Samuel_Tow

You don't sound mean, but I cannot see where you're coming from. How can you claim the world of City of Heroes is unexplored, when it's supposed to be an analogue of our world, but with super powers? Yes, sure, not all places have been settled, and I'm sure there are at least a few places that have never been explored, but the WORLD itself is fully explored. There's no chance of walking over a mountain and suddenly seeing a massive, continent-spanning alien empire that somehow no-one knew about. It'd have to be HIDDEN, which defeats the purpose.

I'm also not sure how you can say events aren't directly affecting the world. Do you mean that nothing I write affects the actual in-game canon? If so, well, yes, obviously. But then what's the point of writing something if canon is going to contradict me? Because if I want to talk about the end of civilization as we know it, I either have re-write written canon (which I can't do) or use another world. I CAN make events that don't affect the world in any way that canon contradicts, yes. Invariably these are events on too small a scale to be interesting to me.

And, at the end of the day, it's not about carving a niche for myself. I didn't buy a super hero game to be carving a niche for myself where I don't disturb anyone else. That's what I do in my real life. I bought a super hero game to be a cool, important, world-affecting hero. Granted, no MMO will ever allow me to do that in practice, but I can at least write about it. And it is simply not interesting to me to explain how these supposedly huge, large-scale events manage to happen without catching the notice of any country in the world.

In fact, this is why I'm always bothered by teenage superhero shows to an extent. Let's take W.I.T.C.H., for instance. In order to preserve the premise, the five teenage Guardians of the Veil have to keep their identities a secret and fight war with a whole other dimension of monsters all by themselves, and with the help of a ragtag army of rebels armed with swords and bows. The rebels are helped by such advanced Earth technology as walkie talkies and fire extinguishers. Why not enlist the help of Earth's military, when it's blatantly obvious that modern military technology would annihilate bad guy Prince Phobos' entire army of vaguely threatening monsters? Well, because that would complicate the show too much, and introduce such things as politics, economics and military themes, which are both out of character for the show and uninteresting to the target audience.

On a modern Earth, it is impossible to make something large-scale enough to catch the interests of nations around the world, and yet still avoid involving these nations in it. You can kludge it with crappy explanations, but even then the best you can hope for is something underwhelming. I do NOT want to make my own version of the Rogue Isles, believe me. I don't like the version we have to begin with.

Actually, that's not a problem. That's half the fun Devising reasons why these otherwise embarrassingly powerful characters aren't as powerful sometimes takes quite a bit of thought, and the solutions to that problem are many. To be honest, though, the scope of our power at level 50 is pretty much enough that I can call it only one step removed from godlike, and that's usually enough for me. It's just a matter of explaining why that character isn't as powerful NOW.

Explaining why a such a character is a hero or a villain is typically even easier, because a character's personality as written and developed in their origin story will already have the justification for in it. If I know WHO this character is, deciding what their alignment will be is easy. Well, no harder than writing them in the first place, at any rate.

I guess it wasn't so much a problem as a worry that ignoring canon to such an extent and drawing so many characters from other places (hey, that's a good way to call them ) was unusual and maybe unreasonable. In retrospect, it's not a problem at all.

PNP games lack a graphic character creator and graphic battles with cool, flashy powers flying around while gangs of all kinds of enemies swarm around our heroes. Why bother play PNP games when I can simply write stories? I play this game for the ability to put stories into graphics, and so far it's the only one that allows me to do that in any meaningful way.

Even Champions Online and DC Universe Online don't seem to be shooting for as much arbitrary freedom.

No they're not. It's true that there are plenty of dump, simple guys, but it's not like there aren't plenty of shallow, stupid women out there, and not a whole lot less, either. There is a little pitfall when reviewing this perception, in that men remember interesting women more easily than we remember interesting men, and that women in fiction have generally been regarded differently from men, both positively and negatively. Even credible authors who try to get away from the notion that women are simple housewives whose only purpose in an action fiction is to be kidnapped and rescued, still end up treating them differently in the opposite direction.

There is this phenomenon that a woman in an otherwise all-man team will be generally smarter, cooler, more complicated and sometimes even stronger than her male counterparts, as an overcompensation used to avoid treading close to representing her in a sexist light. Which, admirable as that may be as a practice, creates the feeling that women are always smarter and more complicated than the male characters, who in turn are usually either too macho or too stupid. Because making a female character is, for many authors, a little bit more of an "important" event than creating a male one, these females tend to get SOMETHING remarkable and memorable about them, whereas men can easily be painted in as the jackass of the group with no redeeming qualities whatsoever and no-one bats an eye.

A well-written eccentric woman can indeed be endearing. But then, so can a well-written eccentric man, only those tend to receive less care in their eccentricity, making them just plain weird a lot of the time. But it's not at all difficult to make female characters at all weird and creepy, and all one has to do is have even just a cursory look through a few anime and manga works. Granted, the genre has a few weird guys, but when it comes to weird girls, they threw out the rule book, and the weirdness is just off the wall in places. Sometimes it's endearing, and at other times it's just plain wacked out.

