The best gift you can give in CoX

[DougGraves]

Is to compliment someone on their costume, character name, or biography.

 

No matter how much influence they have, no one ever has too many compliments.

[Fan Mail]

Sure, I'll agree with your statement.  

 

Your thread title is a little riské though.  

Edited December 23, 2019 by tafilr

[ZacKing]

So long as those costumes aren't parodies or homages.  there is no wiggle room there, despite being told the contrary.

[Gulbasaur]

3 hours ago, DougGraves said:

Is to compliment someone on their costume, character name, or biography.

I always shout out a good costume when I see it and I love it when people do the same to me. A well done Silver Age of Comics costume is something I can never quite get right but always makes me happy to see. 

 

There's someone who I've run into over a few task forces and she always recognises when I've changed costumes (I tend to do variations on a theme, like 90s comics, Cimemora, Vanguard, future/winter/injured version of my character etc) and it's so gratifying to be noticed for something that I had fun doing. 

Edited December 23, 2019 by Gulbasaur

[srmalloy]

5 hours ago, ZacKing said:

So long as those costumes aren't parodies or homages.  there is no wiggle room there, despite being told the contrary.

Which is why, if I make a character that draws from other source material, I'll research that material so that I can create a bio that justifies why the character is in Paragon City's universe and not their own. For example, when I decided to see if I could do a reasonable job creating a draenei in the character creator, I dug into WoW lore wb pages to see where a draenei could reasonably be extracted from that universe and dropped into CoH's, and wrote the bio accordingly. Another character I created, motivated by seeing how certain costume part combinations resembled anime mecha, was named 'Mobile Suit Gun Dame' and used various references to make her costumes look like different Gundam mecha.
 

[DougGraves]

1 hour ago, srmalloy said:

'Mobile Suit Gun Dame'
 

That is a good name

[Ukase]

I have never complimented anyone on their costumes because I simply don't notice them. Bios vary. Some are exceptional and some are just ...stupid. "A mop bucket spilled over and I got these powers"...what? 

The best gift you can give in CoH is helping someone with a badge. Nobody cares if you like their costume or bio. Help them get Really Hard Way or Avoids the Green Stuff. Then you've made a friend. 

 

[Arcanum]

11 hours ago, DougGraves said:

Is to compliment someone on their costume, character name, or biography.

 

No matter how much influence they have, no one ever has too many compliments.

I agree, DougGraves!  I always appreciate a well done hero costume/concept design! I happily message people stating how nifty I think their costumes are when I see them in-game!

 

However, I too have made a lot of friends doing Really Hard Way runs together - so hard to make a superlative! Perhaps we should just compliment other players while doing badge runs together! 🙂

[DougGraves]

51 minutes ago, Ukase said:

The best gift you can give in CoH is helping someone with a badge. Nobody cares if you like their costume or bio. Help them get Really Hard Way or Avoids the Green Stuff. Then you've made a friend.

 

Glad to help you.  If you select the chest detail type "Over" then you can select a star (I think it is star 2) and it shows up on your vest.  Color it appropriately and you have a nice badge for your western marshal (pic 1).  But, because it is the chest detail, you cannot have it and a bolo tie.  A solution for that is to have your vest open with a bolo tie showing, and using the retro belt with the star belt buckle acting as a badge (pic 2).  Of course, as everyone knows, bolo ties were invented in the 1940's and are not period accurate for western marshals.  So you should probably just go with the badge on your vest.

 

 

 

[Heraclea]

I always make a point of complimenting player characters inspired by classical mythology.  And especially, if they choose a name in Greek or Latin and get the grammar right.  Ungrammatical Latin guild names were an endless nightmare in WoW. 

[Lost Ninja]

Well thought out Names and or Bios are the things I see and am interested in (even though in HC I seldom bother with actually doing my own Bios.

6 hours ago, Heraclea said:

I always make a point of complimenting player characters inspired by classical mythology.  And especially, if they choose a name in Greek or Latin and get the grammar right.  Ungrammatical Latin guild names were an endless nightmare in WoW. 

I frequently look for and use lesser known Roman/Greek/Hindi/Norse/etc Gods/Goddesses/Mythology for at least the inspiration of names. And I often use Greek or Pseudo Greek names.

 

And typically the part of character creation that takes longest for me is getting the right name.

