Samuel_Tow

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Uh, we dont need Atlantis, and Lemuria is just another sunken or lost continent. Now, what do we already have in the game that directly points to the third of the famous 'sunken' continents of mythology? Hmmm, what could it be? Oh, I dont know; maybe...

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Honestly, when I read that and though about making an underwater zone that was not an ancient sunken city, I thought of an underwater base. You know, kind of like in The Abyss, Leviathan, Deep Star Six (to dredge up the past a bit ) or even more recently Bioshock. Personally, I'm not interested in going INTO the water, but a zone in a base UNDER the water would be cool, especially if it had a lot of large windows looking into the sea and maybe small sections of deep(ish) water ala that little pool in Grandville.

I am not, however, interested in the land of underwater lemurs. Or Atlantis. Or the Coralax, even.

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Would Mind Control look better Pink?

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Everything looks better in pink. So, yeah.

This is becoming interesting to me, as there seem to be as many opinions on the matter as there are people who old opinions on it. That's one of the things that makes writing difficult, but it's also one of the things that makes it so interesting and exciting

To the point that there are many types of love, I have to agree with this. I'm not sure, however, that I can agree that some of its more basic forms can actually BE called "love." For instance, I would personally call obsessive love simply an obsession. But then, I hold an ironically non-romantic view of what love is, ironic because of the romantic way in which I tend to use it. I've seen many stories treat it as something magical, final and absolute, like there is this cosmic force called "love" which can rival destiny in how it can shape things. While I wouldn't really criticise that, my take has always been to view it as an incredibly strong force of attachment and introspect, powerful enough to change people's personalities from within. "This is what I want. This is what is important to me. That has to happen for this to be true." That sort of thing.

In not as many words, I write love as a character's power to change core personality traits and fight on for the object of their love. That's an approach that can easily go over the top before anyone (including me ) realises it.

On the note of innocence, I suspect we're talking about different things. I'm not so much talking about idealistic characters as I'm talking about inexperienced characters. Whether that inexperience is in practical skills of any kind, in emotional self-understanding or in interpersonal relationship confidence, it's still the kind of inexperience I keep failing to draw properly. It's easy enough to fudge by simply keeping my cast small (my Tale of Two Hearts has two characters 3/4 of the way through) and having everyone come from a vocation that gives them a certain amount of confidence in introspect and lack of social fear, yes. However, that pretty much requires me to cap my fictional world to at least 20-years-olds, sometimes even 30-year-olds and up. We've all been children once, and I'm sure we all remember all the embarrassing, confusing and scary experiences we've had simply learning how to behave with other people. Well, somewhere along the line, I simply lost my own memories of this, and without a fail, I end up fudging potentially interesting moments of inexperience with some kind of deep-seated worldly lesson that a young person is unlikely to have this deeply-ingrained.

It doesn't stop my characters from acting like little kinds, though But it stops them from BEING little kids, because they always THINK like jaded adults. I'd really like to be able to work around this some day, because it is a failing that becomes incredibly obvious if I pick the "right" story premise.

It's also interesting to see different people's preference of characters and story. Some feel it is important to have a solid story, with characters and their affairs as supporting sub-plots, some feel it is important to have believable, interesting characters for whom to tell a story, with an actual plot being a secondary supporting device. I tend to agree with the former on a theoretical level, but since the framework I've picked to tell stories is a biography or auto-biography, I end up actually writing to the latter. It took me many years to find a style of writing that fit both the text medium and my personal preference, and what I settled on was a Discovery-Channel-style reconstruction of past evens, done through the eyes of witnesses, the protagonist or a third person narrator. That, and the fact that most of what I've written in recent years has been stories about my own playable characters, leads to a heavily character-centric style of writing.

For instance, in the one full, completed work I have, pretty much the ENTIRE plot has to do with the trials and tribulations of the two lead characters while the story follows their journey of discovering themselves and discovering each other. The "other than that" plot starts out fairly important but loses its importance as the story progresses, depicting the characters' growing understanding of what it is that truly matters in life. As the characters begin losing interest in their own "destinies," so the focus of the story shifts from the destinies they were set to play out to live to the life they forge for themselves.

