Good post, and what I was thinking as I read a lot of the responses. "Toughen up fatass" or embarrassment is really only effective when I give a shit about the person that's talking to me. When some internet tough guy or a random person on the street says it, that's just encouragement to hole myself up in my apartment and order something terrible instead of going out, getting some exercise, and buying some decent food from the store.

I don't blame anyone for my obesity, it's something I'm in complete control of, but it's not at all as difficult for everyone. I grew up in a house with incredibly poor eating habits where I was encouraged to eat as a reward and an emotional crutch. Despite that, when I had the prospect of a girlfriend or close friends interested in getting outdoors, I found it easy to eat healthy and get exercise. Now it's been years immersed in my work and then shuffling back to my apartment at night, and it's a huge uphill battle that's going to involve a complete lifestyle change. I have trouble approaching girls, hitting the gym, getting outdoors with friends because I am too embarrassed, not the contrary.

Anyway I'm not trying to whine, it is entirely my fault, just pointing out that it's a problem that snowballs harder and harder. The perspective of someone that's 200 lbs is not quite the same as the 250 and 300+ lb people that we like to have a laugh at, and just telling us to get over it because it's easy is useless. For my part I've been comfortable giving talks to audiences with hundreds of people since I was a kid, but I quickly learned that telling shy people just to tough up and get over it, or even mock them for their timidity, is a great way to ensure they never actually try.

I dunno about that, the vast majority of people I've met in WoW have been more interested in tooling around on new characters, running their buddies through low level instances, etc. In EQ2 pretty much the same. You might surround yourself with the hardcore as I did but that does not mean that their dollar is the only one that counts or even the major source of income.

CoH is actually a game designed around that entire philosophy. You can do most of the "end game" content by level 35, the "gear" you can earn just promotes you to being a god instead of the demi-god status you get for free, you can sidekick your buddies to the max level and play with them right out of the box... essentially the stuff that you grind is just thrown in there to give people something to grind, for people that literally want to be able to go AFK while soloing all but one or two of the hardest enemies in the game.

Their big problem is actually people will grind compulsively in a game that has no rewards for grinding and end up burning themselves out.

Maybe if you have a certain mindset, I dunno. Personally I feel if you stripped out heroic instances and raid instances, had the entire game take place on Kalimdor, and had regular instances be all herds of solo mobs standing around with a no-strategy tank-and-spank elite sitting at the end you'd have a fair approximation of the content in the entire CoH game. What makes even Scarlet Monastery, Strat, Mauridon, etc worse than Abandoned Warehouse with Generic Hero at the end?

The actual gameplay is pretty different though and CoH has some nice quality of life stuff.

I can easily see it happening when you have someone who's just not as in touch with modern technology or as big a consumer of copyrighted material as most of us. America is a huge producer of intellectual property and you can paint it as protecting our interests.

We have a different perspective and there may well be some payola involved at the end of the day but someone might agree to it without being a lapdog.

Sorry to break it to ya bud, but you're living a long-term-rent life inside a husk of a body that's currently decaying around you :P

Sometime around six or eight I realized I'd gone three books and couldn't iterate a single meaningful plot point. We go from killing big evil guys and fulfilling huge prophecies as the major moments in the books to... I dunno, weren't like two books driven by a bowl that controls the weather or some shit? We go from Thom, Moiraine and Lan to some random irritable old crone and some "knitting circle" crap? I really couldn't bring myself to care. I had already stopped reading the fifty page intros about nondescript shadowy figures that you'd need to make flowcharts and spend years poring over the texts to figure out who the hell they were.

I bought the remaining books out of dogged determination and was momentarily interested when he actually brought main characters together in a familiar location to do something interesting. Then he proceeded to write another book that had absolutely nothing to do with this big event. I don't think I did more than skim a couple pages from it.

Well that's a personal choice, people spend hours upon hours farming CoH for rare recipes or the merits to buy them with. The rewards system isn't much different in either game. They put carrots there for the OCD gamers. There's some badges that are almost as bad as the worst achievement grinds in WoW. The one advantage CoH does have is it's much easier to roll alts and get them into the meat of the game, you don't have to worry about gold for epic mounts since you just pick up a travel power, etc.

It's more a gameplay comment than just sheer amount. People are using WoW but it's the case in an increasing number of MMOs, when you walk into a boss fight you have to expect the unexpected. Dodge bombs they chuck at you or beams they shoot. Break teammates free of ice they're encased in. Dodge behind rocks or pillars to avoid getting hit with an attack. Dodge tail swipes and dragons breath. Cut teammates free before a sword impales them. Dodge a giant on a wyrm making passes at you down a hallway while you collect harpoons to fire at it and bring it to the ground. Ride your dragon allies into an aerial battle. In CoH it could be awesome because mobility is a huge part of the game, but it just doesn't happen. Every enemy comes down to (a) what damage type does it use and (b) does it drain endurance. The only thing needed to overcome any difficulty is enough purples or blues sitting in your tray.

