UberGuy

I think the market forum name for what those people are accusing folks of should be a "flip-offer".

Definitely possible. Sadly, we really have no way to know. Most of our information is given to us either as in-game NPC dialog or as text from clues, some of which are also in-character dialog, but others of which are supposed to be written info or descriptions of seemingly factual findings. Only a small part of what we think of as game canon is given to us in what seems to me as honest-to-goodness omniscient third-person narrative.

Examples would be the info on the game website, like the "know your enemies stuff", and some of the in-interface descriptions like the origins and powers descriptions. We also have the stuff that Manticore told us in the canon clarification/Q&A thread.

We have to be careful, though. Which one is really "canon"? If we dislike the Origin of Power stuff, it's easy to use that as an excuse to dismiss it when it conflicts with other lore. But what's valid canon is assigned by fiat, not our preferences. The story devs might view Zenflower as the story anomaly, not what Brainstorm said.

Just because the NPC exists in contradiction to what another NPC said isn't clear proof that what the NPC said is supposed to be wrong. It's could be simple inconsistency by the writers/editors.

My point is really that we just don't know. Until someone comes along and gives us the skinny, we have to pick and choose based on our preferences.

Even "word of god" can be suspect. If I recall correctly, we were given "word of god" that Brainstorm knew what was going on as part of the promotional info for I9. That could mean his words are valid canon, or it could mean that we can't trust the "word of god" either.

It could, if people wanted it to. It wouldn't have to, though any more than Technology and Natural force someone like Green Arrow into one side or the other.

And being born on some other planet (where everyone has super powers relative to a human baseline) would fit in that.

Ditto. They could let people pick the little origin power they want if they went this route.

So...what about Incarnates?

That gets back to the core of what I said in my very first post in this thread. You're ignoring that, in the City universe, a Natural human being is able to find something in themselves that lets them do just that sort of absolutely inhumanly possible thing. What the Origin of Power mini-arc tells us is that, though it's a lot tougher, somehow, some people who ought to be completely physically incapable of that level of super human feat find a way to do it. They can punch a hole in giant robot or survive a salvo of rockets. How? Who knows! There's no "real" explanation for why someone with a mutant gene should be able to do something like that. It's pure suspension of disbelief.

No. Stop, right there. No, no, no, no. It does not cover Superboy. Superboy has his powers by birthright. If he never trained a day in his life he'd be able to fly and punch holes in walls (at least when under a yellow sun's effect). Think back to the original Superman movie, to the scene where the Kents find baby Kal-El in his meteor/spaceship. One of the first things he does on Earth as a tiny infant is lift their pickup truck over his head. He did not train to do that.

A lot of people would consider Punisher to be Natural origin. There's significant conceptual overlap in the Natural and Technology Origins, because we can get to levels of technology that people no longer consider "super". The Punisher is squarely in that area of overlap. Also, in City terms, he's probably a very low-level character, no matter which origin you put him in. I think it's fine that there would be overlap in the Natural and proposed Alien origins. It gives people flexability.

It's an aside, but Doom is really a mix of Technology and Magic that we have no way to replicate using CoH's Origin system. I get that you were likely focusing on his power armor, which I would agree is Technology (as far as I've read.)

Um. I don't think I know anyone who would agree they should share an origin if their origins were explained. Sorry, that just seems like a bad example to me.

You're playing word games there. I don't know anyone who knows what, say, the Marvel comics definition of "mutant" is in the X-Man sense who agrees that someone who takes a mutagen is a mutant in the X-Man sense. If you pick some Joe off the street who has no context, then yes, I agree they would see "mutant" and "mutagen" and be confused.

I agree on the God origin thing. Then again, based on the Incarnate lore we have (publicly, at least), we may be getting a God origin. I disagree on the robot thing. I do not see a "robot" origin as reasonable.

In order to qualify for the Natural Origin, you just need to have not done anything that makes your powers stem from any of the other origins. If your training included reading magical incantations that channeled extradimensional energy that a human would never otherwise have any way to channel, it's Magic. If you were bathed in Impossiblicide and it made you able to do this, it's Science. If you were born of human parents with no such gene, but ended up with a gene that unlocked this potential, you're a Mutant. And if you could only achieve it through what we'd consider modern technology, well, I think you get the idea.

I see none of those as bagging together "origins" that are so terribly conceptually unrelated as Karate Kid and Superboy. There are plenty of existing exemplars in fiction and comics to get psychic powers from the five existing origins (and an Alien one, if it was added). I don't see a lot of people twitching when told that the fundamental origin of a robot and a suit of power armor or a coating of sentient nanites are all something called "Technology". But in contrast, I think that anyone would look at you funny if you sat down and said that Superboy and Karate Kid (assuming they had any idea who the heck Karate Kid was) got their powers from the same place. They'd want you to explain that. They might buy into it, but I think many would not. I also think only the geekiest would bother to argue the point. And yes, I do understand what that means

Except I don't think it covers this case fine. And I think what you were doing there was a fallacious case of argumentum ad absurdum. That can be a valid way to argue a point, but I think you introduced a false dichotomy, because I don't think introducing the Alien origin would imply the popular demand for proliferation you suggest.