That was a pretty much entirely character-driven story from beginning to end, which is something that surprised me. Going into my next one, I wasn't sure if outdoing that was a good thing or a bad thing. Story length and perhaps my own lack of skill kept comments on the story low, but the few people who did comment had largely positive things to say, so I think I did at least OK

They say genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, and I've always held it that a story's idea is often nowhere near as important as a story's actual execution and style. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but unless I know what to do with them, they're worth exactly as much. Asking this is my way of trying to pin down one more tool that I can use and rely on.

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I'd like to see this implemented, but I'd like to see them honor both the limitations AND advantages of such a setting. Sacrificing realism in the name of balance is not always a good thing, to put it mildly.

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If a zone is unfair in a big way, it's going to suck big time if you're one of the people who gets burned. Or not, because the other guy's fire is suffering from a debuff. Balance is there to make sure everyone is having fun, not just the lucky few who, be it through outside knowledge or dumb luck, ended up benefiting from the circumstances. That's why I find an underwater zone to be a bad idea. An entire place where you're at a distinct disadvantage thanks to something that's completely out of your hands just isn't something I can agree with.

Plus, there is the whole "sing like a stone" problem, not to mention questions such as how a Storm Cloud would operate underwater or where you would put your Acid Mortar or trip mines. Look around. You'll discover that many, MANY powers require that you be on the ground. Stupid stuff like Forcefield Generator, even.

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When I heard one of the devs say "A death knight shouldn't be able to just totally obliterate a rogue," ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm yes they should. When you see a DK coming you should go "OH @#$% HERE COMES A DEATH KNIGHT" and not "ho hum here comes another random class that's just as equally balanced as me."

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I have a friend with a level 80 Hunter and a long list of obscenities spoken who would like to disagree with the above statement. Big time.

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What we really need is a list of the offending buffs added to our Options menu with selections that allow us to ignore those effects completely.

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There might be a problem with that. Teleport and Resurrection prompts don't actually prompt based on what power is used to invoke them, they seem to prompt based on a mechanic being invoked. Being teleported, for instance, or having your "dead" flag flipped. If we make an option to disable flight in general, that would disable Fly and Hover along with Group Fly, which isn't always what you want.

Technicalities aside, yes, choosing to refuse ally flight is an option I am definitely behind, though it would have to block the debuff as well as the fly component.

Something interesting occurred to me, though. Why not use very slow flight as an enemy-affecting status effect? We already have Stun, which makes characters walk around dazed and bottoms out their run speed. Why not have some powers induce forced Hover that rips you away from the ground and bottoms out your Flight speed? Just an idea

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And the concept of Lemuria is older than Champions.
Some info
SO while Champions has a specific design of Lemuria, they by no means own the rights to Lemuria in general.

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So THAT'S where Lemur Lad is from?

Seriously, though, I'm not sure how Champions will handle the land of underwater Lemurs, but it's something I'd be interested to see. There are far (far, FAR) too many limitations in how powers interact with an underwater environment for me to see this as workable, and it's pretty much a no-win situation. Ignore the limitations and it's stupid, honour the limitations and it breaks gameplay. Even before we consider the issues of air, fire, electricity, bullets and ice underwater, there are plenty of powers that either root you to the ground, cause you to hit the ground or cause you to pick items up off the ground, which I just don't see in what I foresee as a "weightless" environment.

I've spent a good deal of time thinking about this, and I've never been able to find a good way to implement something like this. Same for space.

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I thought of this because I wanna focus on my main characters and not make alts and forget all about them. I thought that if we can get a subclass system going that, we can still play our main characters and still be able to try out new classes.

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...So because you can't bring yourself to focus on one character and stop making alts, you think they should add a system that just lets you go from "tanker mode" to "blaster mode"?

