Shadow Shard #2

Finished up the second Shadow Shard TF this evening, continued from Thursday. About half the missions, running about 5 hours. Hang Time, Noelle Frost, Shock.Therapy, War Bones, Sword of Asgard, Amorpha, and Psi-clone.
The final AV battle, Rudaludarulaluk, or whatever his name is (Rudalak), was just what it should be — tough, white-knuckly, but doable. We zapped most of the near minions, went in, pounded on Rudi for a while, inadvertently drew the far minions, nearly all died, rezzed up, zapped the minions, fought Rudi some more, had Rudi come into the outer room, fought Rudi still some more, and, finally, long-last, beat the SOB.
PC face-planted four or five or six times — ended up 86k in debt (which, of course, doesn’t mean all that much right now). At that, everyone else did close to likewise. Lowest death count was probably Shock, since she tended to wisely stay way back.
The pic at the right is Rudalak. From the ground (where PC was, flat on his back), looking up over the head of War Bones, who just Taunted the god. Yes, he is that tall. Yes, he stomps like he is.
I was able to confirm, over the afternoon that in mass-hold situations (esp. something nice and visible like Noelle’s ice stuff), Psionic Tornado is great fun. A nice AoE damage power, with Containment.
Much fun.

Is it live, or …?

Les has a post demonstrating how cool computer game graphics have gotten … scary-good. Four pictures. Spot the ones that are generated with the new Crysis graphics engine and which are real.
I got them right — but only because the real photos were there to compare. Otherwise, I’d have been fooled after a cursory look.
CoX isn’t at that level, of course, nor should it be (a bit of cartoonyness is appropriate for comic books). But some day …
Hmmm. That raises a cool idea — wouldn’t it be neat to be able to choose an artistic style for your CoX install? CoX as drawn by Jack Kirby, or John Byrne, or Gil Kane, or Jim Sterenko, or Michael Golden, or Mike Mignola, or Arthur Adams, or Jim Lee, or Frank Miller, or … wow. That would be really cool. Tailor it to each toon, too — suddenly each alt is a different immersive experience, not just a different set of powers.
I would pay money for that.

Unshiny!

Part of I7 is tweaking Invulnerability on the CoV side to not be all shiny. This makes sense, as, well, having a silvery gleaming sparkling fiendish villain is aesthetically dissonent.
They fixed this by turning the white pixels in the Invuln effects into black (maybe dark indigo) ones. In theory, this sounds pretty good. In practice …
Well, it’s not all swirly/cloudy like Dark, but it just looks … off. It looks like a negative (which it is), but with the same “offness” that looking at a negative has.
I didn’t take any pictures yet (not sure why), and it may be that my eye will adjust to it eventually. But in the meantime … weird.
Much discussion online about it, too.
(The ultimate answer is the ability to personally color-tune effects for your toon. This has been talked about as a QoL improvement, but I suspect it remains fairly low on the list.)

Mayhem

Margie was burning a couple of freespecs last night (prior to new ones being issued today), and she was doing it with Blue Point (47) and Amorpha (50), so it took her a while. I amused myself with Lynn, and was pleased that I could handle clusters of 3-4 orange CoT without much in the way of white knuckling. She may be on her way toward being and A.F.R. …
After that was all done, we hopped over to CoV, pulling out Mister Ravenous and Charity at Home. I continued to have toon-switching crashes (with subsequent file verifications), as well as the irksome “Lose global chat while zoning” Known Issue during the evening. (Had that with Lynn and Mr. R — in one case, it actually trashed the channel selections for one of my tabs. Might be worthwhile checking that for all my channel-based tabs.)
Still, eventually ended up on a team with Venenata and Barbarity, later with Mastadon Rex (“City of Brutes!”), and saw a couple of other folks on (a lot more people than the previous evening). That led, in turn, to my First Mayhem Mission, featuring a bank robbery in Skyway City.
A few observations:

  1. Fun! A roller coaster ride of things to Smash.
  2. Way too many cops. Didn’t get to smash enough things because of all the yellow and orange SWAT teams and Longbow types around. Yeesh. I mean, why don’t we see that sort of presence in Skyway most of the time?
    Indeed, we had a slew of character deaths and rezzes and the like.