And again, this comes down to how women are viewed differently from men by the actual audience, at least the male section of that audience. A woman, especially if she is pretty, can be endearing in the absence of just about anything else, whereas a man can pretty much almost never be endearing at all. So a man has to be made an interesting character on his own merits, or he falls short. A woman can often be made an interesting character solely based on her being a woman, but with a quirk. This isn't necessarily a difference between men and women, but rather a difference between how easy it is to write for men and women.

Now, I want to end on a small note. All of the above isn't to say men are better than women or women aren't good enough or anything else of this sort. What I want to say is that this notion that women are always better, smarter, cooler and more interesting is just as manufactured as the notion that they're weaker than men and always need to be rescued. It's a prejudice in either instance, and while it CAN produce interesting stories as a once-off, as a general principle it just limits characters down from what they could be. They are all people, and they can all be interesting as people, before we evaluate how interesting they are as men and women. It's down to how they are written, not what they are written as.

Hmm... You know... THAT IS COOL! And it hadn't even occurred to me. For some reason I'm constantly stuck in "alter entire powerset" mode because that's likely how I'd do my customization, but yes, changing powers like that would be really awesome. Taking Energy Blast and turning it into a combination of hand, eye and chest beams would make the set REALLY cool, just on its own merit. Energy Blast in particular tends to use all the same, or at least very similar animations to begin with, so something like that would increase customizability many times over. Think about it - how many unique animations do we really need for a "chest blast" style? Aside from one or two versions of "puff out chest" that can be cloned over all the Blast sets with different sprites (like a lot of the current animations are), what can you even IMAGINE there being in terms of animations, anyway?

Another interesting thing is the weird and wonderful combinations this could produce. For instance, look at how Fiery Melee is right now - you have punches, you have swords, and you have a fire breath attack. You could potentially make a LOT of powersets like that. Or, if you're one of the elemental weapons haters, make Fiery Melee NOT like that. The above-mentioned altering of Power Blast to come out of different body parts would actually make for a closer approximation of an Iron Man style power armour, as that would have an array of weapons to shoot out of, on the hands, chest, face and maybe even shoulders.

So, for that which is within the realms of POSSIBILITY, it has quite a bit of potential, at the very least. I wouldn't imagine they'd start building on power customization right after they put it in the game, obviously. If it were me, I'd let it simmer for a while to try and figure out how worthwhile of an investment if was, practically, before I engaged into expanding it. But, as a hope for the future, this has a LOT of potential.

What I meant was that was supposed to mean that the "cost" of an item shouldn't be viewed as something as simple as time or challenge or even ease. It's a combination of a lot of things, and isn't the same for each player. "Annoyance factor" is something that you cannot really measure, as some people get annoyed by certain things while others don't even notice them, and still others actually enjoy them. Simple example - spam e-mails. Some fly into a murderous rage when they get them. Some shrug their shoulders and delete them. I ENJOY getting them because I enjoy the act of reporting the people who send them. Spam-reporting 50 e-mails takes no more than a couple of minutes, but it makes me feel good at the end.

I'm not saying that players will police themselves, but I'm also saying that you can't artificially police them as you can't make content that is "worth" the same to everybody else. I'm also saying that people ought to look at WORTH more than they look at VALUE, because a lot of the really valuable items aren't actually worth it, especially if you value your time or your enjoyment. Since big rewards are apparently here to stay and big cost is needed to balance them, I'd say less NEED should be put on having them so people would be less likely to substitute value for actual worth. Or maybe I'm just wrong.

If you're already talking about over time, then we're using different terminology. A greater reward per unit of time is the value, a greater difficulty is the cost. A great value balanced by a great cost is just as worth as a low value balanced by a low cost. It's a question of where this balance is, but yes, everything should be WORTH the same. Keep in mind time is not the only COST of acquiring the item. Preparation, danger, penalty and so forth also are. Though, in the end, that still comes down to time.

I don't believe all activities should have the same rewards per unit of time, but that they should have the value of their rewards balanced by the cost of acquiring them. Whatever this cost may comprise of, it should never make people feel like if they should be doing a specific thing because it's the only thing that's worth it.


Here's the thing - you have no definition for what "challenge" means, and the way people at large tend to use it, it means exactly zilch. You can't say there is no increase in difficulty, but there is an increase in challenge, since challenge in context means the same thing, and outside of context means something that makes no sense in this context. If you're talking about "the price of admission," as it were, which is the TIME invested in planning a build and acquiring the resources to make it happen, then yes, that raises as you increase the difficulty. The mere fact that some people make that investment on their own as part of their status quo does not change the fact that, from the viewpoint of a non-optimising player, it IS extra time spent preparing for the earning of extra reward.

