Samuel_Tow

My explanation for this seems to be "old stuff is old," essentially. At some point, either the studio got a new writer on board or someone said "**** it, write whatever you want!" to the writer staff, and any sort of continuity, history or established characterisation became up for grabs, if not through flanderisation then through outright ret-con. Wanna' kill an established character? Go right ahead. Wanna' reveal that the Rikti aren't from an alternate dimension but from Earth's future and no-one could ever tell? Sure, why not. Wanna' take a storyline and twist it into something that's completely the opposite? Eh, go right ahead.

City of Heroes appears to be under the relentless assault by a person or a group of people who want it to be something completely different entirely, and I honestly don't see a good enough justification for it. There was nothing wrong with Rick Dakan's old storyline design. The man might have been garbage as a lead developer, but at least he was damn good as a writer. He had an almost tolkenian sense of the "broader world" of his fictional universe, instead of relying on shocking plot twists and unexpected developments.

You would not be alone. Storytelling in City of Heroes has been in a tailspin even since Going Rogue came out. The continuity has become more and more tangled because old canon is completely ignored because old stuff is old, the writing has become needlessly darker and edgier and storylines and characters which were just fine, inspirational even, have been ripped apart and sewn back together into variants that are nowhere near as compelling. Storytelling since Going Rogue has been nothing short of a systematic dismantling of just about everything I used to like about the City of Heroes storyline and mythos. I'd call it deconstruction if I felt for a moment that it was intentional, and it wouldn't make me like it any less.

Going Rogue itself wasn't a bad idea, or even badly executed. I wasn't a fan of the darker and edgier storytelling and named characters constantly dying to feed some writer's bloodlust, but it fit the thematic of the place. Variety is always good, and I guess we could have used a crapsack world. But then that writing spread like a disease, and where in Praetoria there was no real canon to speak of which could be defiled, when Paragon City and the Rogue Isles contracted this disease, it was terrible. It has been killing my interest in the game's story pretty much since I19, and it just keeps getting worse.

It's not a question of her physical appearance. No, she doesn't look that young. No-one in this game looks particularly young, because our costume editor, for all its strengths, is incredibly abstract when it comes to the finer points of a person's physique.

What this is about is a question of Penny's mannerisms, attitude and behaviour. She sounds and acts like a kid. If the Penelope Yin of Faultline is supposed to be an 18-year-old woman, then she's an incredibly juvenilie one. I get that she's acting cute and friendly and all that, but there are certain mannerisms inherent to children that even young adults don't often keep.

The real tragedy here is that Penny's 14-year-old kid writing is some of the best in the game from a technical standpoint. She sounds spot on as a little kid, and she's probably the only character in the game who manages to act youthful without acting like an idiot.

While there's an argument about what makes one a hero to begin with, I fully agree with Rian's take on what makes one super. Whether a character be a super hoer or a super villain, what makes that character super is the super powers which define his abilities. I don't have anything against simply highly-trained humans being considered heroes, not at all. Real life has plenty of real heroes, and they deserve nothing short of complete respect. But that doesn't make them "super." It is a person's ideals, actions and achievements that make one a hero, but a person's super powers that make him a super.

I know this is not a popular position to take, but I have a VERY serious problem with ordinary people being put in a position to show up actual super-powered beings of a considerably higher power level. I know it's a "geek fantasy" to be able to roll with the big guys because you're just that awesome, but you end up with situations that either make the normal guy look ridiculously super-powered, such as being dropped out of a plane and surviving, or it makes the super guys seem much weaker by comparison if the ordinary guy can take it and keep chugging.

In a big way, "supers" are defined as much by what they're not as what they are, and what they're not is "normal." In a lot of situations, a character is demonstrated to be super-powered by being able to do or survive things a normal character couldn't. If you don't have, you end up with the Dragon Ball Z problem - you have attacks that seem to create pretty fireballs but never hurt anybody, to the point where you have to wonder if they're just for show. If you don't have a scale to measure things by, power becomes abstract, and the best scale there is is... Well, us. I couldn't take a rocket to the face and walk it off, but Crash can. I can't dodge bullets but Sam Tow can. I don't have an army of robots, but the Rook does.

