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mythicfoxSo Halloween's coming up. It's always an awkward time for me, really, because it feels like I find myself either having or bracing myself for a specific awkward conversation I have at least a few times every year...
(Some of this is gonna get a little personal. Fair warning.)
Basically, I'm not much of a fan of Halloween. I mean, I did the trick-or-treat thing when I was a kid but sometimes it feels like I'm the only person I know who lost interest about the time I got too old to dress up and beg for candy. (And I probably only stand out in that regard due to the contrast against all of the childish stuff I still do today.) I think a lot of it has something to do with the fact that I grew up pretty much in the middle of nowhere and just didn't have friends my own age growing up. About 99% of the kids my own age I interacted with were at school, and they all treated me like crap because of a combination of social awkwardness and the fact that I was in a lot of the gifted classes.
And maybe some of it is the fact that as a lingering result of that social awkwardness, I sometimes feel like when I'm interacting with people in person I'm actually putting on some sort of performance. Even though it's not like I'm trying to hide things from people or slip stuff past them, I have trouble not feeling like I've got some sort of 'mask' up to make sure they see what I want them to see. It feels, often, that my moods just don't register on my face like they do in my head. I always have trouble getting my ideas across to people, particularly in person -- I've always been that guy who, when getting birthday or Christmas presents, never looks as surprised or pleased as he feels and most people don't believe it unless they can clearly read it on your face. Honestly, I wonder if there's anything more to me than the mask after a while.
But anyhow, bringing this back around to the original topic, a lot of people really get into Halloween for the 'be someone other than who you are' aspect of it. Same reason some people get into cosplaying or roleplaying (I think I get into roleplaying more to try and express parts of myself that normally don't see the light of day, take that as you will). But to someone who has issues with feeling like he's faking it even when he's not faking it, pretending to be a something/someone else for Halloween lacks appeal because it seems like something I do anyways.
Okay, to get on a more interesting topic, the closing of City of Heroes is starting to loom. It's only a little over a month now until the servers go dark. I hit the 'acceptance' stage of the game's shutdown a lot earlier than most people, but recently (partially inspired by Samuraiko's 'One Last Day' video) I've been making plans for something I'm going to do before the game goes down. I don't have a specific timetable for this or anything, but I've decided to spend a couple of days at some point visiting every publicly-accessible zone in the game and find a spot to get a screen shot with one of my two mains (Sting of Justice and Professor Junkpile). Just find a spot that's got a cool view, or a memory for me, or whatever, and just build up a little album of those; one shot per zone. It seems like the simplest way to organize memories from the game without completely losing it and going on a madman's screenshotting spree.
I'd also, if I may, share a few thoughts regarding the other superhero MMOs out there because for obvious reasons they've been on my mind.
Now, I haven't spent a lot of time with Champions Online yet. At the behest of a good friend I've given it a try for free, and while parts of it are at least workable or good enough there are a few parts that really bug me.
The first is their treatment of the non-subscription players. Champions Online, if you're a free player, gives you access to ten archetypes you can use. (Their subscription players get full access to their freeform power system.) And there are another 15 available that can be bought individually for a little under $12 worth of their cash store's currency (which can only be bought in 5, 10, 20, 30, or 50-dollar increments, which means that you're shelling out at least $15 for this privilege), or you can get a single freeform character slot for about $50 (I say 'about' because $50 gets you an extra $3 worth of points). Now, City of Heroes used 'archetype' as a replacement for the common RPG term 'class.' Champions uses 'archetype' to mean 'specific character build, with almost all of your powers already pre-chosen with almost no room for customization.' And unlike DCUO (which I'll cover shortly), there aren't any extra benefits for spending money on the game at all. No middle-ground tier of membership (even TF2 gives you a free in-game hat for spending any money in the cash store). I get that they really want you to subscribe, but it feels less like encouraging you to spend money and more like punishing you for not spending money. And giving in to that feels to me like paying a protection scheme or going out of your way to spend money at a restaurant you know spits in customers' food if you don't bribe the waiter. It just feels like it encourages that sort of marketing plan.