This is also where the annoyance factor comes in, which is probably the only other real balancing factor. However, that is effective only up to a certain point - can I bear to do this. How much less annoying than that an activity is doesn't matter, because it needs to be only as low as to allow people to participate in the activity. After that, reward per unit of time takes over. If something is so annoying that you have to try and die too many times, spend too much farming for the right build to tackle it, or plain build in a way you don't want to have to build your character, then that is still a part of the final cost. But that is, as I said, the price of admission. Having paid that, it IS all about time, and a lot of people have gotten used to paying it. Many have not, however.

Do you realise that this paragraph said exactly nothing? The solution you see is to re-examine the problem and find a solution. Well, I agree. And I don't mean to be a jerk here, please understand, but that's the problem I have with the entire tone of the thread. It states a lot of vague but true facts and does nothing with them.

Rikti Communications Officers are not challenging in ANY context, aside from scripted events with don't qualify. They are potentially dangerous, but even in their native environment, that potential is remote, making spawns that hold them easy, and the Rikti as a whole easier for it. Granted, Chief Mentalists balance that out, but still, Comm Officers themselves are never actually challenging. They give more experience of how they were set up historically.

Originally they gave regular minion experience and their summoned enemies gave experience, but people farmed the gates indefinitely. It costs less to fight an endless, slow stream of enemies than it does to run from spawn to spawn, and the reward is the same. So the spawned enemies were stripped of their reward, making them worthless and so something people don't want to allow to spawn (as it should be) and it was given to the gate itself. This only shifted the problem, because now people wanted to LET the Comm Officer spawn the portal for extra experience. It cost the same whether you let him or didn't, but letting him was more valuable. Because of that and another exploit, experience was stripped from the portal and given the the Comm Officer, and because all these reward-less enemies spawning was getting annoying, they were made into faux-lieutenants to ensure they spawned less often.

They're not dangerous, they're a kludge. Chief Mentalists are dangerous, because they have a lot of hit points, lots of resistances and some of the game's worst status effects, but even they are not equally dangerous to everyone. However, with that big sword and poorly-resisted psi damage, they still manage to be a meaningful threat to most people. Why Chief Mesmerists don't have improved rewards, though... Who knows? They suck MORE yet they're worth less than a fairly harmless Fake Nemesis. Why ARE those worth so much, anyway?

I'll spare you a repeat of my monologue on WORTH = VALUE - COST as I did this in the original post I made in this thread. Suffice it to say that any "drawback" an activity has contributes to its cost. It may cost time, it may cost effort, it may cost annoyance, it may cost discomfort, it may cost a lot of things, but all of these things together make up the item's final cost. The item's value, on the other hand, is comprised of the good things about this item. How much it will help the player, how much the player wants it, how rare it is (and therefore how fortunate the player is to have it) and so on. I'm talking about the final combination of these two, this "worth" of the item. I'm not saying an easy encounter should give the same reward as a hard encounter. Obviously, the hard encounter should give more. But because it's harder to win, it also costs more, so both are, theoretically, worth about the same.

If you're buying Alchemical Gold, it doesn't matter if you buy one for 50 000 two for 100 000, Alchemical Gold is still worth around 50 000. If you're questing for a guaranteed Mu Vestment, it doesn't matter if you do the TF that nets you one in half an hour, or the longer one that nets you two for two hours. They are both worth the same. If you're fighting an enemy with 100 hit points and 100 experience for reward, or you're fighting one with 1000 hit points and 1000 hit points of reward, they might still be worth the same. That would depend on the enemy. The point is that the prerequisite for the reward should be balanced around being worth the reward itself. I don't mind a small reward if it was quick, cheap and easy to get. It's not a big, super-cool reward, but then I didn't have to quest and raid for it for days to get it, so it's still worth it.

MMOs tend to forego cost altogether and sucker people in with massive-value rewards with NO regard towards the actual cost of the item, and that creates the horrid raiding systems that see you repeat the same boss over and over and over again hoping for a random, extremely rare drop. I guess they are worth it to the people who do them, but I don't believe that whole system is balanced with worth in mind, because it is NOT worth it for quite a few people, as well. Making super-cool rewards is good and all, but they should not be stuffed behind something that is obectively as hard, long and annoying as you can make it. That's not balanced. That's needlessly overbalanced.

Which is worth what is subject to debate, obviously, but in the end value AND cost ought to come into consideration.

I just want to say that this isn't to start an argument, but just to give a bit more background as to why I view these things as "needed."

