so many little things that bothered me, because I am not your answer

More griping from the disenchanted forest.

[Help] Thunderbeard: I have a dumb question. Is there an in-game guide or encyclopedia that can inform or remind us who various characters, factions, etc. are?
[Help] Desert Ichor: Hmmm...
[Help] Amazingly Lame: Wikipedia.org
[Help] Thunderbeard: I mean in-game, so I don't have to log out to be reminded of who/what the Rikti are, etc.
[Help] Desert Ichor: I don't believe there is ingame, But the Titan wiki......
[Help] GodIike: wiki.cohtitan.com
[Help] Dragon Blessed: Another one is Paragon.wiki.com I believe
[Help] Desert Ichor: Paragon.wiki was the one with malware Dx)
[Help] GodIike: paragon wiki isn't being actively updated anymore I don't think

Not at this point, but there's also a specific City of Heroes wiki internally hosted by NCSoft, as well.

[Help] Thunderbeard: Right, I mean something in-game...
[Help] Desert Ichor: Then nope....
[Help] GodIike: you don't need to log out, just alt+tab
[Help] Desert Ichor: Unless you read What the contacts actually say...

A not-so-subtle jab at reminding Thunderbeard that much of the in-game information on the various gangs, groups, aliens, mystic powers, and zones come from NPCs and mission texts.

[Help] Night Lioness: the only thing i can think of ingame that is close to that is if u read the various clues when u go thru mish arcs, and if u can remember all those facts

As Night Lioness reinforced in this next line.

[Help] Thunderbeard: Whenever I opened a browser in WoW things would tend to crash...
[Help] GodIike: WoW is trash. CoH isn't.

And there it is. Listen, I profoundly disapprove of WoW on a lot of levels, but as a game itself I have never objected to it. The cultlike behavior of some adherents, the insistence that if I game, then I need a WoW account, is irritating to me, and I also blame Blizzard as a company for taking Diablo I and Diablo II--good, strong, dystopian games of sacrifice and challenge--and making them into DiabloWoW for the third iteration.

I think the thing I most blame on WoW is the proliferation of "toon" as a reference for in-game characters. In Runes of Magic, they were dolls, not "toons". In Second Life, they're avatars, not "toons". In City of Heroes, they're heroes, villains, alts or characters--again, not "toons".

How'ver, even with all my open contempt for WoW and for Blizzard's manipulative Diablo destruction, I wouldn't call the game itself trash. A lot of people like it, a lot of people still pay subscriptions, and go to the conventions, and make other media centered on WoW. Even though they've lost over a million players in the last quarter, weirdly they've lost them to Diablo III, so it's all still funds coming into Blizzard, itself. It is, by any standard definition, still a successful game.

[Help] Thunderbeard: Hey, I like WoW. But my computer isn't omnipotent in terms of running too many programs or windows at once.
[Help] Desert Ichor: In CoH it just lags a little.. or in my case epicly.
[Help] GodIike: WoW is where former AOL users get stuffed when everyone gets fed up with them.

And note the name--it's not "Godlike", which comes up later in the chat I'm excerpting here. It's actually "GodIike"--I guess the closest approximation to pronunciation, according to the spelling, would be "Gahd-Eye-Ike". He has enough limits on his imagination that he refuses to change "Godlike" into something else that's a near approximation, so he decides to misspell it deliberately so that, if we squint, we might see it as the "Godlike" he wants it to be?
Really?

[Help] Thunderbeard: That's not nice. I like WoW and CoH.
[Help] Arbiter Smythe: Godlike you're without a doubt a complete neckbeard take your hate elsewhere no one cares

Yeah, I had to look this one up. That's actually a pretty devastating insult, all things considered.

[Help] Imperial Templar: Now that's we've compared our E-Peenz, let's play some CoH.....
[Help] GodIike: it's not hate. just fact.
[Help] Thunderbeard: No, it's being rude to other players.
[Help] Arbiter Smythe: No it's pointless unwarrented hate
[Help] GodIike: when AOLers get tossed, and miss landing in the woodchipper, WoW is where they end up.

And yes, I have also made jests at AOL's expense, but those same jests can be made towards Hotmail users (those that spam, anyway), Gmail users (again, those that spam) and gold spammers in any MMO game at large (and City of Heroes has 'em too). (Also of morbid amusement: "gold spammer" was a term originated in WoW, and that term's gone global, too.)

[Help] komodai: just ignore him, it's going to end up gumming up help channel
[Help] Arbiter Smythe: Oh yeah ignore that's where morons go, I forgot sorry fixing that problem now

Indeed.

For reasons I can't adequately figure out, there's a LOT of WoW hatred in City of Heroes. Not just dislike, or to make this personal, not just my hard-coded twitch against the "toons" references--that proliferate through a lot of online games, not just WoW--but active, acid-spewing hate. What I can't figure out is why.

Seriously, think about it--WoW's main competition are similiarly-designed fantasy games: so things like Runes of Magic, TERA, Diablo III and similar console games, those are the ones directly abutting WoW's market share. City of Heroes is anything but fantasy-based, and so far, City of Heroes' only real competition is from Champions Online and DCUO--both superhero/supervillain-based games. So why all the hatred directed towards WoW? Don't like WoW, don't play it. And hey, if you're in City of Heroes, guess what--you're not playing WoW, are you?

It's a perpetual confusion, but this bit (from a much longer, rambling conversation) painted the controversy in exacerbatingly vivid colors. But making it brighter didn't make it any easier to understand.