Some wonderful news in the world of comics: Peter David will be writing Spider-Man! Short of a revival of the Spider-Man 2099 book with Peter at the helm (or an ongoing solo Scarlet Spider title with PAD), this is the best comics-related news I could have read today! Woo-hoo!

Anyway, here’s this week’s list of comics:

• The New Avengers #5 (8/10)
• Batgirl #63 (6/10)
• Batman #639 (7/10)
• Catwoman #42 (6/10)
• Daredevil #72 (7/10)
• The Flash #221 (8/10)
• Legion of Super-Heroes #5 (8/10)
• Supreme Power #16 (9/10)
• Ultimate Secret #2 (10/10)
• Wonder Woman #215(8/10)

More …

I just got done explaining why people shouldn’t be so uptight about the problems with World of Warcraft, and here I am preparing to explain the improvements I’d make on the game.

If I were in a position to do so, I’d make the following suggestions. I don’t expect that any developer will ever read them, nor do I think they’d follow them if they did. I spent years and years playing console games (which can’t be patched, at least not easily), talking with my friends about features that would be cool. I have never really expected these types of things to be implemented, but they’re fun to think about.

• The Bounty System: Diablo II used to provide trophies for PVP action. I’d like to see us get similar trophies on here. If I kill someone named “Alliancejerk” I should get a unique, time-limited trophy called “Alliancejerk’s Ear.” In general, these trophies should be worthless, but there should be a way to put a bounty on someone from the opposing faction.

  What I’m thinking is that you’d set up a “Bounty office.” When a particular Alliance member has been a nuisance, I could put a small bounty on that person’s head (or ear, as it were), and possibly also define the number of times I want him killed (I could put a 1g bounty on him for one kill, or ten 10s bounties, for example.) The first person to bring in that person’s ear gets the money. Each town should, at least, have a poster saying who the ten or so “most wanted” are, and how much the total bounty is for them. It’s a PVP-based “Honor” system, because as you offend the opposing faction more and more, you would generate higher and higher bounties, causing people to go out of their way to hunt you down. Every tavern should also have a “rat”, someone who (for a small fee?) will let you use the “/who” query for the opposing faction, letting you know the name, level, class, and general location of an individual on the other side.

• The Honor System: Activate the dishonor system. Set it up so that getting more than X Dishonor points in, say, a week, will turn all the guards at Booty Bay, Gadgetzan, and Ratchet against you until the end of the next week. If you get 2X dishonor points, the cities where you’re seen in a friendly light have guards who turn against you. At 3x, the cities where you’re honored turn against you. At 4x, the cities where you have the next higher reputation turn against you. See the pattern?

  Similarly, at 1x, whatever price benefits you might have in a given city should be nullified. At 2x, you take a price hit that gets progressively worse as your dishonor grows.

  I’m aware that there will be those who think that it’s cool to be an outlaw and who will abuse the system in order to make themselves such — I’m okay with that. There are those who like to live outside the “system” in the real world, too. To help them make it “on their own,” there should be a few “outlaw” vendors set up that sell trade goods and who can repair items, but nothing else. If the outlaws need anvils and forges and the like, they can fight their way in to one.

• Making the Honor System Stick: Every individual in a guild has a banner under their name that proclaims their guild. Their actions reflect on not only them, but their guild. I propose that honor points belong to the individual, but dishonor is shared by all members of the guild. Guild officers should be able to see the honor/dishonor stats of everyone in their guild. (Or, maybe, all members should be able to see these stats.) Since bad actions on one person’s part would have bad effects on his friends, the guilds will, no doubt, provide peer pressure to force people to act honorably.

  Does anyone really think that “gankers” gang up on people or attack people much lower than them because they just get a perverse thrill from it? They do it because their friends encourage it — they laugh at it. While it’s true that honor, for a few people, is something that matters only because of how they feel about themselves, most people only care about honor as it affects their standing in society. The symbolic “standing” represented by the current honor system is nice, but society in the game isn’t just the NPCs, and making dishonor spread to the guild will make the honor system have more of an effect in the society as a whole.

• Fix Dispel: Dispel is a very useful ability, when I can use it. Like most spells and abilities, if I’ve got a valid target selected, it hits that target. If I don’t, I get a nice cursor that lets me select that target. The problem is, unlike most abilities, Dispel can be used on friends or foes. If I’m in a battle, the only way to use it on a friend is to target them, which interrupts my fighting. I’m a priest, so that’s not a huge deal, really. The bigger problem is when I want to dispel something on myself. I can’t target myself, so I have to untarget everything (because everything’s a valid target), click Dispel, then drag that cursor back up to click myself. Not a problem, if I ever want to dispel something when I’m not being attacked. If I get attacked, though, it auto-targets what hit me, and screws up my dispel.

  The best way to fix that, I think, is just to make the user always manually click the Dispel recipient, though there may be other ways.

I’m sure there are other things I’d like to see changed, but those are the biggest ones.