She already has a story, in fact my ONE complete story - the Tale of Two Hearts posted somewhere in Roleplaying - which is pretty much set in stone. The power of this character is directly drawn from the alien settings, requires thousands of years, the destruction of a world, a world populated by hostile creatures in a hellish environment, dark, insane elder gods who trace all the way back to the beginning of creation. It's a rather grand-scale story which pits the gravity of global events and the weight of the responsibility of power against the very humanity of life and the small things that truly matter. I would be doing this story a massive, massive disservice if I bring it down to the level "just a woman with fire powers." It also wouldn't make sense given WHAT she is (red demon-looking woman with a lengthy legacy) for her to even BE from Earth. The closest I can do is bring her out of this world's hell, and that's still "from another world," just in a different way.

I've always maintained that the merit of a story is only down to the original idea in a relatively small way, and much more down to the actual execution of the story itself, and far, far, FAR too many plot elements depend on this being another world with an alternate history. In theory, I could simply retrofit them all into this world's story, but even supposing I don't lose the grandness of the tale, I may as well simply start over and write a new story with new characters.

Again, starting a bit earlier in the story...why did this bad guy think that he could kill this woman and steal her source of power if that power source was enough to doom the world? Why does he want to plunge the world into an apocalypse? These are interesting questions (to me) that could create an interesting character: what was this guy doing 5 years before he strode into this ruler's throne room? To tie it more closely to this world, maybe this ruler hasn't even taken rulership over a country yet, but she and this guy already have a history...[/quote]

This one is a story I don't actually have any good answers for, because so far it's nothing more than an amorphous concept. But what this concept hinges on is a few key things: The apocalypse, as this is a post-apocalyptic, recovering from the disaster tale. A lost memory time skip, as the protagonist I never got around to mentioning finds himself in a familiar, but altered world with no memory of the intervening years and, in fact, only fragmented memory of the world before (which is always a cool place to hid plot twist secrets). A story of the meaning of humanity and emotion as a machine develops a strangely romantic kind of intelligence.

The third I can sort of retrofit into this world, as we've already seen with that AI we rescue from Crey, though Executable 1's concept is badly underplayed. The second I could kludge, but as I'm looking at a time skip of something like 40-50 years, isn't really relevant to how Paragon City has changed, and the changes to it aren't what I had in mind. The first, though, I simply cannot retrofit in any way. Your standard issue post-apocalyptic future is characterised by the fall of civilisation and the dissolution of governments, armies and law enforcement. The lack of a the "higher power" of modern civilizations looming over the barbaric conflict of less civilised places on Earth is what sets the tone required for that sort of thing. I could, potentially, kludge this into the currently-existing modern society, I suppose, but it would be a kludge no less ugly than trying to stuff Terminator's future war against the machines in the modern-day USA while somehow explaining why the machines HAVEN'T destroyed all of humanity. And it doesn't work to say they haven't YET, because the story sort of requires that they have.

See, the thing is it's not just about the rulership of a country. It's more about the rulership of a WORLD. When you rule a country, there are always other countries with the power to meddle in your affairs. It's the lack of this kind of guardian angel justice, the lack of an equivalent power that can swoop in and do good, that makes the settings work for me. I'm not a very cheerful person, myself, so the stories I make tend to launch off an "evil has already won" world and go from there, exploring not so much the fight to preserve what's left or reclaim what has been lost, but the act of heroes coming to terms with this and finding ways to make things work regardless. It's sort of like the speech the Prince gives to his Sand Self in The Two Thrones, come to think of it

Again, this is not to start an argument, just explaining my position. This world is interesting, but anything done in it has to either be smaller in scale, or DESTROY IT, which cannot be done with a static continuity. Even Recluse, by all accounts the biggest bad guy in the world, is still playing the UN and dancing to the tune of make-pretend diplomacy. Nemesis hides, the Rikti are cut off, Rularuu is off in his own dimension, the Kheldians and Nictus are largely inconsequential outside of a few shining moments, the Battalion are only hinted at, the doom the Shivans are supposed to bring never comes... And none of this will ever change, because suddenly turning the game into a permanent war zone and erasing several city zones is just not something that will happen.

It's like people say: Our world grows smaller each day. There are few frontiers left to push, few wildernesses left to explore and very few secrets left to find. It's a smaller-scale world than your average non-Fantasy-Fantasy would would be. Even reading about the old days when the Oranbegans fought the Mu and Hequat pulled an entire island out of the sea, fought a world-destroying monster and locked it under the bottom and so forth... That's cool. That's the stuff that's really large-scale. A modern world is interesting, but it's too much... In control. I honestly wish we were eventually allowed to travel to other, unexplored planets at some point. I don't want to go elsewhere in the world.