My second big beef with the game is that the combat and movement feel sluggish to me. Attacks seem to come slower than they should, such that I feel like I have to double-tap everything every time. And character movement feels like I'm undergoing a constant speed debuff. Even the unenhanced version of the superspeed travel power feels slower than the 'Ninja Run' not-quite-travel-power in City of Heroes (and unlike Champions, the CoH superspeed power's 'stealth' component actually works). The controls just don't feel as tight as other games.
The game also has a pretty steep learning curve. As in: even if you know what you're doing, even if you pay attention to the on-screen cues, you will die at least once in the tutorial. It's pretty much guaranteed that the final boss of the tutorial will wipe his ass with your character a few times. They go to a lot of trouble to get you to learn to use this lackluster blocking feature that would feel a lot easier to use in a game with tighter controls. That said, I think the blocking (like a lot of bits of the combat) is a holdover of when the game was intended to have a console version that never materialized, and I can't help but wonder if their devs have out any thought into revamping mobs and such so they can just drop it.
The game does get some things right, though. The interface for interacting with contacts, despite the fact that you have to keep running back to them, is pretty smooth and I like the way the minimap helps spell out where you need to go for missions (although I personally have some issues with the game's interface but it's a minor niggling bit). The chat system is pretty well done, particularly compared to some games. I really like how they dodged the issue of name availability. I just wish it didn't feel so hostile to the free players.
DC Universe Online, on the other hand, gets a lot of things right. The combat is tight and the world is beautiful. And if you have Batman or the Joker as your 'mentor,' you're getting missions from Kevin Conroy or Mark Hamill respectively. Try to convince me that's not awesome, I fucking dare you. And it still has a pretty wide range of options for free players. And if you spend at least five bucks in one purchase, they bump you up to the 'Premium' membership tier. This increases caps on a few things and gives you a few more character slots. And this comes back to my big sticking point with CO: if I buy an extra archetype in CO, I just have that archetype and whatever points are leftover from my initial purchase. But I dropped $10 on DCUO's 'Fight for the Light' pack for, among a few other systems, the Light powerset and got some extras in the process. I mean, the point of going F2P with a cash store is to nickel and dime the players, not browbeat them into subscribing anyways. But I digress.
DCUO's downsides, though, have little to do with how much money you spend. It's definitely designed as a console game first and the abysmal chat interface really makes that show. The costume creator is really lacking -- absurdly so, compared to CO or CoH. If you want to create a character in the vein of John Constantine or Jack Hawksmoor, who basically don't bother with a costume, you're fucked. And there's no way to create a character who's just strong or fast without just opting to not select any powers (which might be an interesting experiment, but not one I'd spend too much time on). I personally find it really ironic that even though you're encouraged to design a character in a visual style reminiscent of a lot of DCU luminaries you actually can't build a character that emulates a lot of the DCU's big names. Also, some people might take issue with the fact that the game treats you a lot like the 'second-stringers', like the recurring characters from the last couple of seasons of Justice League (when it was rebranded as Justice League Unlimited), but I'm pretty cool with that myself because some of those folks are still pretty awesome.
