Fireheart wrote:

Agreed, it was bad, but I don't think I'd want to be able to put random links in there. How about if every character came with a page on the CoT website, which could be edited and embellished by the player? These pages would then come under CS/GM oversight. Then the character page could have some images.
Be Well!
Fireheart

Great idea. I don't know the costs of having an "official" CoT website that would store a page for every character, but just to flesh this out a bit:

What if you had a 1064(whatever) character text block that any other player could see by right-ckicking on you in-game. (Basically what CoH had, this was one of my favorite features) But at the bottom there was a link directly to your "official" CoT entry, that was created automatically with the character/account. This entry would, by default, have your name, a "mugshot", AT, Level, and the 1k blurb. (maybe some additional info; Quote, Battle Cry, others that aren't occurring to me right now) You could then go to this entry Out-of-Game and expand the write-up, add photos, links, etc.

I would think there would have to be some kind of storage limit on the Official Entry, but you could link out to your own website if you want to go beyond.

If we get the sliders I'm hoping for in the Character Creator, It's not too far a stretch to see the CC generating default vital statistics for us, based on our settings (Height, Weight, etc.) I expect we'd still want editing capability there so that we can reflect "super-dense" or "fairy weight" type numbers, but I'm not sure how that would be done, or even if it's necessary.

This would be a great addition IMHO. However, This would be something that would require oversight, and would therefore cost money. Unless you can find some volunteer trustees. I'd sign up for that.

WarBird wrote:

Fireheart wrote:
Agreed, it was bad, but I don't think I'd want to be able to put random links in there. How about if every character came with a page on the CoT website, which could be edited and embellished by the player? These pages would then come under CS/GM oversight. Then the character page could have some images.
Be Well!
Fireheart

Great idea. I don't know the costs of having an "official" CoT website that would store a page for every character, but just to flesh this out a bit:
What if you had a 1064(whatever) character text block that any other player could see by right-ckicking on you in-game. (Basically what CoH had, this was one of my favorite features) But at the bottom there was a link directly to your "official" CoT entry, that was created automatically with the character/account. This entry would, by default, have your name, a "mugshot", AT, Level, and the 1k blurb. (maybe some additional info; Quote, Battle Cry, others that aren't occurring to me right now) You could then go to this entry Out-of-Game and expand the write-up, add photos, links, etc.
I would think there would have to be some kind of storage limit on the Official Entry, but you could link out to your own website if you want to go beyond.
If we get the sliders I'm hoping for in the Character Creator, It's not too far a stretch to see the CC generating default vital statistics for us, based on our settings (Height, Weight, etc.) I expect we'd still want editing capability there so that we can reflect "super-dense" or "fairy weight" type numbers, but I'm not sure how that would be done, or even if it's necessary.
This would be a great addition IMHO. However, This would be something that would require oversight, and would therefore cost money. Unless you can find some volunteer trustees. I'd sign up for that.

In general this is a good idea. But like Fireheart said I don't think any "outside" links should be allowed because inevitably people would abuse that by dropping in links to all sorts of virus/scam/porn sites. Even letting us upload pics would be problematic for obvious reasons. As you say this would definitely require some policing or at least a very easy way to flag an entry for naughtiness.

I don't know that "Capebook" (great!) would take more policing than the Forums. I do think that it would be easier, having the hero-pages in a central location and format, than it would be, running through the databases that store the actual character-data. Maybe have a 'like' and 'report' button?

Then again, Titan Network had a lot of useful extra features... and isn't/wasn't Titan Network almost the same as MWM? So, some of those features could be integrated into the game, or just developed as officially unofficial add-ons.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Lothic wrote:

Brand X wrote:
Lothic wrote:
In general this is a good idea. But like Fireheart said I don't think any "outside" links should be allowed because inevitably people would abuse that by dropping in links to all sorts of virus/scam/porn sites. Even letting us upload pics would be problematic for obvious reasons. As you say this would definitely require some policing or at least a very easy way to flag an entry for naughtiness.

Which is why it's a bad idea. It goes along with why CoH was best without an official RP server. A good official RP server takes some additional staff to really make it official. Not to mention, there's just different ideas on the ideas of RP.
And allowing this would take lots of extra staff.

Eh, to be clear if there were no outside links/pics (as in "outside" the confines of the CoT managed bio website) I don't see that this would be any much harder to support or police than CoH's original in-game bio sheet. Links and pics could very easily be naughty, but I don't recall the Mods having a difficult time Mod-smacking a bunch of people for plain bio text.
The main advantage of this is to provide those people who always thought the CoH 1,024 character bio limit was too small a lot more room to write stuff without bogging down the main game servers with having to upload a whole bunch of text into a game GUI. Only the people who cared to read extended write-ups would ever have to click the button to access the bio website at all. And obviously such a bio website could have language filters to make policing it relatively easy.
As with most ideas like this I wouldn't be bothered if this "offline bio" thing wasn't implemented on Launch Day, but maybe it could added later on as a QoL feature.

You have a point. Though hopefully the mods aren't as anal about bios as they could be on CoH.

One of the City of Heroes Devs at one of the two Player Summits admitted to me that the user interface for City of Heroes was written in ... [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl]PERL[/url]. Lin Chiao Feng, who was party to the conversation heard this and pretty much had the necessary reaction for me.

The fact that the City of Heroes user interface handling was written in PERL basically meant they were using a system that practically maximized developer unfriendliness. Difficult to Modify just barely begins to hint at the barrel of pricklies this environment was like to make any changes in. Needless to say, this was why the Devs HATED ever having to do something that involved modifying UI elements to do new and different functions, because the operational UI was essentially a house of cards built on a pit filled with broken glass, and the only way to get into it to do anything was to jump off the high diving board and ... pray ... a lot ... and try not to scream when you hit bottom and slashed yourself to ribbons (while knocking over the house of cards).

So long as the City of Titans team can avoid making the same User Unfriendly mistake(s) in development, I think we ought to be okay ...