Tattered Page

Well, the deadline for the City of Heroes Comic Book Creator Contest is fast approaching, and I’ve barely started mine.  I’ve got plenty of stories in queue, but nothing I can distill into an 8-page tale… well, one, but it’ll be a challenge to get done. 

I’m doing it again.  I cranked out the 36 pages in a few days and got good reviews, but the 8-pager is going to paralyze me.  With nearing 200 entries, I’m not expecting to win any of the cool prizes (my gaming PC can’t even handle the video card prizes). I’m just

I’m sure that a great many people feel anxious about sharing their creative side.  I was a bit nervous until the first feedback was posted(positive, thank goodness).  Well, second, really.  First could have been my mom. 

If you had the time to waste to swing by here, go over to the hypercomics site and give a few words of encouragement to the fledgling writers.  I’m sure they’d appreciate it.

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  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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