  3. We had problems with keeping the team together, not helped by Mr. R going to smash a truck, only to find it was the way he’d arrived and zoning out for a minute. *sigh* But lesson learned: stick together!
  4. Interesting tension between “smashing things buys you time” for the timed mission (taking down a group of cops gives you 30 seconds for “resisting arrest”) and wanting to get straight to the mission (because, damn, there were plenty of cops inside).
  5. Of course, if you go to hospital, you end up in jail. Which was fun, but time-consuming.
  6. Lots of patrols/ambushes, esp. inside the bank. This was like a heist mission on steroids.
  7. The super-hero to defeat wasn’t all that tough. A red AI spines scrapper. Ho-hum. We smashed.

Ultimately, we failed the mish (we got in, got the money, took down the hero, but didn’t either exit or zone out before the timer completed). Ah, well. Still, hella fun, and I look forward to more.
The Prima PDF guide for I7, btw, has maps for the Mayhem Missions. Worth peering at.

The Freedom Phalanx

The next CoH novel, The Freedom Phalanx, even though by a different author than the previous installment, The Web of Arachnos (Robin Laws vs Robert Weinberg) suffers from many of the same problems — cliches, uninvolving characters, etc. — of its predecessor, but without the pulp charm. Set in the late 80s, it details the reformation of the FP by Positron and Synapse. The original FP has fallen apart over time as its members have squabbled and died off, leaving the heroes of Paragon disorganized and listless, and the life of the city increasinly chaotic, corrupt, and crime-ridden,
Ho-hum. The majority of the interest in something like this should come from learning more about the “signature characters” and the city of Paragon. As to the first, we do, but nothing there really grabs — Positron is smart and earnest, Synapse doesn’t want to be a hero, Manticore is an anti-social vigilante, Statesman is filled with “all my loved ones will die around me as I live eternally” ennui, and Sister Psyche is truly screwed up. Ho, and again, hum. That’s about the depth of the characterization, which can be surpassed by 90% of the novels (and 75% of the comic books, and 40% of the CoX character logs) out there.
And as to Paragon City itself — the book seems riddled with what are either fundamental mistakes (the gleaming corporate towers of Skyway City?) or reflect a pre-Rikti world that has radically changed since then. Hard to tell, and hard to care.
It’s not that it’s a bad book. It’s just not all that good of one. Suitable for light-fluff reading in an airport or something like that. Any of the locals who want to borrow (after that glowing recommendation) are welcome to.

Uninspiring

It appears that Inspirations (combat-related) are a lot weaker than either the text descriptions provided or the Devs thought they were:
DEF (Luck)
S – 12.5%
M – 25%
L – 33%
ACC (Insight)
S – 7.5%
M – 18.75%
L – 37.5%
RES
S – 10%
M – 15%
L – 20%
DMG
S -25%
M – 33%
L – 50%
The Resist and Damage inspirations are working as advertised, but Defense and Accuracy are, clearly, not.
Castle has added it to the bug list.
Cue endless discussion of whether this was always a problem (“The Devs are incompetent dolts!”) or was a stealth nerf (“The Devs are evil manipulators!”), which sound oddly like discussions of Washington politics …
(via Doyce)