Being more than ordinary people is what makes one who is already a hero into a SUPER hero.

That's not the assumption I'm making, however. My assumption there is that there isn't enough interest in multi-team raids to sustain raiding as a concept. You need to involve other people, people who aren't explicitly motivated by the act of raiding itself, and those people you need to "bribe." Look at one of the chief concerns behind Dark Astoria - if you give people a solo path with a similar pacing to iTrials, then there's every reason to believe iTrial participation could reduce to such an extent that populations crash below the minimum critical level, and raiding effectively becomes impossible to run with any consistency. The mere fact that this concern exists is strong evidence that raiding alone is not self-sustaining and it needs not just extra incentive, but other content needs to expressly not have too much incentive.

Essentially, I'm not allowed to have too much fun outside of a raid, or else I'd never raid.

The subject of pacing is entirely separate from the subject of raiding. That's something I've been trying to beat into people's heads since I18. You can have raids without them being end game and you can have end game without it being raids. At this point, this is a fact, and evidence to this fact is, again, Dark Astoria. That's end game without the raiding. Well, almost entirely without the raiding - there's that Trial at the end, but it doesn't preclude one from playing the rest of the content up to that point. Additionally, the Winter Lord's Realm raid is a pristine example of raid content that's not end game, and people seemed to play it quite freqently despite it not offering Incarnate progress.

But as to the concept of pacing itself, you are correct that that's an important issue. If the game progresses too slowly, people get bored. If the game progresses too quickly, then its progress gets devalued and you can't enjoy your gains before they become obsolete. But there's an important distinction to make here about rewards. There are, at the very least, two ways to view rewards. You can either view rewards as progress, or you can view them as payment. Let me explain the distinction.

If you view rewards as progress, then you use them as milestones to move a player along through a game that the player wanted to play anyway. It's a lot like that peasant in that village offering me 100 gold to go kill the Kobold King I was going to go kill anyway, but that 100 gold will help buy me better gear IN ADDITION to the gear and experience I'll get off the Kobold. Rewards as progress infers that people intrinsically enjoy the experience, thus the rewards are there to provide novelty and keep it from getting stale. I may enjoy punching Skulls, but only for so long. Before I get bored of it, I'm shuttled along to punch Trolls, instead, and the game remains fun.

Viewing rewards as payment, however, is where I run afoul of the system. This recognises that players intrinsically DO NOT want to play the game, or at the very least do not want to play that particular content, but they do anyway because they want the rewards. This is where the game turns into a job and where people start to grumble. Again, it's the old argument people made about Hamidon farms. Out of one corner of their mouths, they claimed they just wanted to raid and would do that even if there were no rewards. Out of the other corner, they insisted they'd stop raiding if the rewards were reduced. Ideally, a game should never ask a person to do something he doesn't want to do in order to get something he wants to have. That's why games are escapism - we can have what we want without working for it.

Obviously, WHERE this pacing stands is up for debate and obviously, wherever it stands, SOMEONE will be left out in the cold. My concern is more one of development ideology. Recently, a lot of our reward structure has been designed such as to funnel people into content the developers want to be played, whether or not players actually want to play this content. When I say I want to just run story arcs and no farm for merits or tickets or what have you, I'm told this is the least productive way to progress. Because story arcs are old, and developers want me to play their new stuff, because I need to pay them to play it. When I say that I want to kill everything in my missions, I'm told that that's a bad idea and I should instead stealth Dark Astoria repeatable missions for the mission reward.

It's a reward structure designed to keep people playing even after they're no longer enjoying themselves that I find to be "backwards." And that's exactly where I see the Incarnate system. Because, really, there is NO WAY to design a system that's going to keep people playing forever. Either they'll reach the end, or they'll walk out, and the longer you try to stretch it out, the worse it becomes. There is no such thing as endless content. The sooner players and developers accept this fact, the better.