And this is a minor point, but there are a lot of players who think nothing of blatantly ripping off other companies' characters and like to run around wrecking the destructible scenery (it respawns after a minute or two) because they can and generally act like dipshits. Now, every game has dipshits but because everyone's crammed into one server you don't have the option of limiting your playing to servers where it's less of a problem. And some people argue that CoH has just as many people who rip off trademarked characters, to which my response is "Shut up, you're wrong." Blatant ripoffs, in CoH, get reported pretty quickly and dealt with just as fast. People see there are consequences for that sort of thing. But hang out in one of the popular police stations or nightclubs in DCUO for a half-hour and keep an eye out for how many trademarked ripoffs you see (95% of which will be Marvel characters -- the Hulk and Spider-Man seem to me to be the most common). Now go to Atlas Park or Pocket D and do the same. I challenge you to say with a straight face after that that CoH is just as bad as DCUO, even after adjusting for the number of players you'll see in either game. (Once, in a one-hour session of DCUO, I wasn't even people-watching and saw no less than three Magnetos despite the fact that there wasn't even a powerset even suggestive of the character)
I could see myself playing either game with friends, but I'm not sure how much time I'd spend poking at them if it was just me. The biggest difference between them is that DCUO is clearly an action game first while CO tries very, very hard to be a comic book simulator (CoH leaned a little more towards the latter but was still a happy medium). Either might serve as a fun little distraction to get my superhero game jollies, but neither will ever properly heal the wound left by the impending loss of City of Heroes.
And now for something completely different.
Every now and again, a business I frequent fucks something up. It happens to all of us at some point, and so what separates a lot of businesses for me is how they deal with it when you complain. For example, I haven't eaten at a McDonald's in my town in a couple of years because I had multiple orders in a row from different locations (these are all owned by one franchisee, not corporate-run) get something wrong and their service never improved -- they simply send you coupons that are only good at those locations.
So when a company screws up something and does right by me to make it up, I like to tell people. Thus, we rewind to about two weeks ago. The coffee shop where I was writing had closed for the evening and I relocated to Buffalo Wild Wings as I sometimes do (particularly on Tuesdays when their wings are cheap) because they've got free wi-fi, the background noise I need to write, and I can type with one hand while eating chicken wings with the other. I waited to be seated while waitstaff buzzed around the place -- it wasn't too busy, but there was a normal-sized crowd. Now, this has never been a problem for me in the past, but I waited about two minutes at the podium to be seated and didn't even get a reflexive 'someone will be with you' even when one waitress had time to screw around with her friends out front and walked right by me when she came back inside. And it's not like they didn't see me -- just none of them said anything or went out of their way to grab someone to seat me. After a couple minutes of being ignored I decided my money could be better spent elsewhere and fleet. When I got home, I took it upon myself to send an email to the company telling them about it -- I don't think anyone here will say that ignoring a paying customer altogether is something that should slide.
Less than 12 hours later, I got an email from the manager of that location (who supposedly checked the security cameras to verify my story) personally apologizing for what happened and asking for my address so they could send me a gift card. And they did it; a few days later I received a handwritten and signed letter of apology with a $20 gift card (which is more than I usually spend in a single trip). So yeah, the place is kind of a goofy sports bar but I just wanted to say that when someone at Buffalo Wild Wings dropped the ball, the company went out of their way to make sure it was made up to me.
So yeah, that's a good chunk of what's been going on with me. The rest is mostly legal matters I can't say too much about at the moment.
Speaking of which, I've got a long week ahead of me. Wish me luck.
(Some of this is gonna get a little personal. Fair warning.)
Basically, I'm not much of a fan of Halloween. I mean, I did the trick-or-treat thing when I was a kid but sometimes it feels like I'm the only person I know who lost interest about the time I got too old to dress up and beg for candy. (And I probably only stand out in that regard due to the contrast against all of the childish stuff I still do today.) I think a lot of it has something to do with the fact that I grew up pretty much in the middle of nowhere and just didn't have friends my own age growing up. About 99% of the kids my own age I interacted with were at school, and they all treated me like crap because of a combination of social awkwardness and the fact that I was in a lot of the gifted classes.
And maybe some of it is the fact that as a lingering result of that social awkwardness, I sometimes feel like when I'm interacting with people in person I'm actually putting on some sort of performance. Even though it's not like I'm trying to hide things from people or slip stuff past them, I have trouble not feeling like I've got some sort of 'mask' up to make sure they see what I want them to see. It feels, often, that my moods just don't register on my face like they do in my head. I always have trouble getting my ideas across to people, particularly in person -- I've always been that guy who, when getting birthday or Christmas presents, never looks as surprised or pleased as he feels and most people don't believe it unless they can clearly read it on your face. Honestly, I wonder if there's anything more to me than the mask after a while.