[Megajoule]

9 hours ago, Lost Ninja said:

And typically the part of character creation that takes longest for me is getting the right name.

[Myrmidon]

15 hours ago, Megajoule said:

Until they start to clear out the name squatters, don’t forget the 3-6 “this name is already taken”.

[agentx5]

On 12/23/2019 at 4:22 PM, Gulbasaur said:

I always shout out a good costume when I see it and I love it when people do the same to me.

Same here.

 

In fact, I'm more likely to say something if I see they wrote something in for character information details.

The majority of players (at least on Torchbearer at the hours I play) don't write much of a story, so I'm excited to see something thought-out there.

Sometimes it's comedy gold, sometimes is PvP or PvE bragging rights, sometimes it lame super-sayan-eqsue god-modding BS, and sometimes it's REALLY well thought out and matches the costume(s) perfectly.  But frankly I'm just glad to have SOMETHING there at least, in info, typically when I going to check to see what powersets people who are joining the team have.

 

Speaking of, is there a keybind command that displays the personal info of the target you have selected?  That would be convenient, and good to share.

[MetaVileTerror]

/info

This will open the Info Window of your Target, or yourself if you don't have a Target currently selected.

https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Info_(Slash_Command)

 

[DougGraves]

1 hour ago, MetaVileTerror said:

/info

This will open the Info Window of your Target, or yourself if you don't have a Target currently selected.

https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Info_(Slash_Command)

 

 

now if only there were a way to bind a slash command to a key so you did not have to type it every time.

[MetaVileTerror]

Same with every command.

/bind KEY info

Where "KEY" is whatever button you want to bind the command to.

 

You can also /macro it if you want to add more buttons to your Power Trays.

[Lost Ninja]

There is also /info_self so you can see your own "Info" as others would see it.

[RikOz]

On 12/23/2019 at 4:45 PM, srmalloy said:

Which is why, if I make a character that draws from other source material, I'll research that material so that I can create a bio that justifies why the character is in Paragon City's universe and not their own. For example, when I decided to see if I could do a reasonable job creating a draenei in the character creator, I dug into WoW lore wb pages to see where a draenei could reasonably be extracted from that universe and dropped into CoH's, and wrote the bio accordingly. Another character I created, motivated by seeing how certain costume part combinations resembled anime mecha, was named 'Mobile Suit Gun Dame' and used various references to make her costumes look like different Gundam mecha.
 

I have a character named "Epic Gear" whose costumes are purple and incorporate those big gear-shaped shoulder pieces. He's a direct spoof of "elitist" WoW players (I've played WoW since 2008, except for when I'm playing CoH):

 

Epic Gear began his adventuring career on another world, in another dimension, where he was a mighty warrior known to all as Pwnmastr. In his long and storied career, he defeated elemental lords, lich kings, murderous dragons, demons, and even a few ancient, evil gods. In short, he was one of the most elite, hardcore heroes of his world.

 

Alas, a teleportation spell gone wrong, probably cast by some noob casual adventurer, sent Pwnmastr hurtling through dimensions until he landed on this ... "Primal Earth". Although this new world was vastly different from the one from whence he came, he saw that there were evils to conquer and villains to pwn, and he set forth to become a hero here as well. Despite being still early in his career as a ... "superhero", he is clearly already one of the elite. See how he is clad head to toe in epic purple gear!

 

On the other hand, another of my "tribute" characters is named "Mendacious D" (mendacious: adj. Lying; untruthful) made to resemble Jack Black's wrestling costume from Nacho Libre. His bio reads, "This is the greatest hero in the world. This is not a tribute." 😄

Edited July 28, 2022 by RikOz
Converted PNG to JPG

[srmalloy]

On 12/24/2019 at 4:57 AM, Lost Ninja said:

Well thought out Names and or Bios are the things I see and am interested in (even though in HC I seldom bother with actually doing my own Bios.

I frequently look for and use lesser known Roman/Greek/Hindi/Norse/etc Gods/Goddesses/Mythology for at least the inspiration of names. And I often use Greek or Pseudo Greek names.