I have experience with endgame, and without exception it has been the most boring, demotivational experience of my life every single time. But that's not the point. Let me explain.

I don't doubt that the CONTENT behind the endgame is designed to be fun. The various artists worked hard to make the visuals and presentation exciting, the writers tried hard to make the experience memorable (whether they succeeded is irrelevant), the power balance guys did their best to make the experience challenging yet possible. No developer sits down to design and thinks: "Today, I'm gonna' create ****!" Everyone does what he can to make a good game.

It's where gameplay meets time sink that the disconnect ultimately takes place. See, the various artists work hard to make a fun piece of content, but then this is taken and slotted into a SYSTEM that's designed to keep people addicted and conditioned to repeat the same tasks over and over again and never even think of asking for more. That's precisely what Matt Miller wanted - "a system." He was well aware that Incarnate content by itself would be insufficient to keep people's attention, even if it came with further character progression. The solution? Time sinks, Skinner boxes and clever tricks to keep player "activity levels" artificially high.

Read any article on the science of this kind of design and you'll see people constantly use terms like "activity levels," "stopping points" and suchforth. It's hard science, but the one aspect that this hard science never takes into account is whether what's being designed is actually fun to play through. Because "fun" is not the point. The point is to keep people playing. Whether they play for fun, through psychological manipulation or peer pressure is irrelevant. The point is to keep people playing.

I dislike large-scale raids, obviously, but that doesn't make large-scale raids inherently bad or unfun. It's easily provable that there are plenty of people who enjoy that. I'm sure the actual act of playing those raids is fun for them. What I'm saying is that the system behind them is not intended to entertain them, but rather it's intended to, as the Freedom trailer says, "Play for free! FOREVER!" That's really a necessity in this case, because large-scale raids require large-scale participation, and there really isn't any one thing in this game that has a large number of fans. Consequently, the only way to support large-scale raids with any consistency is to rope people who don't really like them but are open to doing them if the reward is right into the mix to serve as population.

Why I find endgame as a concept to be "backwards," however, runs deeper than this. I have no special hate for raids that isn't shared by a whole bunch of other team content which I have a policy of "live and let live" with. It exists for people who like it, but alternatives exist for people who don't. Diversity is a win for everyone. Why I find endgame to be "backwards" is that it usurps this concept to use it as a time sink, because large-scale raids ARE a time sink. They take time to organise, time to coordinate, time to run, they can fail and their rewards can vary. All this does is diminish the actual raids themselves for the people who run them while at the same time both roping in unwilling participants AND using perverting content into something that PREVENTS people from having fun.

Time sinks hurt a game's entertainment value, that's what it comes down to. By turning raids into both a time sink and a bottleneck, it breeds exactly the kind of cynicism that sees people hate raids as a concept, and hate people who run raids by association. It breeds contempt, for the sole reason of keeping people playing even when they're not having fun.

It's postulated that if people could just "beat" the game, they'd stop playing, so you have to mire them and not let them progress so they'd play forever. This completely undermines the concept of replayability not just by ignoring it as a factor, but also by making the game into such a chore that it's not worth playing over again. When I end a game, look back and think "Man, that was fun! I want to do it again!" then I will. Over and over and over again. When I look at a game and think "I never want to do this again!" then you're not going to keep me playing much longer. I didn't spend seven years in this game spinning my wheels at level 50. I spent seven years making some 50-odd characters, getting 10-15 of them to 50, getting a whole bunch to 40 and even more to 30 and continue to make new ones when a new and great idea strikes my fancy.

Every time I play another game I like, I'm compelled to come back to City of Heroes and remake my character from that game into this one. Because every other game makes itself such a nuisance that by the time I'm done, I don't want to start over. Because every other game is about finding "the one." City of Heroes is the only game I've ever seen which was about making my own fictional universe of characters, and an endgame which bogs me down to such an extent that I HAVE to pick a "main" and focus on simply takes a big bite out of my motivation to replay the game.