In fact, and here's something interesting - the ONLY place we have in City of Heroes that truly counts as wilderness is the Shadow Shard. The place is strange and mysterious, as though amazing secrets are just looming over every hill. And indeed, upon a turn you happen upon an ENORMOUS fortress floating in the air, staffed by a single, odd creature. It's always quiet, always strange, and always far, far away from other people. There are no buildings, no soldiers, no-one to assist you, no-one to direct you. It is... Well, the Shadow Shard, in every direction as far as the eye can see. Moving past the Chantry and into the Storm Palace still gets me excited even to this day, because it makes me feel like I walked so far away from civilization I walked into another world. I don't get that feeling travelling through Talos Island. I guess The far side of Eden and the inside of the Hive sort of work like that, but only just. The old Rikti Crash Site worked like that, before it was made so busy, as did Faultline, before they ruined the mystique of the zone.

It is possible to tell a lot of stories in this world, but other worlds and expressly their NOT being this world and the differences this entails is exactly what makes them so appealing.

[/QUOTE]

That's all there really is to it. The older you are, the more likely you are to have questioned implied taboos and found justification for contradicting them, if for no reason other than because you are more likely to have had more opportunities to do so. I don't know, maybe I'm not old enough to have forgotten what it was like to be a kid (I'm 24, so judge for yourselves), but I have found that simply trying things you feel you shouldn't be (I'm male, so I SHOULD be making male characters because I'm making representations of me, say) is a good way to find that perhaps they are good things to do, and having done them once, it is easier to get over the taboo in the future.

For close to two years, I had a grand total of two female characters to around 8-10 males, and even those I'd made because I thought I should at least try it. Via my interaction with a friend of mine who had AMAZING designs for female costumes, I got inspired to make a lot more female characters and explore many more themes that I hadn't even considered before, to the point where now females make around half of my entire character roster. In fact, I recently had to take a step back and make a few males because I was running out of females to make.

Here's another interesting anecdotal observation - most inhuman characters I have seen have been largely Male and Huge. Moreover, almost all genderless characters I have seen have been Huge, and I say "genderless" to refer to walking piles of rock, alien robots, giant plants, androgynous demons and so forth. It's interesting to note that making an inhuman character FEMALE still preserves her as an inhuman female (and there's a whole culture that thrives on that stuff), whereas making a male character non-human often ends up with a genderless alien being. I don't know whether that's an artefact of how the female model imparts boobs and butts on even alien reptiles, whereas the male form seems more... Generic, or whether it's the fact that if an alien race has genders, males may or may not be shapeless monsters, but females will almost always be pretty much humanoid, but it is a factoid worth considering.

I've always felt that, if I was going to make a robot, say, I may as well make it "a robot," rather than making it a FEMALE robot. If it's not going to matter, why bother with the extra connotations?

Putting it like that, you have a point. Gauntlet, to a large extent, feels not so much like an inherent but rather as a side effect of Tanker powersets. That doesn't specifically make it bad, but an ACTUAL inherent would be interesting. The fact that Brutes have a smaller version of that AS WELL AS an inherent is why I'm saying this. Yes, Brute "punchvoke" is weaker than Tanker Gauntlet, but Tanker Gauntlet is just as unimpressive as Brute punchvoke at the end of the day. It does seem outdated and ill-refined when put against a lot of the other inherents that do a lot.

Now, I could go into Scrapper Criticals vs. Stalker criticals, but that's a topic for another thread.

"Ridiculously overengineered character customization system." I love that

You exaggerate. Yes, BABs mentioned thousands of animations, but did not elaborate much about it. You talk about Blast sets needing hundreds of new animations as though they HAVE hundreds of powers now. They don't. There was a thread where we counted them, and they came out to a total of around 10-15 unique animations shared by all the sets, but with different effects. There are only so many ways you can shoot stuff out of your hands, so I'm honestly surprised we have as many as we do already. Making another set of 15-30 animations is all it would take to add one extra set, not thousands and thousands.

You also misrepresent what BABs has said over the years. Yes, each power has a different animation for each model. Technically. If you look at their models, their animations are entirely very similar, and BABs himself has said that, while they are technically different animations, taking one and adapting it to the other models is not a difficult, laborious or time-consuming task anywhere on the order of what making a new power is.

Also, it is worth noting that "adjusting" powers is something they've done once already, for Shields. It was then he quoted I believe thousands of powers that had to be done in the span of one Issue, but noted the changes were often small enough that they could knock out a dozen powers a day (don't quote me on the actual number). Granted, that's largely accounting for left arm position, rather than making new animations from scratch.

I, myself, never said it was quick or easy, but it's far from the world's most herculean task. You don't need nearly as many new animations and nearly as much retrofitting, and you may or may not need to reword the sprite effects of powers. Yes, it's a big thing which we will almost positively never see undertaken, as they could just as well make NEW powersets. But then look at it from the other directions - allowing us to alter our own powersets also gives us "new" powersets to our redesign, with the benefit of allowing one to serve as many. Hell, we're not getting Radiation Manipulation for Blasters, to go with Radiation Blast, and already I'm looking to solve that problem by recolouring Energy Melee green, and that's not even using animation customization.