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Actually, about the only thing I heard about the DC MMO that I actually liked was that they would allow you to do just that, in a sense. You could switch between several modes on the fly (sort of) so you could go from dealing damage to tanking to supporting your team all on the same character, and your powers would do different things depending on what mode you are. For instance, what was once Lightning Blast in offensive mode would turn into Tesla Cage in defensive mode.

I'm not a big fan of modes, but depending on how "on-the-fly" they can be switched, it might be a good route around the strongarm MMO tradition of all characters being broken and always needing each other. Of course, the DC game seems to be designed more like Devil May Cry or God of War than like an MMO, so constant action and being able to "do everything" are key components, but it's a good idea nonetheless.

I would not be opposed to a Melee/Buff (or Buff/Melee) AT added to the game. Maybe then all the nonsense directed at undermining Scrapper secondaries so they can pretend to be Defenders can shift to that AT and free up Scrappers to flip out and kill stuff like in the old days. While I would personally not play such an AT, I don't believe it would be overpowered, practically speaking.

Even plain replacing a Scrapper secondary with a Defender primary wouldn't be TOO much of a problem (overpowered, obviously, but not by THAT much) as the Scrapper would lose the thing that kept them alive - their protection. Pretty much all of it. As Defender buffs aren't always applicable to yourself and Defender debuffs have limitations, being forced into melee would still put you at a significantly higher risk of death than the typical Defender, and without personal protection to protect you, this is a precarious situation indeed.

Practically speaking, however, such an AT would, in my eyes, require Scrapper health, about Tanker damage and special Support sets that mix support with personal protection in a similar way that Assault sets mix melee and ranged damage and Manipulation sets mix damage and support. I'd also say that such an AT should have somewhere between Mastermind and Controller support numbers.

I don't believe that would be overpowered. If anything, it would probably end up underpowered.

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Yes, yours definitely is "good".
Actually "good is a freakin' understatement, yours is awesome.
And... *GLOMPAGE* HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

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I tend to have a very critical view of writing in general, just because so much of what I've read hasn't been to my tastes, but I have to agree - that story really DOES appear very good I didn't read the whole thing, but it's rare that I'll read something and feel that "Woah... I would like to know more." This is definitely one of those things, and it's a pretty big thing for me to say it, believe me.

It highlights, I think, where my disconnect happens, however, in a very big way. I just can't seem to make my characters innocent enough, at least in terms of mentality. That doesn't mean they're sinful or cynical. I could have the most pure of heart, honest character and I still end up painting them like someone with a life's worth of experience behind them. I don't know why that is, and perhaps it's a reflection of my own self-examining ways. When I was a kid (read: teenager) I used to write about people in their 20s, and now that I'm in my 20s, I write about people in their 30s (and beyond, in their 200s and on and on ). I consider this a non-insignificant failing of my writing, and is perhaps the primary reason why children are always absent from my stories. If I tried to use them, I'd probably end up writing them as simpletons or writing them as shrunken adults. And it bugs me, because I used to be good at it when I was a kid. It bugs me at least a little that I've forgotten.

And that, I suppose, makes my love stories a bit more serious than they need to be. Somewhere along the line, I lost my ability to write puppy-dog eyes, embarrassing, unwitting love. I really need to work on that.

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IIRC, Granite Armor and Rooted have -fly attached to them which more than overcome whatever +fly Grant Flight would give you. Once you turn them on, you are pretty much incapable of flying.

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However, neither can be activated while airborne. Once Group Fly catches you, it's impossible to land. And since both Rooted and Granite Armour have movement speed debuffs that, even when mitigated, still put you at a walking speed slower than the rest of the team, you're going to want to turn them off at least some of the time. Yes, contrary to popular belief, Granite Armour CAN be turned off.

If ground-only powers were modified to work NEAR the ground (possibly requiring brand new animations, possibly not), then maybe this could be workable. I know that's possible for clicks, Trip Mine and Time Bomb used to do it and may still do that. Whether that's possible for toggles... No idea. Probably not.