As a fallback, you can always use a description of the character's powersets in a foreign language; I had/have a number of characters with names like this in Russian - Yaderniy Ogon (Nuclear Fire, a Fire/Rad Controller), Yadernaya Zima (Nuclear Winter, a Fire/Cold Blaster), Tenevoy Ogon (Shadow Fire, a Fire/Dark Corruptor), Luchevoy Mirazh (Radiation Illusion, an Ill/Rad Controller. Some less directly descriptive - Ledyanoy Kulak (Ice Fist, an Ice/Ice Tanker), Deva Molniya (Lightning Girl, an Elec/Elec Dominator), Obmorozheniye (Frostbite, an Ice/Ice Dominator), Stal'naya Deva (Steel Maiden, a DB/WP Scrapper, and Umstvenniy Ulan (Mental Lancer, a Psi/EM Blaster).

[RikOz]

Ooh! I have an elec/elec brute named Elektricheskiy Shok! I originally called him "Old Soviet Hero", as he's a middle-aged Russian man who grew up in the Soviet era and was a member of a government superhero team, and emigrated to the USA/Paragon City in the early 2000s. I haven't fully written his bio yet, though. Right now his bio just says, "I am capitalist now!"

 

(Though I will admit I don't know how good the name is, as I just relied on Google to translate "electric shock" into Russian for me.)

[siolfir]

On 12/24/2019 at 5:40 PM, Megajoule said:

This has stopped me at the last screen on character creation for 3 different Stalkers in the past month. I still haven't created one because of a lack of a good name. :(

[Lost Ninja]

3 hours ago, srmalloy said:

As a fallback, you can always use a description of the character's powersets in a foreign language; I had/have a number of characters with names like this in Russian - Yaderniy Ogon (Nuclear Fire, a Fire/Rad Controller), Yadernaya Zima (Nuclear Winter, a Fire/Cold Blaster), Tenevoy Ogon (Shadow Fire, a Fire/Dark Corruptor), Luchevoy Mirazh (Radiation Illusion, an Ill/Rad Controller. Some less directly descriptive - Ledyanoy Kulak (Ice Fist, an Ice/Ice Tanker), Deva Molniya (Lightning Girl, an Elec/Elec Dominator), Obmorozheniye (Frostbite, an Ice/Ice Dominator), Stal'naya Deva (Steel Maiden, a DB/WP Scrapper, and Umstvenniy Ulan (Mental Lancer, a Psi/EM Blaster).

I do that too... or use semi made up versions of various languages so they look right but if you were to actually go off and look them up they'd not translate. I also like play on words names. One of my favourites both on HC and Live was Pyroclastic Flower (Fire/Kin Controller) named of course for the Pyroclastic Flow that can come during a volcanic eruption. Pyroclastic Flows can also be called a Pyroclastic Surge... that doesn't really work for a name so I used Pyroclcastic Sarge. For my third one I was drawing a blank so it was Pyroclastic Ninja.

 

I had a team of Rads (I forget their precise builds but probably Electric/Rad (Controllers or Corruptors) named after the various British code-names for nukes (war heads or bombs I forget) but unlike the rather masculine naming for US munitions (I am never going to call a female character (I really only make female characters) Fat Man or Little Boy (even if using such names didn't have the chance of upsetting people whose families were actually lost by said munitions... also M103 (or whatever) is also not a name I'm likely to use).

 

[DougGraves]

3 hours ago, siolfir said:

This has stopped me at the last screen on character creation for 3 different Stalkers in the past month. I still haven't created one because of a lack of a good name. 😞

 

You can create the character and park it in an arena or pvp zone for a day badge and then rename it for free when you think of a name

[srmalloy]

4 hours ago, RikOz said:

Ooh! I have an elec/elec brute named Elektricheskiy Shok! I originally called him "Old Soviet Hero", as he's a middle-aged Russian man who grew up in the Soviet era and was a member of a government superhero team, and emigrated to the USA/Paragon City in the early 2000s. I haven't fully written his bio yet, though. Right now his bio just says, "I am capitalist now!"

Once I started making characters with Russian-derived names, I went a little overboard working up bios for them, looking up actual Soviet/Russian research institutions, such as Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова (I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry) to reference, and made up a collection of background references -- the state-sponsored hero groups like Народная Армия ('People's Army'), villains like Красная Угроза ('Red Menace'), Генерал Зима ('General Winter'), and heroes like Красный Орел ('Red Eagle') and Зимняя Дева ('Winter Maiden'), which I referenced through different characters' bios. By re-using the same references to individuals and organizations back in Russia, I think it creates a more organic backstory than having each character's bio being completely isolated from each other's.