It all comes down to time, actually. From your example, you seem to assume that smashing hordes of greys is as quick as smashing hordes of purples, and therefore it could be argued that they should provide the same reward per enemy. This is false, because purples are a lot SLOWER to kill than Greys, and so provide a much higher reward. Risk, for the most part, factors into reward to keep things that are TOO easy or TOO hard from becoming lucrative, because both are incredibly boring and inciting your playerbase to try them is bad business.

Yes, activity difficulty SHOULD be given some importance, but a lot of examinations of it fail to separate difficulty from time delays. A difficult activity is one which you try to do but often fail, resulting in either you having to start over, thus wasting time, or resulting in you able to proceed, but with a penalty, thus again wasting time on having to make up for this penalty. Unlike simple time sinks, however, difficulty is a variable time sink which has both the potential to yield MUCH faster rewards if you're lucky or good, and much WORSE rewards if the universe hates you. It is theoretically possible to examine a perfect difficult activity which always takes exactly as long as a comparable easy activity and then, yes, under those theoretical circumstances I would agree that the difficult one should have the higher rewards. But in practice, every difficult activity ends up being slower to actually do, thus giving difficult activities is a serious gamble, because more often than not, it incites players to find ways to minimize the risk, thus making it easier and faster, yet still consummating the large reward.

What's more, increasing rewards based on potential danger is an even bigger pitfall. We've seen countless exploits of enemies who give greater rewards because they are potentially very dangerous, but practically very harmless with the right approach. This, in a nutshell, is what the old Architect Comm. Officer farms were - farms of an enemy designed with extra reward because it COULD be dangerous, but ends up being an experience snack cake because of how not dangerous it could be and how easy that is to achieve. There's a reason a lot of people cheer at the sight of Comm. Officers in random Rikti spawns.

And you're never going to balance around what's fun and what isn't. This isn't even about personal preferences about what fun actually is, it's about how you're going about balancing these things to begin with. If your players approach the game from a "let's have fun" angle, then you can just view rewards on the basis of how much fun players will have with them and how best to stagger them. Ideally, that's how a rewards system SHOULD work. But players don't approach games that way. They don't think "I like doing this, what rewards I can get for it?" but rather "I want these rewards, what do I have to do to get them?" As such, fun doesn't really enter into it because fun isn't why people do the activities. They do them for the rewards. You have to, therefore, balance based on the value of rewards and the cost of earning them, which is what I said to begin with.

Granted, while some people will numb their minds in the most profitable activity possible, regardless of how dull, there is a certain extent to which most players will got make sure they are getting the best rewards they can while STILL having fun. In my experience, however, reward speed is a far, far more important metric in people's minds than fun. As long as it's not horribly, mind-numbingly, soul-suckingly boring, it's all the same anyway. After all, everyone's been playing the game for five years and we're all tired of everything, as common wisdom goes.

Ideally, activities should be designed as interesting as possible, so that people would WANT to play them, or at the very least not want to SKIP them, but the value of rewards they give should be balanced based based on the cost of doing the activity. All activities should, in the end, be equally worth doing, within reason. At the very least all activities even remotely intended.

Very much so In fact, the reason I mentioned a barbarian at all in the first place is that I have a good concept for one (whom I can't make until Scrappers get Battle Axe) who comes from a world kind of reminiscent of the Krogan homeworld from Mass Effect. It gives me an explanation why a half-naked chick is bullet-proof, why a wooden shield is harder than steel, why leather vests are harder than kevlar and so forth. Hey, if it lets me use wooden shields, who's complaining?

That's actually something I continuously fail to fully appreciate, as well. I can't be sure why I felt odd that a lot of my characters were off-universe when that's half the fun of making characters in this game, but a lot of what I have seen simply reaffirms a simple fact: "Why not?" The game supports it and even promotes it with the post-50 content, with all the time travelling, with all the (genuinely) space aliens, with all the extra-planar demons and ghosts... Come to think of it, half the actual WORLD is from off-world

Hmm... That's an interesting take, and it would explain a lot, but that is rarely how it works for me. For the most part, my characters start not even as characters, but as vague stories with no determinate protagonists for some time. Out of these stories, they evolve as a basic concept first, then personality second powers maybe vaguely implied, as I don't like writing descriptions in my stories. So when I sit down into City of Heroes, I start looking at ATs and Powersets and thinking "Hmm... What would this character's loosly-defined powers translate as, and what would her fighting style class him/her as?"

To be quite honest, that isn't always an easy call to make. You'd think that with something as easy to depict as FIRE I'd have an easy time making a character, but since her concept evolved out of her being an incredibly powerful Empress of Flame, that didn't really give me a good enough AT to jump to. Scrappers are cool, but not appropriate for the scale of the character, Controllers are interesting, but lack the punch I wanted, and I can't really play Defenders and Tankers without getting terribly bored, so I ended up making her a Blaster. It still doesn't quite do her justice, but the RAW POWER of a Blaster really does make up for lack of direct survivability. From my description, you'd think she'd be a demigod, except I wrote her entire story as pretty much a tragedy replete with many defeats, so I'm not really looking for godlike powers, just large-scale destruction, which Blaster specialise in.