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What you replied to didn't say everyone needs them, he said every would benefit. Which is true. How much benefit will vary, but more slots would make your powers better.

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Too much of a good thing is never a good thing. Just adding more slots runs the risk of allowing players to slot all their powers, at the same time negating the meaning of slot placement choice the game-over and overpowering characters in such a way that's impossible to make up by altering the environment, even if such a thing were even practical to begin with.

So, no, not everyone would benefit. I'd wager that the balancing and rebalancing which would be required for something like this to exist would hurt far more than it would actually benefit, and most of the people hurt would be those who need more slots to begin with - the people who don't optimize enough.

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Essentially. He may have meant "from levels" given where he said it, but it would be a bit optimistic to suppose so.

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What he actually meant was that no more of these could be given in any way, shape or form, so any new levels couldn't include giving them. I wouldn't be opposed to seeing four or five slots at level 50, just to make it a little more unique, but that's as far as I'm willing to stretch this, because we ARE already overpowered.

The only problem I see with a 4 minute fly buff is that if it's non-refusable, non-cancellable, it might really mess up, say, my Stone/Stone Brute. Even without a to-hit debuff, I'm still losing Fault, Hurl Boulder, Tremor, Rooted and possibly Granite Armour.

I should mention up front that I have a rule to never write what could be considered "fan fiction," simply because when I DO use other people's characters, I take far too many liberties with them, ending up either derailing them or mocking them. What I do write is always entirely comprised of my own characters, largely made up on the spot Not that this has any real importance, but I'm laying it down as a bit of an explanation of context.

I suppose I ask because I've found two polarly opposite schools of thought when it comes to writing - that of event-driven stories and that of character-driven stories. To avoid going into a long diatribe, that's the difference between a story where plot elements happen because the author has a story to tell and the characters are written around it and a story where the author has characters to talk about and weaves a story such that they do and become what they need to do and become. You appear to be of the opinion that story should come first, with characters written around it, and to a large extent I agree. I've always believed in what I like to call "organic" plotlines where what events take place is largely decided at random, with character reactions and progress simply written to accommodate. After all, it's a more realistic approach.

This raises the question, however, of how seriously you would pursue one. Personally, and it largely depends on my mood at the time, I have the tendency to ride my characters pretty high, to where even the stoic and stone cold eventually lose their composure and the weaker are practically panicking or broken down. This is true in almost every kind of plot, but whatever I do, it ends up cropping up by far the most seriously in love stories, even when they aren't intended to be that central. If anything is likely to induce a major personality change (as much as a person CAN change), inspire a significant act of desperation, be it heroic or villainous and largely move the characters, who then move the plot, that's likely to be a love story, or some kind of emotional story at the very least.

Would that strike anyone as a bit... Much? I understand it's down to style and preference, and I'm unlikely to budge from my perch regardless, but it's interesting to me gather a few opinion just to have something to work with on the subject. It's also true that I'm currently searching for inspiration (or rather HAVE some, but no form to put it into), so any direct examples explained in short (or at length, I'd like that even more) are very welcome.

At times it just seems to me like I'm trying too hard, and I know how damaging that can be.

That's Vanessa DeVore's party house as given by whoever the 45-50 Carnival contact is. It's his very first introductory mission that reveals who Vanessa really is.

This is, as the title says in redundancy, a question, rather than a story or suchfroth. I'm putting it here because, however, because it is a question that lies pretty much at the base of storytelling and fiction writing, at least from where I'm looking.

What do you believe makes for a good love story?

Over the years, I've attempted to write many different stories from many different angles, and though I can find inspiration in many places, it seems a love story, or at least something with a hint of such, are the only things I can stick with long enough and follow through into an actual, finished work of fiction. On the other end of the spectrum, however, I can't seem to bring myself a story that is ONLY about a love story and nothing else. I cannot stand modern-day soaps and their drawn-out melodramas, I cannot emphasise that strongly enough. Such is my conundrum. I've been looking for an answer to this question for ten years now, and while I find particular examples of things that work, I've never been able to understand the underlying mechanics that make one story rock while another sucks with seemingly the same basic scenario.

