a good idea, at least to me.

Not sure about this one to be honest.

Is that voice at 1:18 who I think it is? :)

No. This game does not need sweeping defense nerfs. The HC folk are moving in the right direction by adding higher difficulty levels to content.

Your support for the base NPC is noted, thank you. Again, perspective was provided in the original post. If the team here needs additional insight, I would be happy to gather a group of his friends from in game to provide them with more. While a base NPC is a nice idea, I am not sure it would be good to have competing memorials, and restricting these NPCs to bases that he had built is not going to be feasible in that I am not sure there is anyone else in those SGs who can edit them. There is precedent for adding the characters of very special members of the community into the game with meorial NPCs characters like Curupira and Gloryhound in ICON and Croatoa respectively. Steve was a very special member of this community and deserving of the same special treatment in my opinion. His main character of Heraclea had the strongest connection to Cimerora. I think Steve would smile knowing Heraclea will be there forever standing watch.

Reading the original post in this thread provides the background and the suggestion as to where and how to memorialize Heraclea.

This would directly and adversely impact running back to back TFs/SFs or any mission content really. Many people use TFs as means for leveling.

Totally understood that it is not a promise of anything. Thank you for sharing your insight here. 🙂

Not to diminish your experience as I have no reason to doubt you, however my personal experience is wildly different than yours. I migrated from Torchbearer to Excelsior many months ago and I have yet to encounter any player that is brand new to the game, let alone one that was PLed to 50 right out of the tutorial. I am online daily joining and leading PUGs for all sorts of activities. I am being honest here, I just do not see the problem you are seeing. Are there players who I feel play badly? Absolutely. Are there players who will not remember how to get places? Absolutely. I started playing CoH back in BETA and I still do not know everything there is to know about the game. I do not remember a lot of things. Personally, I think it a mistake to judge people on badge counts or how they want to play or what the extent of their game knowledge is. If you encounter someone who does not know something, take it as an opportunity to teach them instead of berate them. Bemoaning them on the forums here is not helping to build a welcoming community. I totally agree with what @PeregrineFalcon posted above. Make friends and team with them. That is what friends lists are for. He is also spot on in that completely removing AE and radios and whatever other content you do not like is not going to have the affect you think it will. Players who play badly are still going to play badly regardless and will just find another mission to farm. It just seems silly to me to read people complaining about others begging for PLs who then go to the AE building to hang out and observe people doing something that totally annoys them. That is just odd.

I have a couple of alts in Amazon Army and I have no intention of closing the doors on the group. The base he built will remain untouched so long as I am around. I will try to put together some nice screen captures into a thread for the base. He had the passcodes in his forum signature, so they are all open to the public to visit and enjoy. I am all for having Heraclea as a permanent NPC in the base as well, however that seems a lot more work for the team here.

Yes please!! Would love to see the animations from Quick Strike and Body Blow ported over from KM as alternate punch animations for Thunder Kick and Storm Kick.

Totally agree with helping others. I have yet to encounter a brand new player who was PL'ed right out to the tutorial. And no offense meant, given the criteria of how these supposed "new players" were deemed "new", I question whether those players really were new.

May I kindly ask that you re-read what @GM Impervium posted above and keep the drama out of this thread? Thank you very much. Appreciate it.