But anyhow, bringing this back around to the original topic, a lot of people really get into Halloween for the 'be someone other than who you are' aspect of it. Same reason some people get into cosplaying or roleplaying (I think I get into roleplaying more to try and express parts of myself that normally don't see the light of day, take that as you will). But to someone who has issues with feeling like he's faking it even when he's not faking it, pretending to be a something/someone else for Halloween lacks appeal because it seems like something I do anyways.
Okay, to get on a more interesting topic, the closing of City of Heroes is starting to loom. It's only a little over a month now until the servers go dark. I hit the 'acceptance' stage of the game's shutdown a lot earlier than most people, but recently (partially inspired by Samuraiko's 'One Last Day' video) I've been making plans for something I'm going to do before the game goes down. I don't have a specific timetable for this or anything, but I've decided to spend a couple of days at some point visiting every publicly-accessible zone in the game and find a spot to get a screen shot with one of my two mains (Sting of Justice and Professor Junkpile). Just find a spot that's got a cool view, or a memory for me, or whatever, and just build up a little album of those; one shot per zone. It seems like the simplest way to organize memories from the game without completely losing it and going on a madman's screenshotting spree.
I'd also, if I may, share a few thoughts regarding the other superhero MMOs out there because for obvious reasons they've been on my mind.
Now, I haven't spent a lot of time with Champions Online yet. At the behest of a good friend I've given it a try for free, and while parts of it are at least workable or good enough there are a few parts that really bug me.
The first is their treatment of the non-subscription players. Champions Online, if you're a free player, gives you access to ten archetypes you can use. (Their subscription players get full access to their freeform power system.) And there are another 15 available that can be bought individually for a little under $12 worth of their cash store's currency (which can only be bought in 5, 10, 20, 30, or 50-dollar increments, which means that you're shelling out at least $15 for this privilege), or you can get a single freeform character slot for about $50 (I say 'about' because $50 gets you an extra $3 worth of points). Now, City of Heroes used 'archetype' as a replacement for the common RPG term 'class.' Champions uses 'archetype' to mean 'specific character build, with almost all of your powers already pre-chosen with almost no room for customization.' And unlike DCUO (which I'll cover shortly), there aren't any extra benefits for spending money on the game at all. No middle-ground tier of membership (even TF2 gives you a free in-game hat for spending any money in the cash store). I get that they really want you to subscribe, but it feels less like encouraging you to spend money and more like punishing you for not spending money. And giving in to that feels to me like paying a protection scheme or going out of your way to spend money at a restaurant you know spits in customers' food if you don't bribe the waiter. It just feels like it encourages that sort of marketing plan.
My second big beef with the game is that the combat and movement feel sluggish to me. Attacks seem to come slower than they should, such that I feel like I have to double-tap everything every time. And character movement feels like I'm undergoing a constant speed debuff. Even the unenhanced version of the superspeed travel power feels slower than the 'Ninja Run' not-quite-travel-power in City of Heroes (and unlike Champions, the CoH superspeed power's 'stealth' component actually works). The controls just don't feel as tight as other games.
The game also has a pretty steep learning curve. As in: even if you know what you're doing, even if you pay attention to the on-screen cues, you will die at least once in the tutorial. It's pretty much guaranteed that the final boss of the tutorial will wipe his ass with your character a few times. They go to a lot of trouble to get you to learn to use this lackluster blocking feature that would feel a lot easier to use in a game with tighter controls. That said, I think the blocking (like a lot of bits of the combat) is a holdover of when the game was intended to have a console version that never materialized, and I can't help but wonder if their devs have out any thought into revamping mobs and such so they can just drop it.