I suppose the question is - where do you draw the line between fiction and romance, and how do you go about intertwining them such that one doesn't have to come at the expense of the other? If anyone's seen my Tale of Two hearts in this very forum, you probably know I draw that line pretty far in favour of romance, to the point where the characters skirt BECOMING the story. I'm generally a fan of romance, both as a form of inter-personal relationships and as a general philosophy of fiction, but I always fear stepping over the line and going into a drama... IN SPACE!

I've spent the last couple of days going over TV Tropes articles. It's more than a little addictive, must say. But rather than being discourage by all of the well-documented cliches and finding myself without any novel ideas, I instead find myself inspired by all the tropes I keep reading about. Some are comedic, some are frankly disgusting, but the ones that consistently always catch my eye are the ones that deal with deep, personal emotions. Understandably, there are 1001 ways to get those wrong or make them too obvious, but I have to wonder... Isn't there a way to get them right? Well, there is, and we've all seen it. I'm sure even the most cynical among you have, at one point or another, seen, heard or read something so beautiful it brought a tear to your eye. So it's possible. The question is, how does one accomplish this?

It comes down to a few simple quandaries. If you were to write a non-soap love story, would you start with that premise and work characters and plot around it, or would take an existing idea and try to introduce it there? How would you go about making the love story a central point without making it THE central point? How would you go about making it moving and interesting, but not nagging and obtrusive? What would you do?

I recently spoke with (read: ranted to) a friend of mine about how "the power of friendship" always seems to usurp the limelight from romantic love in anime, a phenomenon I seem to have picked up from Western animations and the kind of Japanese games and movies that would get me banned off these forums. He wasn't too moved, saying he was indeed more interested in stories about friendship, trust and sticking together than he was in romanticism. Apparently, I have a highly subjective view on the subject, thanks to the various philosophies I espouse. It's only prudent that I collect a few opinions from other people, just to perform a reality check on the situation.

So what are your preferences and your methods for writing this sort of thing? I could really use some help.

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I'd say nuke both Group Fly and Group Teleport from orbit and rewrite them.

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I'd like Group Teleport a zillion times more if it was reconfigured to be Team Recall (i.e., "Assemble the Team").

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You've apparently never seen TTP used properly.

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Which, in itself, might suggest something isn't quite right with it. I, for one, have never seen Team Teleport used... Ever. And I'm not joking.

I'm honestly not interested in your vendetta. It's just growing old that every thread, no matter what it's about, has a 50/50 chance of getting SOMEONE complaining about PvP. It's the new ED, I guess, and no less annoying to listen about.

As for your passive-aggressive dance, I find myself unmoved. You're playing the victim card horribly poorly.

It still boggles my mind why Group Fly is SO CRAPPY. What does it do that benefits the team, anyway? It gives them sluggish, slow Fly. Is that really worth that kind of endurance cost and that kind of debuff and that kind of outright grief when half your powers require you to be on the ground?

I'd say nuke both Group Fly and Group Teleport from orbit and rewrite them.

Can I go nowhere without tripping over a PvP whine? I thought all the PvPers had left. How does that work, again?

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Then don't publish them live in the first place. And CERTAINLY don't wait 2 and 3 years to make such jarring changes to correct problems only the devs are even aware are an issue.

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If they tested everything to the point where all possible kinks could be observed and worked on it until all possible problems were rectified, the game would still be in beta. And when it came out years after today, players would STILL find ways to break it that the developers hadn't foreseen and had no means of fixing.

Problems crop up and problems get fixed. I would rather prefer having a game to play in-between those events.

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Full disclosure of a fait accompli is a hollow gesture. The time for full disclosure was back when the powers in question were on the table being looked at. Full disclosure would have been a heads up to the player base, like "We don't consider this form of +recharge inheritance to be working as intended, so don't get too used to it. And don't blow too many hours of gameplay building for it."