This brings up a question: Couldn't you just have made the flaps into the single surface of a skirt and have them act accordingly?

Also, another question: There are five flaps on the back. How is that different?

I don't think anyone specifically objects to the presence of corsets. They're a nice addition. I, personally, just happen to want to see women get more than just corsets and skirts and thigh-high boots. Give them those, more options is always better. But don't give them JUST those.

Even if you ignore release schedules, the way the SSAs are spread across the level ranges ensures that a slower player like myself could easily take a week between each story arc levelling up, and possibly a month between 4 and 5 if I run SSA4 at level 30, just because levelling in the 30s is so slow.

Every society has morals, yes. Not every society has YOUR morals. I feel confident enough in saying you have not lived in Eastern Europe long enough, but I can tell you that we now live the legacy of a totalitarian, corrupt state which taught people that rules are for losers and laws are there to get in your way, creating an entire generation... An entire society, even, which does not respect any form of legality unless it is explicitly forced to comply to it and overseen in the process. And that's not just us. The entire former Soviet block is in much the same situation after decades of being ruled by a Communist government where everything was free and no-one cared if you embezzled.

While I don't want to raise the spectre of SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, let's look at software piracy. We all know it's wrong. We're all pretty sure it's illegal. Yet do you have any idea how hart it's been to pitch actually BUYING games to people around here? I tell my friends I bought City of Heroes and I pay $15 a month for it and their eyes turn into dinner plates. I tell them about this great game I bought on Steam, and they tell me I'm stupid and I could have gotten it off a torrent for free. I have a neighbour who's considerably richer than me - you know, big house, wide-screen TV, multiple computers, nice car, etc. But heaven forbid he spend $6 on Steam to get a decent game for his son. Why would he, if his son can just torrent the thing for free. "No-one wants to spend money," he says and... Yeah, I agree. No-one wants to spend money for the sake of spending money. But spending money for products is how the creation of those products gets funded. SOMEONE has to pay for it, and it makes sense for that someone to be the people using it.

But no, because laws here don't mean anything unless you get caught. Hell, you have no idea how hard it's been to expunge illegal software out of my workplace. We own Windows 7, we own MicroSoft Office, we own the software we need, yet time after time I see computers with pirated software on it. Why? "Eh, I didn't want to bother so I pirated it." People like that send me up the wall, and I've campaigned like hell, twisted people's arms and insisted we at the very least use the legal software we already ******* own!

And that's just today in real life. That's ignoring the history of the world, as well as the history of different peoples across it. The history of human sacrifice which was fundamental to the culture of a lot of the native American empires that existed before the New World was colonised, the history of slavery which drove not just Colonial America, but also the Greek and Roman worlds, as well as plenty of other historic nations, not least of which being part of my own history. And what about the history of feminism and women's place in society?

Every society has morals, but those morals are not always concurrent with contemporary Catholic American ideals of truth, justice and the American way. And I'm not saying that as a dis against the US, far from it. The classic super hero is pretty much entirely your invention, because only in America can a man dedicate his life to fighting crime and the forces of evil and actually be taken seriously. The reason American comic books are comparatively less popular outside the US and possibly Western Europe is because that kind of moral high ground simply doesn't exist all over the world. It's not "innate" to people to believe in this kind of idealism, and being in the Eastern end of Europe, I know a thing or two about how that doesn't exist around here. Occasionally, you'll see a person trying to stick to his ideals, but this being a crapsack world, he'll usually be proven wrong and publicly humiliated for it. Because around here, bad guys win, and if you want to win too, you have to do what they do.

No, it is not. Altruism is almost never profitable in an actual real life setting. The easiest way to fulfil your needs is to live on the backs of other people who do your work for you, it's to take from other people who've done the honest work. Altruism may be the path to success in a society that's good and honest, but most societies aren't, that much I know for a fact. In fact, morality, altruism and high ideals are probably the least effective way to satisfy your needs, per chance one of those isn't doing the right thing, and I've yet to meet another person who truly needed that in his life.