The game does get some things right, though. The interface for interacting with contacts, despite the fact that you have to keep running back to them, is pretty smooth and I like the way the minimap helps spell out where you need to go for missions (although I personally have some issues with the game's interface but it's a minor niggling bit). The chat system is pretty well done, particularly compared to some games. I really like how they dodged the issue of name availability. I just wish it didn't feel so hostile to the free players.
DC Universe Online, on the other hand, gets a lot of things right. The combat is tight and the world is beautiful. And if you have Batman or the Joker as your 'mentor,' you're getting missions from Kevin Conroy or Mark Hamill respectively. Try to convince me that's not awesome, I fucking dare you. And it still has a pretty wide range of options for free players. And if you spend at least five bucks in one purchase, they bump you up to the 'Premium' membership tier. This increases caps on a few things and gives you a few more character slots. And this comes back to my big sticking point with CO: if I buy an extra archetype in CO, I just have that archetype and whatever points are leftover from my initial purchase. But I dropped $10 on DCUO's 'Fight for the Light' pack for, among a few other systems, the Light powerset and got some extras in the process. I mean, the point of going F2P with a cash store is to nickel and dime the players, not browbeat them into subscribing anyways. But I digress.
DCUO's downsides, though, have little to do with how much money you spend. It's definitely designed as a console game first and the abysmal chat interface really makes that show. The costume creator is really lacking -- absurdly so, compared to CO or CoH. If you want to create a character in the vein of John Constantine or Jack Hawksmoor, who basically don't bother with a costume, you're fucked. And there's no way to create a character who's just strong or fast without just opting to not select any powers (which might be an interesting experiment, but not one I'd spend too much time on). I personally find it really ironic that even though you're encouraged to design a character in a visual style reminiscent of a lot of DCU luminaries you actually can't build a character that emulates a lot of the DCU's big names. Also, some people might take issue with the fact that the game treats you a lot like the 'second-stringers', like the recurring characters from the last couple of seasons of Justice League (when it was rebranded as Justice League Unlimited), but I'm pretty cool with that myself because some of those folks are still pretty awesome.
And this is a minor point, but there are a lot of players who think nothing of blatantly ripping off other companies' characters and like to run around wrecking the destructible scenery (it respawns after a minute or two) because they can and generally act like dipshits. Now, every game has dipshits but because everyone's crammed into one server you don't have the option of limiting your playing to servers where it's less of a problem. And some people argue that CoH has just as many people who rip off trademarked characters, to which my response is "Shut up, you're wrong." Blatant ripoffs, in CoH, get reported pretty quickly and dealt with just as fast. People see there are consequences for that sort of thing. But hang out in one of the popular police stations or nightclubs in DCUO for a half-hour and keep an eye out for how many trademarked ripoffs you see (95% of which will be Marvel characters -- the Hulk and Spider-Man seem to me to be the most common). Now go to Atlas Park or Pocket D and do the same. I challenge you to say with a straight face after that that CoH is just as bad as DCUO, even after adjusting for the number of players you'll see in either game. (Once, in a one-hour session of DCUO, I wasn't even people-watching and saw no less than three Magnetos despite the fact that there wasn't even a powerset even suggestive of the character)
I could see myself playing either game with friends, but I'm not sure how much time I'd spend poking at them if it was just me. The biggest difference between them is that DCUO is clearly an action game first while CO tries very, very hard to be a comic book simulator (CoH leaned a little more towards the latter but was still a happy medium). Either might serve as a fun little distraction to get my superhero game jollies, but neither will ever properly heal the wound left by the impending loss of City of Heroes.
And now for something completely different.
Every now and again, a business I frequent fucks something up. It happens to all of us at some point, and so what separates a lot of businesses for me is how they deal with it when you complain. For example, I haven't eaten at a McDonald's in my town in a couple of years because I had multiple orders in a row from different locations (these are all owned by one franchisee, not corporate-run) get something wrong and their service never improved -- they simply send you coupons that are only good at those locations.