Oh, and THEN I start thinking about what characters should actually look like. I used to think I thought in pictures, because they really DO feel like pictures in my head, but over the years I've found that my "pictures" lack any sort of detail. This is very obvious when I sit at character creation and realise that I don't have anything more specific as a mental picture than "red woman in white dress." How do you even MAKE a dress in City of Heroes, anyway? We don't have anything longer than a short skirt! I kludged it anyway, but that's just how it goes.

And, in fact, the more I hear people talk about how they enjoy tying their characters to the current in-game lore, the less I understand it. In the end, it likely comes down to personal preference (I don't feel right using other people's names and designs even in passing), but still, I just can't work with that. For instance, over lunch the other day, I came up with an interesting story. I won't retell it, but it basically starts with a bad guy walking in on a good ruler, killing her, stealing her source of power and using it to plunge the world into a PPG-speed-demons-inspired apocalypse and WOAH! Yeah, with that kind of beginning, how CAN I make that originate in Paragon City or anywhere on this Earth in this point in time? And I didn't specifically planned it like that. I didn't even plan it as a story, it was just something that came up into my head for I don't even know what reason.

I've seen a lot of people say I start with thinking why a character would be fighting crime and what in the world would cause him to feel that way, but... I just can't work that way. I don't mean to claim it's BAD, but it seems like backwards flow of the process for me. I design my characters around spur of the moment emotions that go through my head at the particular moment of conception, wrap a basic personality around that, then send that personality through the wringer of backstory and THEN try to decide how that person would use his powers at the end of the day. At the point where the character begins having to fit into the world I'll actually be playing him in, he already has both a story and a personality, not all variants of which are applicable to this world. Unless I can have some kind of emotional response to the actual game and start from there, I never start creating a character by thinking about where he fits in the world.

I should also note that the question "What if you personally received powers?" is quite interesting. Personally, over the years I've grown a very wide disconnect between myself and my own heroes, never putting myself in their shoes and wondering what I would do in that situation. I just don't think that way, because a lot of what drives a good hero is the story narrative, and I can't really be narrator AND protagonist at the same time. That's both Mary Sue and God Mode. Maybe better writers than me can pull it off, but I end up flopping badly. My real life isn't interesting enough to make for a cool super hero, though I suppose it IS just weird enough to make for a cool super villain. I prefer to stick to people I make out of whole cloth because then I can give them the necessary emotional power in their backstories to make the choices they made interesting.

Sorry about snipping your quote, but this is interesting. I've seen a lot of people suggest their characters should be a LOT stronger than the game actually provides, even stronger than the entire fictional universe really supports. After all, the gods of the gods IS an interesting concept just in terms of sheer cool factor. To me, though, it has always been interesting to pick up these super-super-human characters and weave them in such a way as to explain why they aren't Cthulu-all-powerful. It allows such "ultimate power" to exist as a concept, but still keeps it from interfering with the plot, because we all know that undefeatable, allpowerful characters are boring, and using plot devices to keep them in check sucks.

More to the point, though, you CAN have a character who originates from another world AND make that character fit into this one. As I said, our current settings may not be capable of (easily and believably) creating ALL types of characters, but all types of characters are capable of existing in it and having story arcs about it. I, myself, make it a point to NOT include any facts from the current game continuity or fiction (at least not such that I can't simply rename if need be without loss of context) because I enjoy the feeling that my characters are truly my own, despite them practically belonging to NCsoft. I guess that's part of why I have a hard time designing characters in this universe, what with doing my utmost to AVOID using anything truly unique to this universe. Which is an interesting retrospective answer to a question I didn't expect to see actually addressed. Hmm...

One thing I can't agree with, though, is this apparent implied resentment for people who look to other universes for their character origins. You have to remember than unlike SWG or EQ2 or WoW or just about any other MMO that I'm aware of, we HAVE no defined or even implied races. Yes, careless writers occasionally assume we're human (like that we have hair to slick back... What?) and some combat effects treat us like that (like poison gas choking us, despite some of us not needing to breathe... Or having mouths) but by and large I can claim I'm a robotic demon lizard from the third circle of hell on the planet Moonscopia who fights crime because another demon kicked his dog, and there is just about nothing anyone can point to that contradicts me. People can point to me and laugh, of course, but that's not the same thing.

