Happily Married, here.
Just thought I would share this:
So last night, I had a dream of playing a Superhero MMO with my wife, Blissfully Wed. We encountered a super-villain named the Hacker. While in glorious battle, I began getting pop-ups of a risque variety. Angrily slamming my keyboard over and over again, the pop-ups kept hitting my screen. Come to find out, that is the Super-villain's crowd control power. I woke and told my wife. She said that I needed to let you guys know.
—
Marriage is work. Anyone tells you otherwise is selling something.
What he didn't tell you, is that I was mad at him in the dream for getting popups of the "Just WHAT have you been looking at?" variety. What I thought was hilarious was that the in-game super-villain, Hacker, effectively used real life wife-aggro as a control power to stop the Tank from tanking.
And I also wondered if something like Hacker's control power (screen spam, not necessarily risqué popups) has ever been done in a game before, where the Player is wondering what the heck is going on.
"Why clean the house when you can be saving the WORLD?!?" ~Justice Wraith
It's an interesting idea to use "pop-ups" as a control power effect against human players. You'd have to do it in a way that it was completely and totally obvious that it was an effect being generated by the graphics in the game and not have it look anything like "actual" pop-up windows you might see with a real-life web browser. Also any "game effect" like that could not be accidentally confused with something like a hardware failure of your video monitor. This reminds me of that scene from the Andy Kaufman "Man on the Moon" movie where he messed with people's TVs:
[youtube=500x300]8aUGmABfeR8[/youtube]
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Easiest way I can think of implementing such a game mechanical feature would be to have every PC+NPC within the area of effect have a local /say comment queued up that ONLY appears on the affected PC's screen (so no one else gets the comment spam on their client(s)). Then just have the game run through the comments on a delay (1-2 seconds between comments) so that they don't all land at once and create an all too obvious noise pattern.
After that, it's just a matter of writing up a list of MadLibs "fill in the blank" comments to toss out which only the affected PC will see ... and you've got your "wait, WHAT are they saying about me?!?" power effect.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Perhaps in the spirit of being a "comic book" game these "crowd control pop-ups" could look like a bunch of Adam West Batman styled "word bubbles" like the following examples that could be spammed all over the screen:
[img=400x400]https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSiluxeTHI0TSpc41a22_YurwjGpvXQuSXq6y6ASYojjlC4K3kH[/img]
This idea is actually not too different from a mechanic that Fallout 76 is currently using with its Robobrains. Those critters have a "smoke screen" that they can throw out that literally obscures them and makes it hard to target them. I could see something like this in CoT serving as a means to make it hard to target through all the annoying chatter bubbles.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I was thinking something like Mario Cart's squid ink or a lot of games where you get injured and the screen turns redder and redder. I just thought it was hilarious and a genious idea. You could be working for a Hero against cyber-crime.
Marriage is work. Anyone tells you otherwise is selling something.
I'd play that villain.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
The hero organization is called "The IT Department ". They villain group is called "Malware". Addblocker, Cat5, Bytz, and Codename Steve are the members that need your help.
Edit: I miss Mission Architect.
Marriage is work. Anyone tells you otherwise is selling something.
My wife and I played CoH together, and my son literally grew up on the game. And we will play CoT together one day. I've had several dreams about CoT finally coming out and playing it--but none that funny :P.
There used to be a lot of ingame jokes about lag controllers.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
My wife played a Stone/Energy Tank in CoH and I played a Claws/Super Reflexes Scrapper. The only time my wife got mad at me was when I stole all her aggro...or killed all the MOBs...or when I'd super speed off and brought all the mobs to her. Soooo...I guess she was always mad at me. :)
Typical [url=https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Scrapperlock]Scrapperlock[/url] mentality.
Although to be totally fair, I'd pull the same kind of thing myself on my Ice/Ice/Arctic Tanker, Shirayukihime ... on Tanker Tuesdays ... on teams of 8 Tankers ... who couldn't pull aggro off me.
So even though we had 8 Tankers, all the other Tankers were just DPS. I even warned them ahead of time that I "inhaled aggro like a wind tunnel" and played my Tanker like a Brute, and none of them had seen anything like it before.
*I* was the Aggro Magnet ... and there was nothing they could do about it.
Ah ... good times ... *^_^*
I'll just let [url=http://web.archive.org/web/20120906055409/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=290005]Post 7[/url] on this page act as my receipt for my claim. ^_~
Hyperstrike's after action report (that I linked to) was posted 08-31-2010, 08:32 PM.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Redlynne, that link to the way-back-machine to the COH site hit me right in the feels! *sniffles* Pulling a zone of puppies into dumpsters and the device blasters' mines blowing the crap out of them and my job was to focus juggle stragglers for clean up. Oh, good times! Or teleportating foes into an Ice Tank huddle of 8 tanks in a PvP zone...priceless.