Arcanaville

Also, the exclamation mark should be at the end, and a comma put in its place. What a grammatical light-weight.

Hypothetically speaking, if I was trapped in a VR MMO and someone berated me for looking for alternate ways out, I'd probably kill them and then go back to looking for alternate ways out.

What happened on day one of the launch of Diablo 3? What has day one looked like for basically every triple-A MMO launched in the western world?

Even the non-crazy version of SAO promised to be an interesting day for the people who decided to donate their brains to the cause.

Another interesting thing to consider. Separate from Frigid Embrace getting the sustain effects (absorb, +recovery) its radius is also supposed to increase in I24. From 10 feet to either 20 feet or 30 feet, I forget which. But you are going to be debuffing more things with it over a larger area, and Chilling Embrace includes -DMG. It'll degrade with the purple patch of course, but it will be another tool to lower incoming damage if your playstyle is conducive to bringing the targets into that larger radius.

Lets eliminate the villain and try again. A company offers to provide a virtual reality experience no one has experienced before. There is no precedent for this experience. You're being asked to test it. There is no way to exit the game except through its virtual interface.

Bugs Cryptic/Paragon Studios have introduced into City of Heroes:

1. Missions with no lower geometry

2. Missions with no victory condition

3. Missions that cannot be exited without disconnection

4. Mapserver bugs that zone you to random instances with no running mission

5. Mapserver bugs that zone you into other players' missions

6. Game engine bugs that cause server-wide crashes

7. Bugs that scramble your avatar's data

8. Bugs that eliminate your ability to communicate with anyone else

9. Bugs that freeze your client indefinitely

10. Bugs that delete your character completely

Without a failsafe way to experience and exit the game, I wouldn't enter someone's virtual reality powerpoint presentation. A virtual reality game with even the theoretical capability of doing what SAO does, even if no one could figure out how to do it, would be one of the greatest evolution accelerators since the Black Death. Volunteering for SAO would be more insane than volunteering to be the first passengers to fly a pilotless commercial airliner powered by an autopilot running on the Sony Playstation Network.

The damage strength cap for Tankers is 4.0, or +3.0; what players normally call 400% or +300%. The damage cap for Blasters by comparison is 5.0, or +4.0, or +400%.

1.0 or 100% is base damage
0.95 or +95% is normally from slotting.
Double stacked rage for tankers at +80% per stack would be +160% for a total of +255% (capped to +300%) or 355% total damage (capped to 400% total).

That's +45% damage from the tanker cap.

The important thing to note about the "damage caps" is that in the actual game engine they are "damage strength caps." They are caps on the maximum strength that archetype is allowed to have per damage type. And the base value of strength for the damage types is 1.0, which means you do 1.0x your base damage. The best way to remember that base is 1.0 and not zero is to remember that the damage strength *floor* is 0.10 or 10%. Your damage cannot be debuffed lower than 10% of your base damage.

You're absolutely right. I'm embarrassed I didn't consider this earlier.


I forgot to estimate the time I've spent on the forums.

Estimated time spent on forums: ~3200 hours; 1.1 hours per day

Also, it occurs to me that all my saved threads over the years contain my post count at various moments in time. And that data can be plotted:



There's actually some interesting information encoded in that graph. For example, I can see the pseudo "break" I took between the middle of '08 and the beginning of '09 pretty clearly. I can see Hamidon (version 1.0) and City of Heroes Freedom as well.

If the anti-hero is a character portrayed as the protagonist of the story but has many aspects of traditional villains, its reasonable to look at the converse of the character portrayed as the antagonist that has many aspects of traditional heroes. Ozymandias could be termed an anti-villain in Watchmen in one sense. And there is a very sharp streak of anti-villain in Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs, where the audience is almost rooting for the character in spite of his obvious evil nature, particularly at the end.

The problem with questions like this is that they present real life as an extremely simple set of choices, when in reality you're never presented with such simple and direct choices. I don't believe in the no-win scenario. When presented with a choice to either exit the game and die, or stay in the game and kill, I will inevitably take the third option: frack with the game designer until he wishes the power would go out in my house.

Basically, I would take the Garibaldi option:

Virtual Reality.

Pumped directly into your brain.

From Japan.

You could argue the microwave brain fryer is the least dangerous part of this game.

The backstory there is that there was a thread a while back discussing what the "largest attack" in the game was, and I suggested that due to the odd mechanics of Steel Canyon building explosions, they hit with a huge multiple of the health of the target. So the largest single amount of damage you could see from an attack would probably be if the Kronos Titan were hit by an exploding building, as the highest health target you could reasonably drag to a Steel Canyon building.

And then someone from Protector said "we should do that" and I said if they did to send me a demorecord, and there it is.