So when a company screws up something and does right by me to make it up, I like to tell people. Thus, we rewind to about two weeks ago. The coffee shop where I was writing had closed for the evening and I relocated to Buffalo Wild Wings as I sometimes do (particularly on Tuesdays when their wings are cheap) because they've got free wi-fi, the background noise I need to write, and I can type with one hand while eating chicken wings with the other. I waited to be seated while waitstaff buzzed around the place -- it wasn't too busy, but there was a normal-sized crowd. Now, this has never been a problem for me in the past, but I waited about two minutes at the podium to be seated and didn't even get a reflexive 'someone will be with you' even when one waitress had time to screw around with her friends out front and walked right by me when she came back inside. And it's not like they didn't see me -- just none of them said anything or went out of their way to grab someone to seat me. After a couple minutes of being ignored I decided my money could be better spent elsewhere and fleet. When I got home, I took it upon myself to send an email to the company telling them about it -- I don't think anyone here will say that ignoring a paying customer altogether is something that should slide.
Less than 12 hours later, I got an email from the manager of that location (who supposedly checked the security cameras to verify my story) personally apologizing for what happened and asking for my address so they could send me a gift card. And they did it; a few days later I received a handwritten and signed letter of apology with a $20 gift card (which is more than I usually spend in a single trip). So yeah, the place is kind of a goofy sports bar but I just wanted to say that when someone at Buffalo Wild Wings dropped the ball, the company went out of their way to make sure it was made up to me.
So yeah, that's a good chunk of what's been going on with me. The rest is mostly legal matters I can't say too much about at the moment.
Speaking of which, I've got a long week ahead of me. Wish me luck.
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Date: 2012-10-23 06:08 am (UTC)Champions; I have had a lot longer to 'get used to' the combat system and you know I had my issues with it, as well. I wish I could impress that Champions really just is meant to be a subscription game and not a free-2-play but they've attempted to make it so and in the stupidest way ever. Which makes it even harder to 'sell' that the game is better with freeform and the full options unlocked. :-| Can't say I blame you for it being a sour 'trial'. And the things that matter to me, there, aren't possibly as important for you as they are for me. I HAVE a ton of 'every day people' characters that Champions allows me to have. I also like the clubs, the little pubs, the little 'areas' all around Champions just designed to sit and chill. They built it from the ground up to be a friendly world for RPing.
DCUO from the moment I played it in Beta, I fell in love with the combat style and world itself... but yeah, me being so heavily social-based, it's tougher for me on the chat engine and lack of little 'social' places.I think we've still managed, despite that, though. The buildings have little nooks and crannies and there's whole areas of just 'non-mob' places that are usable. But still, no clubs or things that EVERYONE can go and hang out in.. which astounds me given SoE has always been very social-motivated. The lairs I think may be the beginning of something new, though.
I think it's that my priorities are a lot different from other gamers in that I need places to just 'sit and hang out' and not just combat grind left and right. The bases will make it easier. For me? The 'tard-names' and destruction is so easy for me to tune out. Maybe I've been desensitized to it after WoW and SWG and other games where stupidity runs rampant. But yes, DCUO's tard-level is much more obnoxious than CoH. (of course, we've never been on Freedom so that could be different.)
I may be the only person in the world who didn't gush all over Samuraiko's video. Mostly because I thought it did exactly what the devs asked her NOT to do. She made it sad and that annoyed me.
. But yes, I agree, it did inspire one thing, I also need to sit down and screencap Tal and Thomas throughout the world. I will probably take Harper back to villain side to shoot there although you know I've never been jazzed about villain side but his birth was in villain side and that's where he should represent.
For me, neither will 'replace' City of Heroes... but they will at least give me the outlet of creativity I need that other MMOs like high fantasy or Secret World just don't provide.
As for the legal matters, you know I wish you luck and peace! *HUGS* on that.