It's the Freakshow lifestyle - total anarchy and complete freedom to do whatever they want in words, but in actual fact, they still subsist on the production and support of ordered, rule-bound society. A world made up entirely of Freakshow cannot work, obviously, but they don't want a world made entirely of Freakshow. They want a world made up of weak people who can work and create the stuff that the Freakshow need, which they can then steal and live a life of endless raves and boundless fun. Any utopia built on the notion that everyone will want to do his part and everyone should be rewarded with what he needs is doomed to fail. That's essentially Communism in a nutshell, and I know first hand how well that worked. I've seen the system in action - when people are trusted to do their best, they don't do anything at all. When people are rewarded irrespective of how well they do, they don't do anything at all.

A world built around altruism does not work, because most people are not altruistic. Once you've tried to live your life in altruism and seen that take you up **** creek, if you'll pardon my language, you start to realise that the world works a lot better when it's based on managed greed. Altruism is a motivation for only a very select few, because it generally fails to satisfy needs. Greed, by contrast, is a powerful driving force because it gives the satisfaction of a person's need a particular cost, which pays for that person's support by the rest of society. It's not ideal, no, but that's how the world works where I live.

That... Is not even remotely close to my experience, I'm afraid. I know a fair few people and I have to deal with many on a daily basis through my teaching profession, and I've not seen many people actually trying to be good, let alone succeeding in it. Maybe we just live in different worlds, you and I, but I've never felt that most or even many people at all turn out good. They do if they have a strong example, which I try to be, but they don't in this society.

That's assuming your culture's rules aspire to be good and idealistic. And yes, that IS an assumption. Not every culture has such high ideals in its popular mind. This is actually one of the prevailing problems of Eastern Europe these days - the completely ROTTEN mentality of people in general. I'm coming on 30 some time soon, and the spoiled brats I went to school with are now raising kids, and they're raising them in the same arrogant, self-entitled, rotten way in which they grew up. Because when mom and dad treat other people like dirt and always look for legal loop holes, then what are the kids supposed to grow up as?

You seem to treat your brand of morality as somehow universal and constant, and I simply disagree with this. "Morality" might always be present, but what it means differs across time and across the world. It is entirely possible for a person to grow up embracing the morality of his community and still end up a villain. Imagine someone growing up in 4chan or the WoW forums.

Mostly because that was before Issue 1 and so long ago that even most people who went on those teams don't remember much of it by now. I do remember Hydra teams, though, but that was before mission completion experience was substantially increased. Probably before the Purple Patch, too. In the years since, running missions has become vastly more convenient. People don't street-hunt these days not because street hunting has become worse, it's just that everything else has become better to where the inherent problems in relying on random, unpredictable spawns have become much more apparent.

Personally, I found the old Hamidon Trial to be easily the most boring experience I've ever had in this game by a wide margin. Thank you for reminding me. I thought Reichsman was boring, but that's got nothing on the Hamidon. I fought that thing with a "team" of around 150 people, it took four hours, I couldn't see the Hamidon, most of the people and most of the effects, I played with around 20 seconds of ping time AND massive server slowdown and I had to put up with the most inane, low-brow, idiotic "banter" it has ever been my sad misfortune to listen to as people busied themselves waiting for massively delayed attacks to recharge. Oh, and because I was playing a Scrapper, I spent at least half of that time sitting on my hands during the "hold" phase.

Reichsman is boring as hell, but at least the boredom only lasts 15 minutes to half an hour. The Hamidon was like sitting through the Faatim the Kind TF without being allowed to play.

That's assuming you exist in a society that holds high morals values. I honestly can't say how it is in the US, never having lived there, but I myself live in a society with extremely LOW moral values, populated primarily by cynics, hypocrites and outright crooks. I know it's a harsh thing to say, but I ride a cap a lot, and I'm a chatty guy, so I get to see a very broad cross-section of society, and it's rarely entirely pretty.