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Given that this has been stated, repeatedly at that, as unintended behaviour that they just had no means of fixing, why does it come as such a surprise that they eventually fixed it when they found the means, or rather the motivation to fix? Specific powers were tagged to not accept specific enhancements, yet people still assumed that their being able to sneak that kind of enhancement despite the specific ban and despite what the developers were saying and have been saying was absolutely intended and would never be altered?

Welcome to I2. Your Smoke Grenade has just been fixed.

Someone needs to make one of those cut-n-paste replies to this "mail items to myself" redundancy.

I don't believe so, because all too many NPC powers depend on the NPCs, themselves. Shivans, for instance, use the Hydra model, and there's practically no guarantee that those animations are even available to any of the player models at all. Further still, non-human enemies like Arachnoids, Crab Spiders, the Tarantula, Nemesis Jaegers, Malta Titans and so forth have powers that are unique to their models and are very likely not player-usable.

I don't believe we'll ever get the ability to make custom critters who can do or be anything we couldn't make as a player character.

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I'll have to test that myself, I'm curious. I do wish my boss (oh by the way, thanks Samuel, my mission actually mostly works right now (besides ambushes being weird, and not being able to ensure their dialogue ever works, cause no one's standing there to hear it when it "goes off" it'd be better if it triggered once they targeted someone)) would actually attack the Council spawned next to her, but she doesn't. However, if I engage her, her foot stomps will hurt them, and she does a fair job of helping clear them out.

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Ambushes currently unload their dialogue into the ether where no-one is listening. And I don't know why. I do wish it would be fixed, though, because as it stands, giving them dialogue is pointless.

Also, a Rogue enemy will attack an Enemy enemy or a Friendly (or just about everyone not from his spawn, for that matter) if they stray close enough. My own Dev/Null was picking fights with Crey scientists before I even got there, but I eventually ended up having to turn him back into Enemy to prevent his dialogue from being triggered by wandering enemies. It seems to work, they just have to stray pretty close to each other.

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Another thing I noticed. My ally likes to just bolt off randomly for no reason. It didn't happen when I was soloing the arc, but when I tested it with 2 friends last night, she'd just run off randomly mid fight, and at one point I swear she ran so far we couldn't find her at all. Also she seemed to like to get "hooked" on following the controller's stone pet (would be nice if that didn't happen) and if he died, that would cause her to bolt off too, though even when he wasn't around, she did it.

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That sounds like an AI selection issue. What behaviour did you choose for her? I haven't tried Aggressive, myself, but from the tooltip, it sounds like exactly the kind of thing you are describing. I keep my own Allies on Fighting Defensive to prevent that kind of willy-nilly overacting, and my one ally has consistently managed to keep himself alive, even though he turned out to be a minion, much to my surprise. Heh

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Also, I can't seem to get bosses (that is, boss-level foes, not my actual mission "bosses") to spawn hardly at all. I was running solo on Rugged, and never saw a one, just a ton of lieutenants and minions. This wasn't just restricted to custom groups...I didn't see a single boss on the entire map. Not until I had 2 other people with me did I notice them occasionally. Does it need to be set up to Unyielding to make bosses spawn? I know in the regular PvE game they tend to spawn for solos around Tenacious or Rugged...but MA doesn't seem to work this way...any ideas?

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That's down to the whim of the spawn code. Sometimes you can't get bosses with multiple people, sometimes you get tons of bosses by yourself. I played through the exact same missions I'd made, played through it several times and sometimes I'd get mostly Crey Security Guards and Crey Scientists, sometimes I'd get almost entirely Paragon Protectors. You can't really GUARANTEE you'll get bosses with less than four people or thereabout, and anything less than that is really down to the whim of the spawn code. It's like that in the regular game, as well, actually.

Also, the first, third and fifth difficulties are identical, only the first produces enemies even con and +1, the third +1 and +2 and the fifth +2 and +3. The second and fourth are similarly identical, only the second produces even con and +1 while the fourth produces +1 and +2. When it comes to spawn size and composition, however, you effectively have only two difficulty settings - odd and even.