Some frustrating evening …

Pulled out Hildy and Torchy (after some playing with a new Katherine toon and Margie trying to get a Mayhem Mission on CoV). We both had the Pumpkin Henge Croatoa mission, and wanted to take it on.
Everything was for us. We ratcheted to Heroic. We’d levelled since getting the mishes. We both had the one-shot Rune of Warding.
We lost both missions. Hildy couldn’t hold them enough with her fiery aura and taunt. I didn’t have enough AoE attacks and couldn’t take them down fast enough. The little buggers move like greased lightning. We tried both one-person patrols (each of us) and both sticking by the henge, and it still didn’t help all that much.
Rrg. Hate that mission. That puts me 1 for 5, and if I never take it again it will be too soon, unless I’m on a sizeable enough team and/or one with a couple of Controllers.
So we ran off and beat up on mooses.
The other part of the frustration was … well … the sort of echo chamber out there. Very few people on my Global list were showing up as on. Only a couple of tells on CC. So either a lot of folks are running ghidden and silent, or what should have been a Big Night demonstrated how thin on the ground our particular CoX circle has become.
Bleah.
But we did get to beat up on mooses, which was nice.

I7 Release Notes

Massive set of release notes this time, not surprisingly. My commentary (on highly abridged notes):

Combined (CoH and CoV)
Known Issues
2. Recluse’s Victory signature heroes and villains give debt when they defeat characters. This has been acting to discourage characters under level 50 from fighting them. The debt will be removed in a future patch, and the Temporal Point reward for defeating them will be increased. Good to know.
4. Mastermind pets are not keeping names when defeated and re-summoned. Eek!
New PvP Zone – Recluse’s Victory
* A new high level PvP zone set in an alternate version of Atlas Park and open to players of Level 40+. I do have an interest in this, actually. We’ll have to see.
* Alternative ‘sally port’ exits are available in both Hero and Villain bases, to help alleviate front door camping. Each base has two doors near the temporal portal on the ground floor – in the Hero base they appear as manholes, in the Villain base they appear as sewer entrances. These are connected to 5 doors inside the zone, which will be randomly chosen each time a door is used. The outside doors are not guarded, so players use them their own risk. Clever idea. We’ll see how well it works.
PvP Zones
* In PvP zones, if a character is revived at the Hospital, they will respawn with 1 hit point and 1 endurance. This is to enforce a short delay on all characters before they can get back into battle. Not much of an issue to me, but … well, it seems annoying.
Powers – Players
* Modified PvE critter accuracy. Defense powers will now work equally well against critters, regardless if they have higher accuracy. For instance, your defense powers will work equally well against a Boss or any critter up to 5 levels higher than you, as it does for an equal level minion. Previously, a more accurate critter could circumvent much of your defense, but this will no longer happen. Yay! SR/FF characters of the world, rejoice! Heck, even tanks will welcome this.
o More accurate critters may have a greater chance at the extreme low end of the To Hit scale than previously due to this change. For instance, an Archvillain’s To Hit could previously be reduced (with enough Debuffs) to 5%, but will now have a 7.5% minimum. Interesting, though not that much a biggie.
* If a character is at 100% health, they cannot be reduced to 0 HP by a single application of damage. (For example, if an uninjured character with 1000 Hit Points was hit by a Blazing Bolt for 1500 Damage, the character would be dropped to 1 HP. As soon as the DoT portion of the Blazing Bolt ticked (a second later), the character would drop to 0 and be defeated. If the character was down even 1 Hit Point below maximum when the Blazing Bolt hit them, they would immediately be dropped to 0 and be defeated.) I understand the point of this, but, as the examples note, the actual application of it doesn’t seem to help that much. We’ll see.
* All powers which have an Endurance Drain component will now drain a percentage of a PvE target’s Endurance, rather than a set number of Endurance Points. This fixes the issues created when enemies’ Endurance Pools were increased. Yay.
* Origin Specific powers will no longer be lost after level 10. Characters who already lost these powers (or who never had these powers) will be granted these powers. People without ranged attacks will be happy about this.
* All Temporary Powers will now show duration or charges in their info. Ah! Great Quality-of-Life thing.
* Powers that put you into a self-contained state (Rest, Phase Shift, PFF, Invisibility, etc) now display “Only Affecting Self” in the mez state text below the buff bar. Nice.