It really comes down to my earlier comments on having clear exemplars. Comics are full of examples of superhuman beings who are superhuman solely because they are aliens. The desire for distinction arises because CoH includes a category of superhuman beings that comics don't often - humans who transcend to superhuman abilities without tapping into any of the other origins (and, by definition, not being aliens).

No, I'm not.

Yes, it is.

This is simple logic, Sam. PCs and combat NPCs in this game are called meta human. It's a trademark-friendly version of the term "super human". There's a reason for that, and it's not simply semantic.

If we transplant all the original inhabitants of Krypton to an unpopulated Earth, they'd all have Superman's classic powers. While Kal-El might still manage to grow up to be a heroic person in such a world, and possibly develop into an excellent example of prime Kryptonian health, training and physique, he would not be "super" (or "meta") compared to his peers.

Superman or any comic superhero with true super powers has what we call "super powers" because they are doing things the vast majority of human people cannot do. If everyone could do them, there would be no need for super heroes, because the cops and army and everyone else would easily be on par. (Something they probably overdo a bit in the game, to be honest.) Someone like The Abomination would be a dime thug, because every cop on the beat would be able to go mano-a-mano with him.

Meta human nature is set relative the basis of human norms, even on Primal Earth, where it seems you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Meta. That's because it's a combat-centric video game, and they have to have a target rich environment for us. The canon is that most of the world's Metas were lost in the first Rikti War. It makes sense that this really hasn't changed in six years - we make new characters faster than new heroes would really appear.

Sam, I'm sorry, but at this point your argument earns a great big "DUH." I understand what the game says right now. My position is about whether I find that position satisfactory. I do not. Do not answer my dislike of the current canon with the canon. It's dumb.

No, frankly. I mostly get Science drops off of them.

Why would you think I would want that for you? Right now anyone who wants to can make a Mutant origin character and then fill out their backstory as a magic using cyborg. I don't care what you do with your own characters. I want an Alien origin for my characters. I don't see a problem with your existing characters having two places to be filed, and leaving the choice of which to use up to you. As long as they leave the existing description of "Natural" alone, you could continue to file your characters there. It's not like we don't have overlap today. A demonic Fire/Fire Scrapper can easily be filed as either Natural or Magical, and that doesn't cause grief.

I think they should, but I have no place enforcing that on you. I think it sucks that we have no choice but to categorize them that way, assuming we care at all about making backstories and canon mesh at all. I would like the canon to be expanded to offer a separate categorization. I realize that's such a minor thing to worry about that it's almost certainly never going to happen, even if the devs totally agreed with me. I'm discussing it because you started arguing with my statements about it and telling me I was wrong.

The difference, Sam, is I never said you were wrong to want aliens to be filed under natural. I just disagree with your opinion. I'm debating it with you because I think there are things in game that support my opinion.

I do, however, believe that there are simple facts that make you wrong in your assertions about how "meta human" applies (or in your view, does not apply) from a baseline human perspective. I actually think that's ridiculous. The game is about Earth. It's about a fantasy version of our earth with impossibly super beings people in it, but the baseline assumptions for the world as a whole are clearly about baseline humans. Metas are the exception in the world canon, not the rule. They just feel like the rule to us, because our characters are Metas, and they interact with other Metas constantly. The Rogue Isles and Praetoria are a lot closer to being Meta-centric, but that's because Metas are in charge - places like them are themselves exceptions in that sense. (Well, Praetoria is a whole world of its own, but its the exception relative to the original baseline of Primal Earth.)

The percent chance that CC will apply it's holds is separate from the % chance that it will hit. It has to hit first, then it rolls two chances to apply holds - one mag 2 and one mag 1.

Honestly, it sounds like Castle was answering whether or not accuracy would directly affect the chances for holds.

Does CC's hit chance show up in the tohit roll logs? If it does, this would be relatively easy to test.

Fair in that I should have said "it hasn't been the conventional wisdom for a very long time." I meant the "never" in the context of this conversation, but that wasn't at all clear.

Even before then, I still don't think I agree that the "common wisdom" was that you couldn't manipulate and make a profit, if for no other reason that I know I wasn't sure of that, but I won't say that it wasn't presented as common wisdom, because I honestly don't recall.

