Tattered Page

Zubon’s got a good writeup on the Carnival of Shadows- a Villain group in the City of Heroes universe. I agree with much, but wanted to challenge enough of it that I killed the reply-box before I remembered that longer replies could go to my oft-neglected blog here.

Go ahead and read it, then this will make a bit more sense. You can also read the history of the Carnival at the official site, but warning- much of this is “spoiler” information that you discover in the story arcs.

My comments after the break.

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Well, I got my prizes from the Comic Book Contest.  I figured that, with City of Heroes’ Issue 10 on the way, I’d give the new software a run doing a comic book based “guide” to the issue.

My goal was to mix a brief overview of the features with a little humor.  I hoped to make it target the casual City of Heroes player- no hard numbers or DPS stats- but also make it understandable to the curious outsider… maybe enough for them to want to give it a trial run.

Anyway, it’s currently available through hypercomics as well as .pdf here.  Let me know what you think.

Way back in September, Positron posted this tidbit on the CoH boards:

I had 2 PM’s in my box, back to back. The first was “Stalkers are useless in PvP” and the next was “Stalkers are overpowered in PvP”. The grass is always greener they say…

Now, I had some thoughts back then regarding the topic, but I wanted test out my assumptions first from a number of different angles. I’ll explain some of the Stalker basics after the break for you non CoH’ers, but for now, after a few months of analysis, Positron’s conclusion was wrong.

Both statements are correct.

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Ok, I decided to play around with Comic Book Creator this week.  It’s a fun tool that lets you make comics from clipart, screenshots, or virtually any image file you have at hand.

I made a City of Heroes 36-pager.  It’s something of an “origins” tale, I guess.  There was alot of bungling, and it still has some rough edges, but I figured I’d share it in “Beta format” and see what people think.

You can view the pages in gallery or download the pdf here (7.5mb). 

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Timothy Burke’s remarks regarding the value of forums got me thinking about the LACK of tools to expedite forum datamining. I’m more familiar with phpbb and other open, well-supported forum tools, but I couldn’t find many tangible tools browsing the sites for Lithium (used by SOE) and UBB.threads (common with NCSoft’s)

Some things can be done without specialized tools.

• Identify a few good community members with reasonable communication skills and make bookmarks to the player search for each one. Follow them. They can be your “pulse” on the community
• Most boards have the capability of tracking “hot topics.” See where the action is.

Neither solution is optimal.  You could have tools that help you identify these community leaders- or rate users privately… something to make identifying key members in a less static or arbitrary manner. Hot topics are often cluttered with faddish forum games or quirky sidenotes. Heuristic analysis is nonexistent.

Even when a hot topic is identified, determining its relevance is a bit tough. Posters can be convinced rather quickly that an issue is big enough to merit a response- and that their point of view is the dominant one. Even devs can fall for this false sense of “urgency.”

City of Heroes had a rather decent flareup a few months back, and I took some time to tinker with a text parser to get a more detailed look.  My results follow the break.

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I’m not ashamed to promote something I have a blast playing.

Cryptic / NCSoft released a new boxed set containing both City of Heroes & City of Villains. They call it the “Good vs Evil Edition.” If you’re undecided on getting it, go over to MMORPG.com and get the FREE TRIAL.

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In Zen of Design’s post about the Cryptic-Marvel team-up, Aaron and I had a nice debate on story in City of Heroes and whether Cryptic can do well with Marvel’s material. We’ve since moved the debate to our own blogs. Aaron has expressed some concern that Cryptic’s characters don’t have the depth, but read it for yourself. It’s good stuff- even if I disagree.

Aaron is right in one aspect. Although I believe Cryptic advanced the MMO storywriting skills by leaps and bounds, nobody’s going to mistake any MMO’s story for award-winning literature.

He just gives Marvel too much credit- and Cryptic too little.

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