* Stealth and Phase Shift Powers will suppress (for self buffs or toggles) or cancel (for external buffs) when a player interacts with Interactive Objects, such as Plaques or Mission Objective Objects. Suppression of this type has a duration of 10 seconds. This makes a great deal of sense, even if it makes stealthing missions a lot harder.
* The Claws Power sets for both Scrappers and Stalkers have new animations for the powers Swipe and Strike. The animation for Slash has been replaced with the old Strike animation in order to better match the activation, recharge and damage values. Yay!
* Reduced End costs on Claws high level powers. Yay! I might have to rebuild ol’ Selene again.
* Fiery Aura/Healing Flames activation time reduced. Yay!
* Energy and Ranged Defense will now apply to Pool/Teleportation/Teleport Foe.
* Negative Energy and Ranged Defense will now apply to Warshade/Starless Step.
* Resistance Inspirations (the Sturdy Line) now offer 100% resistance to Teleport. This will not prevent a player from teleporting themselves, it only applies to Teleport Foe, Wormhole and related powers. These are evidently all PvP-driven. Yay.
* Confuse has had the delay after animation removed. Yay!
* Modified sprint fx to only play while running. Not Flying. Not swimming. Not jumping. Just running on the ground. Big yay!
Powers – Critters
* Arch Villains/Heroes and Giant Monsters have been significantly boosted. They should now require more people in order for them to be defeated, especially at higher levels. That should be … interesting.
* AVs/Heroes and Giant Monsters now ignore threat level damage multipliers for different Archetypes. They are still affected by Taunt as before. Not sure I follow this, but, okay.
Bases
* Several new Storage items are available that allow you to store various items in your base:
o Inspiration Receptacle: This item allows all members of the Supergroup to store Inspirations that they may not be using, but other members can use to greater benefit. A permission set in the SG Permissions allows a character to withdraw Inspirations from the Receptacle.
o Enhancement Container: This item allows all members of the Supergroup to store Enhancements in the Supergroup’s base. Members with the proper SG Permission will be able to withdraw Enhancements from the Container.
o Salvage Bin: This item allows all members of the Supergroup to store salvage in the Supergroup’s base. Members with the proper SG Permission will be able to withdraw Salvage (and just ‘see’ it from the base’s worktables as well).
We’ll have to see about this. I’m not sure it’s going to be all that useful, except for the Salvage Bin. Well, I can see dropping off Enhancements while back at the base after dying mid-mission.
* SG Logo Items: Numerous items can now be placed in your base that will display your Super Group’s logo, including banners, stands, floor plates and more. Oooooh.
Tasks
* Changed the parameters for when an AV/Hero will spawn in a mission:
Reputation/Notoriety Level 1: AV/Hero will spawn at team size 6 or greater.
Reputation/Notoriety Level 2: AV/Hero will spawn at team size 5 or greater.
Reputation/Notoriety Level 3: AV/Hero will spawn at team size 4 or greater.
Reputation/Notoriety Level 4: AV/Hero will spawn at team size 3 or greater.
Reputation/Notoriety Level 5: AV/Hero will spawn at team size 1 or greater.
* AV/Heroes will spawn at Elite Boss level if it is below the threshold needed to spawn them.
Good to know, and, especially with the new, nastier AVs, good to be able to go for.
Tailor
* Players with combined City of Heroes and City of Villains accounts now have access to all costume pieces (Hero and Villain) for their characters. YAY!
* New costume pieces added.
* Several costume pieces revamped and updated.
* Fixed many geometry and clipping issues with various costume pieces And, again, all with the YAY!
Badges
* Added many new badges to the game, Villains now have access to their very own Accolade badges as well, with equivalent powers to the Hero Accolades.
* Defeat Badges now require that you or your team do 10% or more damage to the entity to receive credit for the badge. (The former system required that you deal 25% or more damage to get credit). This is good, especially with the nastier AVs.
* All exploration badges now give a small amount of XP when you find them (based on your level). Excellent!
* Troll Task Force badge is now given out for spending time in The Hollows. Yay!
Graphics
* Changed the way the texture quality slider is interpreted:
o Very High: all textures at full resolution.
o High: texture dimensions capped at 256×256.
o Medium: texture dimensions capped at 128×128, all textures reduced by one mip level.
o Low: texture dimensions capped at 128×128, all textures reduced by two mip levels.
o Texture quality is now treated the same in CoH and CoV.