Real life social commentary aside, would being a villain just because that's how you do things come off as unnatural in a society which does not value morality? The Rogue Isles really does seem like the kind of place where, if you can commit a crime and get away with it, you're viewed as a success even if that crime was very amoral. Yeah, you killed a man for his possessions, but he'd have killed you for yours if you'd have fallen asleep first. Yeah, you robbed a bank, but it was stocked with a criminal's dirty money made by extorting the weak, so who cares? Yeah, you released a virus and depopulated a whole island town, but who cares? It's survival of the fittest, baby!

If we're talking about being shaped by nurture as opposed to nature, then wouldn't growing up in an environment where evil is A-OK as long as it's not happening to you make one who does evil because it's evil justified? Or am I giving more context than just that by defining the environment?

Not necessarily, not always, at least. You seem to be arguing from the perspective that people are good unless something happens to make them evil, either by its presence or absence, but I just don't see things like this. I personally believe that good and evil are more often a matter of choice. Not literally the choice between good and evil, but rather the choice in which action to take in a given morality-charged situation. That's why I dislike insane and misunderstood villains as a concept - because then that choice is taken away from them. They didn't choose to be evil, someone or something else made them evil, and they can therefore be fixed.

I remember a biology documentary from many years ago that had a line I remember to this day: "We evolved a big brain with which to make decisions." When we're talking about what makes one a hero and another a villain, I always like to believe it comes down to decisions. A person was given the choice between being right and wrong, and he simply chose wrong for whatever reasons felt compelling to him. What I'm saying is that neither a person's nature nor a person's nurture need to be "damaged" in some way to turn that person evil. Morality is not physical law, it is simply a reflection on how we live our lives.

As such, I don't really believe an external force needs to be present to propel one into villainy. It's quite possible that a fully-functional person brought up in a good environment might still simply feel that he doesn't want to play by the rules. That, then, would make him a villain, and a villain without excuse.

Essentially, what you're saying is "context." Being a hero because it's right in itself is not the problem, but rather being that without establishing why that is. OK, if that's what you're saying, then I agree. It's all a question of presentation

If I earn more than ONE Shard a day, I consider myself lucky. Most days I go entire play sessions not seeing a single one.

Yeah, that's the worst of the Skinner boxes - the kind that not only mire your progress in all manner of time sinks but occasionally simply take your progress away when they feel like it, and you're expected to just pick up the pieces and start over like a good little boy. I honestly have to wonder if South Koreans live such cosy, care-free lives that they need to inject stress, anger and frustration into them artificially.

That's not the only way in which random chance can screw you over, though. Developers these days seem to love putting rewards in large lumps behind random rolls of low probability. Why? Because you're supposed to "feel like you're opening a surprise present with every purchase" as the recent Super Packs boast. Because when you don't let the player see the beginning and end of a process, you extort the player for a constant state of elevated motivation. Even the very first try could yield the big reward. It doesn't, of course, but perhaps the very next try might. Of course, that doesn't, either, but it could have. Maybe the next try after that?

Most systems designed in this way don't place "fun" anywhere on the priority list. They value player participation and motivation. They are not designed to entertain people. They're designed to pray on people's psychology to have them continue performing a task that they pay money to perform. If these people do have fun in the process, it's entirely coincidental, though I assume also very welcome.

I am, actually. I'm not saying end game systems can't be entertaining. What I AM saying is that entertainment, if it's even on the agenda at all, is nowhere near the top priority. Making an entertaining end game system is fairly simple, about as simple as making an entertaining anything, but as others have pointed out, not many people would re-run entertaining content day after day after day with no sense of novelty. And since the raiding end game system is so built as to require a certain critical mass of participation that clearly those who run it for fun don't constitute by themselves, the system is designed to ensnare, addict of compel.