Again, perhaps you consider this a wholly academic distinction, but the things you just mentioned (decreased volatility or "insured" supply) are attributes ascribed to flipping, not explicit price manipulation. Price manipulation is explicitly intended to raise the price. Flipping, at its most general, is just an attempt to profit from volatility around an existing price range - if you see something selling both low and high, you try to buy the low-priced listings and sell at the high price.

There are two separate claims by the folks who, very broadly, are on the same side of the court as Nethergoat. I think that perhaps those claims become conflated. One is the above description of "pure" flipping, and the other is the claims about the risks and effort usually involved in profitable price manipulation of common salvage (especially high-level commons).

As often the case, I think part of this is that the people in this forum tend to have a very specific, sub-community-defined meaning for the word "flipper", while the folks making the "wild claims" just use that word to mean anyone who buys stuff on the market and sells it back looking for profit, no matter their methodology.

That's never been the conventional wisdom. Just about any time this topic gets any lengthy discussion, I try to mention that someone with a seemingly very firm grasp of "real world" economics tried this and showed it was possible. It took trial and error, and he eventually made a lot of money doing it with the right thing and the right time.

Doing this with Ceramic Armor Plates (or any high-level common tech salvage) would normally be incredibly risky. The supply rate on those is normally immense. When the rate of resupply on the market is high, the only way to reduce risk is to maintain a serious gap in the price you're paying to buy up the supply and the price you're selling at, and doing that leaves a ton of room for savvy buyers or other flippers to buy your stuff instead. If you don't do that, you end up paying ever-increasing prices in order to control the supply, which eats into your profits. The longer you try to control supply, the greater your risk that an escalating buy price will leave you in control of more stock than you sold at a point where you don't keep up with incoming supply by monitoring your bid stacks and keeping your buying pipelines full. If your bid pipelines stall, you cease to maintain a "corner" on supply, and you risk the going price falling back far enough that you can't move enough of what you've been buying to maintain a profit.

The lower the supply rate of something, the more likely you are to be able to stay on top of "cornering" supply, because it's less time and market slot intensive to manage the buying side of things. Even if other people get involved and start shrinking your profit margins through competition, a low supply rate means your bid pipelines probably never stall. You are in full control of when to bail out. It's not a guarantee you won't lose your shirt, but it makes it a whole lot less likely.

Of all the market items there are, I believe that high-level tech commons have a ratio of loss risk to labor investment so much larger than so many other ways to use the market to make money, it doesn't make sense for people to do it very often. That certainly doesn't mean it can't happen.

I'm sure we'd figure it out. I mean, come on, they paired Mutant and Magic together, for goodness sake. It's already clear to me that they kind of ran out of ideas there.

Clearly we need more alien opponents. Clarifying spoilers aside, it could be argued that Rikti would drop them, at least sometimes, but that would probably muddle the story of their true nature.

None of which lets most of us punch holes in cement walls, or emit fire or beams of energy from our hands. Not without resorting to tools (arguably technology) or modification of your body (arguably science).

For me, Origins aren't about having cleanly defined buckets in which to categorize people's powers, because fuzzing at the boundaries between origins is more the rule than the exception. For me, Origin definitions are more about having clear exemplars. Things like this.

Technology: Iron Man
Science: Spider Man (radioactive bite explanation), Fantastic Four, Hulk
Magic: Dr. Fate, Doctor Strange, probably Captain Marvel (DC)
Mutant: X-Men, particularly the ones who never had surgical/medical augmentation

Who are the sorts of exemplars we have in comics for "Natural" characters? While I think a lot of people could be talked into it, I don't think most folks would think of Superman or the Martian Manhunter here. If they can even think of an example quickly, most of them would be regular, if possibly well-trained and/or really smart humans. A possibly poor exemplar who comes up on the forums a lot is Batman. Most of the examples we'd come up with can't approach the levels superhuman achievement that the exemplars of the other four origins can. When they do hit superhuman levels, it's hard to find examples of them who don't do it by resorting to things that, arguably, belong in other origins. Batman, again, is a great example of this. For the "truly" natural humans, we have a few examples where they mange to compete with other-origin supers (some good examples were given in this thread) but they're pretty rare.

It's here that CoH as a game universe steps a bit outside the genre. Here, otherwise normal humans can learn to punch as hard as a Colossus, Hulk or Iron Man, unreservedly. I just think that says something worth of distinction from people who are, as a rule, able to do that "out of the box". It's purely a matter of the fiction in the sense that Origin is basically just a label we attach to our characters. Truthfully, I could care less what it would do to DOs, because it's kind of clear to me that they're not that well thought out anyway. I just like the idea of it better.

No, Sam, I'm not wrong. You're wrong for claiming it's even possible to be wrong on this topic. You go on to claim I'm wrong by claiming that I've based my wrongness on things actually said in the game, just because you don't like them and have other examples of contradictions, even though you have no evidence which contradictions are right. There are only contradictions which support either of our claims - none are proof.