* Added new lower Shader Detail options to disable bumpmaps.
* Added new “recommended low-end” or “performance” option on the Graphics Quality slider that should set graphics detail levels to approximately CoH-launch values. All sounds good, especially that you can ratchet things back down if the newer graphics give you fits.
* The camera has been changed to be smoother and avoid ‘popping’ for small items – for example, a light pole between yourself and the camera should not jerk the camera forward now. Yay.
Quality of Life
* Several new options have been added to the display of Buff/Debuff icons in the Status Window (beneath the HP/END/XP bars), the Group Window and the Pet Window. The options for the different windows can be accessed either by right-clicking on an icon in the appropriate window, or from the ‘General’ tab of the in-game Options:
o Hide Auto Powers: The icons for ‘automatic’ powers (those that are always on) can be set to be displayed as usual or hidden.
o Disable Blinking: Set whether the icons for powers that are near the end of their duration should start blinking or not.
o Icon Stacking: Icons for multiple versions of the same power can be set to stack on top of other, to display a single icon with a number showing how many versions of the power are affecting you, or not to stack. All sound good. I think I saw the Icon Stacking working last night.
* In combat, attacks avoided due to Defense powers will now show text messages such as “Avoid!” or “Eluded!” instead of simple “Miss!” This sounds like it could be distracting, but I think it’s a good thing. But shouldn’t be in the same tense?
* A ‘Do Not Allow Invites’ option has been added to the Looking For Group flags. YAY!
* There is a new window that allows the searching of Global Chat channels. To access this window, right click the chat window and select “Channel Search”. You can search for channels with a certain name, the most active channels, or all channels you are a member of. From this window you can also set the channel description and MOTD. Not thrilling, but decent.
* Several new emotes have been added to the game. And they look like a hoot.
* If you receive a tell while AFK, an automatic reply will be sent to the tell sender with your AFK message. Excellent!
City of Heroes
Powers – Players
* Illusion Control/Deceive has had the long pause after cast removed. YAAAAAAAAYYYYY!!!
City Zones
* Spawns updated and adjusted in several city zones. Street encounters in lower level zones have more variety. Spiffy!
* Fixed delay when you click on helicopter pilot to zone from Kings Row to Warburg and back or Bloody Bay to Skyway and back. This seemed to already be working last night — much faster to zone (and a nice “please, feel free to board now” gesture from the pilot, too).
Badges
* The Task Force Commander badge is a new Accolade added for Heroes. For … leading TFs, I assume. Good. Not my cuppa, but a nice recognition for leadership. Heck, I wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of similar badge for time spent as team leader (boosted for team sizes).
Graphics
* Updated and improved many textures and visual effects throughout the game. I look forward to, ah, seeing it. Though I’m glad I’ll be able to ratchet stuff down again.
City of Villains
Mayhem Missions
* Mayhem missions allow villains to enter a large instanced outdoor mission map and create chaos. The eventual goal is to rob a bank – but there are lots of other things going on, too. Mayhem missions are set up for single players and teams. Extra mission time is awarded for destroying property and defeating police. Side missions that appear within the mission map award more extra time and other rewards. Nice.
* The old Heists (Bank and Casino) are now available as normal Newspaper missions. So are they not Heists any more?
Powers – Players
* Mastermind Bodyguards: You can set any Mastermind pet to Bodyguard by selecting the Defensive Stance and the Follow Orders. Your pets must be within Supremacy range for this function to work.
* Bodyguard Damage Mitigation: When set to Bodyguard mode, the Mastermind and his pets share damage from any attack that the Mastermind takes damage from. Each pet takes one ‘share’ of the damage, and the Mastermind himself takes two ‘shares’. This is in addition to any damage that the pets themselves might incur from Area attacks. Coolness.
* Decreased the recharge time for Mastermind Minion Henchmen summon powers.
* Increased the recharge time for Mastermind Boss Henchmen summon powers.
* Dramatically decreased the recharge time for Mastermind Second Tier Upgrade powers. All sounds good. The current delays had been madenning.
* Visual f/x for Brute Invulnerability powers changed. They are now darker and more villainous. Heh. That makes sense. Look forward to seeing how that works with Mr. Ravenous.
Overall, esp. on the CoH side, nothing dramatic, but lots of nice polishing. Spiffy!