Unfortunately, Steel Canyon explosions don't generate floating numbers. If they did, you'd have seen three ticks of about eight million points of damage each hitting the Kronos Titan.

I'll let you know as soon as I figure out how it might be possible to convince me to stick my head in a microwave controlled by a video game company while involuntary virtual reality is pumped into my brain from Japan.

Honestly Sword Art Online sounds like the best case scenario there.

Considering that Reeve's performance of Superman is probably the most beloved, and one of the most beloved of any comic book or superhero character, and that was true essentially from the movie's release, claiming his performance lacked charisma would be like saying James Earl Jones' voice acting of Darth Vader lacked depth. Its a ludicrous complaint.

You could at least claim Reeve's performance lacked subtlety, or it diverged from the comic books at the time, or it had some other technical flaw. But you can't claim the most popular Superman performance of all time lacked charisma unless you declared war on the English language and English lost.

You guys are too crazy for Captain Mako.

Usually, its staying in the game that does that.


Let my subscription lapse.

I actually intend to use my primary on my Sonic/MC. I'm mostly going to draw my pistols and then brawl things in the face with them on my DP/MC.

(Kidding. Mostly.)

That feature was removed in version 0.9 due to a high rate of customer complaints. It may have had something to do with the design of the hand.

That's a joke? I thought that was going to be my DB/MC.

Setting Sorceress Serene aside for now, I think that while the details of the question are obviously very complex, at its heart I think the answer to the question "what makes a good villain" is pretty simple. Its a villain we want to see more of.

90% of the time, we want to see more of a villain because they are interesting. Sometimes there's something about them we can relate to, something that provdes depth to the character, something that makes them seem if not real then at least real enough to connect with in some way:



Sometimes, they seem to personify a particular kind of evil distilled into its purest form:



Sometimes, they are interesting in an intangibly compelling way:




But generally, all of these kinds of villains share one common trait. Either we think we know them, or we want to know them. Now, that doesn't mean actually knowing more about them is a good thing. Hannibal Lector is the classic example of a villain we *want* to know, but its not good for us *to* know. But until we knew more, we wanted to.

As you say, some villains appear irredeemably annoying. But nothing is really irredeemable, its just that it can seem that way because our first impression of them is a character we don't *want* to know any more about.

I don't have a recipe for making characters interesting. I don't have the necessary and sufficient properties of an interesting character. But I do know that you are far more likely to hit the mark when you start by creating a real person, with real motivations, a real personality, and a real background. I've said before that I think much of the villain content is bad because I believe the writers don't believe in it. They don't really believe in villainy and they don't really respect villainy, so much of villain content is either pedantically bland or cartoonishly psychopathic.

You can't write a villain as a real character if you don't really believe in the character. If you're thinking to yourself "what do other people think evil looks like" instead of "if I were evil, what would I do" you'll generally end up with a cardboard cutout of a villain.

We don't know anything about the Joker. But I bet Heath Ledger did. I'll bet Ledger found a way to create the Joker in his head, as a man that had something happen to him that caused him to create and then inhabit the Joker. What that thing was, we'll never know. But I don't think Ledger was playing a man with no past. That's not a real person. I think he was playing a man who has deliberately destroyed his own past. And that's a real person.


I said 90% of the time villains that capture our attention are these complex interesting characters. 10% of the time:



Don't aim for that. Unless the stars align perfectly and you have the ghost of Raul Julia helping you, you're probably going to miss, and miss badly:




On a personal note, I think all of the villains on my personal list of best villains of all time share one additional trait. With one relatively small change, they could have been the hero.

Imagine if Magneto was on our side, or Hannibal Lector? They don't have to be redeemable or redeemed villains. You just have to wonder what if.

Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. Stratonexus will be joining you in the bullpen shortly.

Display List Interrupt graphics!

<---- ANTIC baby

Sorry, I didn't read past the second dot.

I would have liked a "stance" toggle as well, but to be honest if I made the stance toggle there would be no trivial way to work around the stance trade off, and I think the only times stance toggles are accepted is frankly when the players believe they can trivially work around the stance tradeoff.

The psychology of tradeoffs in City of Heroes requires that tradeoffs be covert in implementation, and consequently significant numerically. People think Hybrid is worse than it is and Build Up is better than it is. That distinction has to be understood into order to be properly manipulated.

That's how I interpreted that scene as well. Its clear from the very beginning and throughout the movies that Alfred's loyalty is to the Wayne family, and he still feels responsible to Bruce's parents to look out for Bruce.

I actually imagined that scene mirrored an unfilmed scene in Batman Begins where Alfred promised the Waynes he would look after Bruce for them.