I do not think I could have written the post you responded to in a way that made more clear that it was about opinion. I stated more than once that there's technical validity to classifying alien powers as "Natural", exactly for reasons like what you bothered to post an image of. (The posting of which, I might add, was needless given my granting of that point, but which also failed to actually rebut several other things I actually said.) I addressed that and moved on to why I feel classifying Aliens with Natural meta humans that is not satisfactory. My opinion about the validity and desirability of an Alien origin is most certainly not wrong. You don't get to tell me that what I would prefer about a non-balance element of the game's backstory is wrong, just because you don't prefer it.

I consider lacking an Alien origin adequate but not desirable. Just because we can lump aliens into a natural origin doesn't mean, for me, that we should. I believe that the origins should reflect a more human-centric view on origins of power, because I like the idea of that. It's fine that you don't, but don't try to tell me I'm wrong for feeling so. Because you'd be wrong to do so.

You do have to be a little careful with that analysis. If the per attack damage is truly middle of the road (meaning its attacks deal something near mathematical average damage compared to other sets), but the animation times tend to be as long or longer than other sets, then that's going to make the set deal lower than average damage over time.

Damage over time can be an important performance metric, at least for solo or small team play, where the DP character's damage contribution is a large part of the total. Your short-term damage rate over time is, of course, very important to lone Blasters because defeating stuff sufficiently fast is a huge part of staying alive. But there's a longer view where it translates directly into things like how fast you progress through missions, or how fast you level.

I don't get the sense that DP's performance is such that it's actively bad to play. It's not so slow at killing stuff that it can't solo, or that the general population is giving up on leveling it. Instead, I am betting some of the "complaints" about it are more about it not being as capable of soloing (at some personal standard of speed/success) on as high an elevated difficulty settings as some older sets. It's not so much that DP doesn't work, as that it may not work as well. On the internet and on-line games, that kind of thing often gets turned into binary statements about suitability.

It's true that every set can't be above average on any given metric, such as DPS. But it is possible in a game like this for sets with, say, average (or lower) DPS to shine in other areas. Despite, or perhaps because of its flexibility, it's hard to say what DP shines at other than looking good. And to be honest, looking good has carried the set what I consider to be surprisingly far.

Actually, he now works for Cryptic.

I think it's blindingly obvious what would go in there: beings who aren't from Earth. Everything in CoH is centered around how powerful characters are relative to a human norm. After all, the term is "meta-human". Yes, it's technically valid to say an alien mutant should be classified as mutant origin*. But honestly, how often does that come up in the genre? Unless it's particularly relevant to a plot, a mutant alien is, most likely just classified as an alien. (Plenty of aliens have unusual powers for their species that a pretty much never explained at all.) In contrast, Marvel's "mutants", just one clear exemplar of the mutant origin, are clearly mutant humans.

As I pointed out in an earlier post above, there's often a radical difference in fiction between a baseline alien and a baseline human. In CoH, we can have otherwise baseline humans, who through nothing more than sheer tenacity, will and introspection learned to do things like fly, control fire, or shatter trucks with their bare hands. To lump such a human being in the same category as an alien being who can do the same things because every member of their race is born able to do that with no little or effort seems to clearly gloss over the human's achievement. Lumping them all in the same bag is technically valid but, for some of us, conceptually dissatisfying. That's what the "Alien" origin would be good for - a category defined in a human-centric context for distinguishing ridiculously extraordinary humans from non-human beings who, often, are fairly representative members of their own race. See: Peacebringers.

* Edit: Actually, it dawns on me that the game's definition of the Mutant Origin, as given in the Origin of Power missions, is defined in a rather (Primal) Earth-specific (and thus, probably human-centric) way. In specific, we're told that the Mutant Origin was undocumented before the first atomic weapons were used on Primal Earth.

I think it's that you can't buy anything over your level, period. This would keep it in line with how we used to get pool C and D things as drops.

I could be misremembering. It's been a while since I tried that.

That's probably got something to do with how they have the cookie domain defined. They've mapped the cookie to the fully qualified name "boards.cityofheroes.com", so your browser won't send that host the info in your cookie for the boards, because the host's name doesn't match. If it can't access the cookie, it can't read your session information, so it thinks you're not logged in.

I used it not as an actual explanation for Natural Origin power, but as an image that a lot of people would likely get. You aren't just really good, you're "over 9000" good. If you think about my follow-up post, most of the main DBZ characters are bad examples of my own idea of what this means for humans, because part of their power actually derives from an alien heritage. (Of course, it turns out they're "Just That Good" on top of that, which never hurts.)

A number of my characters have Crouching Tiger style abilities as their explanation for Super Jump.