I7 is live!

Nuff said.

Yes, it’s true – Issue 7 is being patched to live servers!
Everyone should get a free tailor token as the servers come back up for all your tailoring needs.
Free Respecs will be handed out this Thursday morning 6/8/06, during normal maintenance time. Free respecs do NOT stack, so if you have an old one use it or lose it!

Huzzah!

Quick bits

Getting back into the swing of things again, in between blogging and unpacking and cleaning.
Spent a good part of Sunday with Hildy and Torchy, pushing them up to 29. Yay. Got the Evil Plinth mission (both of us) in Croatoa, but we have Runes of Whozits, and we’ve levelled since we got it, so we’ll probably tackle it tonight.
Ran with the Hostess Heroes last night. Ho Ho was on without Peep for a while, as Margie had Real Work she had to do from home. And even after, we were both hopping on and off as we were watching after Kendall and Tyler who were playing and eating with Katherine while their folks were packing for their long trip to North Carolina.
First part of the evening was in Bloody Bay, which was going pretty well and fun until a Villain decided to both start gacking people around the pillboxes and stealing their meteorite ore. Bleah. So not into that sort of PvP. We left shortly thereafter.
Rest of the time was fighting red-orange (to me) nasties in Striga, where I levelled. Yay!

Hiatus

We’re off to Walt Disney World for the next week, so no CoX, and no Blog of Heroes, until next weekend at the soonest.
If you’re just dying for content, my regular blog will have both remotely-posted photos and pre-set posts going up on it all week, so you can get your ***Dave fix.
Until then — be safe, Alliance heroes! And don’t start I7 without us!

You can have it fast, or you can have it right …

… because, damn, you’re already getting it cheap.
I7 will not roll before the end of the month.
And that’s the right answer, folks, because I’d rather it go live with the bugs shaken out, rather than deal with problems, frustrations, gnashing of teeth, and emergency patches.
And I’m not saying that just because I’m going to be on vacation. Really.

Chatting with Positron

Mark Miller has been announced as the new lead developer for CoX. Here’s a nice interview with him. A few excerpts:

In the next update, Issue 8, we will have a new system that gives us the ability to make your level 50 characters better. That means we’ve abandoned the idea of raising the level cap to 60 for now and instead will give you the option to make your level 50s better, then better again and then even better. That process will last a lot longer than additional 10 levels, which just create a new problem: What to do after hitting level 60?

Nice. It keeps the “Hero of the City” title from being devalued, but actually gives you some non-exemplar, non-cleanup stuff to do with your 50s.

Why are you raising the difficulty of archvillains and monsters?
Well, monsters were supposed to get an entire zone buzzing. Instead they are currently treated like secrets. If a group spots a monster, they take it down themselves before someone else notices it. Archvillains were not enough of a challenge, but we are still looking very closely at them on our test server to make sure they don’t get too tough.