Again I don't really mean to sound down on the game because I like it, there are just some things they could do that would make it a lot more fun. I think the city raids and the mayhem missions were the most entertaining concepts they've come up with. I hope there's more like it coming. It might be just a matter of money, I know they were on a skeleton team for a long time. It's still good for what it is.

If you read the missions there's quite a lot of interest going on, but I'll grant you WoW does take longer to get to some of the more interesting stuff. The blood elf and draenei starting areas are the equivalent of the Hollows, newer content that's more interesting on the whole. But would you really say running missions in AP, Galaxy City, Kings Row, Positron TF, all of that is very interesting? Kill _____ for lost magical artifact describes, kill clockworks that have abducted ___ for whatever reason, etc. Even the Hollows is just a missing kid against the backdrop of a gang war. The cool stuff is the Rikti War Zone and the city invasion events, Cimerora, to some extent the praetorians... there's just not a hell of a lot of it.

The newer solo content they're working on in WoW is blowing my mind though. It's really the most engaging MMO experience I've ever had. You ride on dragons, dress up in hilarious costumes to infiltrate enemy groups, work for the fanatical game equivalent of PETA, use harpoon guns to bring down drakes so you can attack them, throw fire bombs off the back of a horse being chased through the woods by werewolves... seemingly every questline ends with something that has me grinning ear to ear. One of the free patches they added a fully fledged jousting system complete with the ability to duel other players and a quest camp where you take up arms for one of the cities.

As far as gameplay mechanics, there's powersets like SS/WP that I set to the fourth level of difficulty on Mercy Island and there's powersets where you wheeze through the first 20 levels no matter what you do. My Grav/Psi is still fairly awful in the mid-twenties and my TA/Dark was barely worth bringing along on a team until 20 and couldn't defend worth shit until the mid-twenties somewhere. CoH long ago abandoned balance in favor of fun, they need to work on making the beginning game fun for everyone.

My biggest problem with CoH is that you can say "this powerset combination doesn't really become fun until 20/30/40" for so many different ones. They really screwed up the low levels. I get that they want you to have progression but ideally you're having fun from the word go on a vast majority of characters. This is especially damning in a game whose high level content is essentially nonexistent. Actually it's even worse, since a large part of the endgame is exemplaring yourself into lower level content that you didn't complete and experiencing the pain of losing the powers that make it fun.

I like CoH but it is pretty anemic on content compared to other games, which is fine for what it is. It's about dinking around making new characters and then trying it all over again. But there is far more content in one expansion for the major MMO of your choice than in the entire Heroes game from start to finish, and it's not 900 different versions of the Tech building or the Office building with herds of enemies plopped in by the computer. Plus they still get pretty much the same amount of additional content patched in the interim.

The gameplay is a big draw for me. The one thing I wish they'd do is put in more bosses with interesting mechanics -- i.e. special attacks that require heroes to get out of the way, things like the Hollows trial where you need to split up to activate things simultaneously, etc. Apart from three or four fights in both sides of the entire game the deepest strategy is point the "boss" away from the rest of the team. In a game with as many mobility powers as CoH you can do sooo much better.

Damn, you're right, I forgot to carefully calculate my sense of humor to be highbrow enough to impress my friends but still lowbrow enough for street cred. Here I was just enjoying the comedy :(

And as it has been stated before, you CANNOT make the new WoW. Do you remember what WoW was like when it was launched? 2 days per week almost assured downtime. A good 30% of quests that either didn't work, weren't finishable under certain conditions or were simply impossible unless you were a specific class. And let's not start about balancing. A game that was started like this today would meet the bargain bin 2 months after release (at the same time, their servers are merged down to 4-6), and a year later it's closing time.

That's actually what I was just about to post. The uphill battle is not against WoW's customer base, but its years of polish. It didn't even have a raid UI at launch, it was a mess by the standard it now sets. There have been multiple games with competitive initial sales that become ghost towns in the second month because people aren't willing to put up with the growing pains when they have games like WoW, EQ2, CoH, etc that have had years to refine their product into playable form. I have a pretty large group of friends that have been playing since EQ and take a shot at almost every major release but always end up returning to other games pretty quickly for this reason.

It's a heavily romanticized version of their philosophy. The CEOs in Atlas Shrugged are the epitome of humanity and happen to provide the major innovation behind their companies in addition to being incredible managers. Before the big evil moustache-twirling government steps in, their goals are entirely centered around the long term success of their companies. When everyone else in the world manages to screw it all up, they take the ultimate ironic revenge by copying the insidious unions that had foiled them, going on strike and heading to a utopian valley where they can practice their philosophy in peace without the Man keeping them down. Naturally without the CEOs, the outside world goes down in flames. Ostensibly they emerge as saviors to restart society some years later.

Short of a catastrophe to shake up the populace, not much? We've stagnated too long and our quality of life is too good right now for people to really push for an overhaul in the government against the politicians' wills.