Saying it like that makes wonder, actually: Being that our world is so accepting of everything, why would I NOT reach to other worlds for my diversity? Wouldn't that be overlooking a great opportunity? I mean, the only thing the game actually assumes is super powers (which we have even if we claim we don't) and alignment, and even alignment isn't consistently assumed. Heroes have the better end of the deal, assumed to be anywhere from a bleeding heart altruist to the equivalent of a super-powered police officer, to occasionally dabbing into being a mercenary, but villains are assumed to be... All over the place. From cackling mad evilnessnessness incarnate to apathetic mercenaries to even outright heroes to... Yeah, that.

Anyway, I guess I sort of answered my own question, but then I have to ask something else interesting: Do you guys find alternate... Well, alternate anything characters appropriate, or do you feel they should be kept to a minimum? I mean, we HAVE them in the story, so their existence isn't in question. Even ignoring the Soldiers of Rularuu, the Praetorians, Nemesis Rex and so on, we have Ghost Falcon, who is just that. But he's just one, even just I have more alternate dimension heroes than that. Actually, I have one. My alternate planet/timeline heroes tend to be more numerous.

I ask this because while, yes, our world is very rich and interesting, it simply isn't conducive to creating the backstory for certain kinds of characters. Anyone who could have been spawned out of a modern society is fair game, but if I wanted to spawn, say, a Conan-style super-barbarian? That doesn't really work in a modern society, and while I could kludge it, at that point I may as well claim an alternate dimension where dinosaurs never died out or something. But then there's the even easier example - if I want to create a space alien, then OBVIOUSLY I can't have that alien's origins be on Earth, because even if he may or may not technically be an "alien," he would never be a SPACE alien unless he came from outer space, which immediately assumes another world.

Or, heck, why not go farther and bring up one of my favourites, the Displaced Troll (who turns out belongs to a friend of mind, which I didn't know when I first met him). From what I remember of his story, he was an orc from a Fantasy world who got brought here somehow. And obvious as that is, what can you say to dispute the plausibility of such an idea? What, when I can walk into a TV screen and fight zombies along stars like Mimmie Van Whooters and Big McLarge Huge? See, that's why I love this game. If I said the above paragraph to anyone NOT familiar with City of Heroes, people would think I was making this stuff up on the spot!

The point, I suppose, is that I started out feeling that having so many off-world characters was unusual and probably symptomatic of a one-sided view of super heroes and villains. Do you believe it is, and that we should stay focused on OUR reality more and make up weak cross-overs less, or should we engage in more off-world travellers to make our city more diverse? It sounds stupid when I say it like this, yes, but it's a serious question.

The character is always the origin of knocback effects. That's how knockback works. A targeted AoE knockback power doesn't scatter things off the target it hits, it knocks things away from you. It's easy to test, too. Find a big spawn of enemies and aim, say, Explosive Blast at the enemy furthest away from you. When it explodes, it'll seem like the explosion is SUCKING enemies into it, because they get knocked away from you regardless of where the Explosive Blast lands. Wormhole's knockback is identical, and I'm very unconvinced its reticle summons a pseudo-pet. What it summons is the actual NPC/PC via relocation, then applies a knockback effect which is slightly delayed.

As far as summoning an invisible, untargetable pseudo-pet and THEN activating the power on it... I'm fairly confident that's not how powers work right now. You can't have a power both summon AND activate a location-based effect at the same time. A power is either a summon or an effect. I suppose it could be rigged up in sort of kludge to have one follow the other, but then you get into issues of timing and powers fizzling, and we've had enough of that with Oil Slick not lighting up. Essentially, what you're asking for here is a technological solution consisting of a re-write, and while I can't say that alone makes it a bad idea, it's something that you're going to need a very convincing reason to push forward with.

I will admit one thing - aiming your cones and AoEs where you want is a cool concept. However, I'm not so sure that even a technologically sound execution could be anything less than cumbersome. Sure, it works for AoEs because those have variable ranges of actication, but how are you going to direct a cone when cones have a set cone length? Using a reticle to aim a cone is just as much a crapshot as using a conventional target. Aim too far and you can't be sure to hit targets close by. Aim too close and the margin of error in displacing the cone becomes astronomical. Personally, I'd just settle for some visual representation of AoE/Cone area of coverage ala forcefields or some such that you could turn on and off or pull up on demand. It ought to make aiming a lot easier, and that's all I feel it really takes.

That's not true. Taunted enemies will run sometimes and not run other times. Running enemies Taunted will sometimes stop and turn around to fight, and at other times will ignore you and keep on running. It's not a guarantee, and in my experience it doesn't work exactly when you need it to work.

Personally, I feel low-damage ATs are spending far too much endurance for the kind of damage they put out, to the point where it becomes not worth using some or all of their attacks. With that in mind, I would not be opposed to seeing an edurance discount for Tankers, at least of SOME kind.

Call it what you will. I play these arcs and find myself not enjoying them for a variety of reasons. Some of the reasons I've listed, some of the reasons are difficult to describe, but it all comes down to my personal tastes clashing with what's there for me to do. If that makes me excessively snobbish, then so be it.