Hmmm. So what they really want is “Oh my God, Lusca!” and get everyone in the zone coming that direction. It might be interesting if they could sort of dynamically scale it (above a certain level) based on the availability of heroes in zone. I know they’re spreading the wealth re monster rewards, but it needs to be spread even further — if you participate (and run a risk), you should get something for it.

We’ll have veteran rewards, which you’ll get every three months of payment and I’d like to stress here that the three months don’t have to be continuous. There’ll be lots of fan requested items and I can tell you that a trench coats costume option will be the first reward that we’ll hand out. The rewards are account based, thus players won’t have to decide which character they want to use them on. Some of the other ideas we’re toying with are base items, free respecs and temporal powers. There’s even a chance we’ll see the beloved Christmas jet pack again. An expanded version of the Halloween event will also open this year giving newer players are chance of getting those cool badges.

Again, nice. You want something that people will value, and that can be achieved, but not something that dramatically affects gameplay.
Trench coats …

The [planned retail] expansion will let heroes and villains team up against a common foe. It can be run from any of the games and there will be no extra subscription fee. It’s also build into the system of making better level 50 characters, however there is going to be content for all level ranges. There will also be a new power set for each of the existing archetypes including tanks and scrappers.

Again, thsi sounds good.

Issue 9 will include a rebuild of a couple of City of Heroes zones of which one is getting a major face lift. I can give you a hint though – it’s the one “we never play” (Faultline, -ed). We’ll also open a City of Heroes zone for villains.

Excellent.

What is the status of the option of transferring characters between servers?
That’s a thing we plan for Issue 8 or around that time. There will be a charge for the service, though – some kind of micro transaction. I don’t know the details but it’s because such a transfer is very taxing on the database servers, there’s certainly much more to a server transfer than you’d think.

Hu-freakin-zzah! Dearly love to be able to do that. And the micro-payment system makes sense — not so much because of the database transfer, I suspect, but because otherwise folks would do it a lot.
A few things confirmed not happening (or not happening soon): the archenemy system, and switching betwen hero-villain, and personal apartments. Which, frankly, is mostly okay (though the archenemy system, conceptually, is cool). I8 is scheduled for 3-4 months after I7 (since it’s not a technology change), so we’re talking September — I7 being predicted “before the end of May.”
(Hrm. Bad timing for us, vacation-wise.)
Lots more in the interview (as much as I quote). Good stuff.
(via Doyce)

If only I wanted to create a new SG

The origin story aside (and I find this 1888 encyclopedia entry about it very droll), I think it would rock to have a group named, “The Thundering Legion.” I mean, is that a name or is that a name?
Heck, now that I think of it, that whole Victorian Era sensibiliity about the name (rubbed off from the encyclopedia itself) might be the best thing about it. A displaced band of late 19th Century science heroes, sort of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen bit (Lady Photon, bless’er, writ large) …
Hmmmm ….

Feeling mainstreamish

Demographics on computer gaming from the Entertainment Software Association:

It turns out the age of the average gamer is 33 years old. 31 percent of gamers are under 18, 44 percent are between the ages of 18 and 49, and a surprising 25 percent are over 50! The average adult gamer has been playing computer or video games for 12 years, meaning that they got their start with Super Metroid and Final Fantasy VI on the SNES, and DOOM II and the original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans on the PC. Those of us who remember playing PONG are rarer, but we’re still out there!

Wow. Part of the plurality. Cool. I’d be curious to see the stats more specifically for CoX, but it’s nice to know that I’m not a completely aberrant freak or something.

As far as families go, 35 percent of American parents say they play computer and video games, and 80 percent of these play games with their children. 66 percent of gamer parents feel that playing games has brought their families closer together. The typical gamer parent is 37 years old. The study also indicates that parents are present 89 percent of the time when a game is rented or purchased for their children.

I will say that CoH has brought Margie and me closer. And if Katherine could play better, she’d be playing more with us (rather than just dabbling with it).
(via Les)