And I say "clearly," because if there were enough people who genuinely wanted to run raid after raid after raid day after day after day to sustain the system, there would be no need to shepherd what we do post 50 to nearly such a degree. It's the old "I LOVE raiding the Hamidon, but I won't raid the Hamidon if you fix Hamidon enhancements!" argument. Plenty of people will claim they enjoy playing a piece of content over and over again, but take away its rewards and they stop doing it, complain about it and then advise other people to not do it.

I'm sure there are people who genuinely enjoy raids, and I believe you when you say you do. What I know for a fact, however, is that the fear the development team has is justified: If you give people a meaningful alternative to Trials, they WILL stop running Trials altogether. If Dark Astoria offered a rate of progression even remotely comparable to that of your average Trial for the cost of effort of your average Trial leech, then people love of the Trials is not going to be able to sustain them, and we'll see very quickly and very clearly exactly how many people run Trials because they enjoy the act of running Trials.

I say end game systems are not designed to be fun because they aren't. They're designed to keep people playing. They do this by offering some fun to be had, obviously, but in a much larger part, they feed on conditioning people to do things they normally wouldn't enjoy, all for the sake of maintaining a critical mass of players enough to support those who truly do enjoy raids. The thing with an "end game" system is that it's a lot like PvP. You have some people who really enjoy it for the system, but the way it's designed, you need participation from people who genuinely DON'T enjoy the system or you simply don't have enough people for the system to run.

We've all see what happened to PvP when participation wasn't there, and we've seen what happened to it when PvE players were being goaded into PvP to serve as meat on the table. Even in its heyday, it was never that popular. I'm sure this is always at the backs of the minds of developers working on Incarnates, because if all of the people who just want Incarnate stuff but don't enjoy 24-man Trials actually stopped participating, the system would shut down entirely. As such, the whole thing is designed around keeping those people who genuinely don't enjoy Trials playing them anyway.

Yeah, the boots are easily the worst part of the set, and the ones on the concept art page are many times better. For instance, the "talon" at the end doesn't look so awkward like it's glued onto the toe of the boot, so much as it's just another plate of the armour. Also, the "calf" area isn't nearly as bloated and round and doesn't stand out as much. Mind you, I still don't particularly LIKE the boots, but they're a hell of a lot better than the final 3D.

The gloves are just as awkward, though. You have a boiler attached to the forearm, then a skinny, skinny wrist, then a large metal plate attached to the back of the hand. That area of skinny wrist is what really sinks the gloves to me.

Honestly, though, I wish we'd gotten the Red-X masks from up in the right corner. They look pretty cool, and they're a lot more expressive than the Celestial face we got, which looks like a blindfold to me.

And what about that hammer? Clearly there was one in development, but instead we got the "cut your own shoulder off" reverse axe? I get that there were time concerns related to this and the hammer probably didn't get made, but the thing really is just two hammer heads on one shaft, as opposed to a hammer head and an axe blade.

And the shield looks like it eventually turned into the Barbarian one, or so it looks like.

Overall, though, this concept art explains why the Celestial set looks so weird in anything but white - because it was conceptualised as white armour. I guess this is where its pretinting started.

Personally, I believe that a good argument would harken back to how you define the limitations on what weapons are available in which category. Once upon a time, BABs asked for new pistol suggestions for Dual Pistols (and that came to absolutely nothing, but that's besides the point), and one of his primary criteria was that the weapon needed to look like it could fire multiple rounds in rapid succession. That's what the set did, so it made sense for the weapons in it to require that as a prerequisite... Even if the flintlock didn't exactly adhere.

Now, I obviously don't quite know your design specifications behind each set, but here's how I see them for Arachnos rifles and Robotics rifles:

Arachnos rifles: Fantasy-inspired, overly-designed weapons, purportedly owing their design to the high-tech, strange science behind their construction, as well as owing to Arachnos' love for the Fantasy villain look. Any weapon which can appear to fire small kinetic projectiles in rapid succession would fit the bill. I suppose you could argue that the weapons would need to have a small barrel, thus why the Devastator cannon wouldn't work, but at the same time, I believe that it's easy enough to infer that one is hidden inside the darkness of the much larger barrel. Or that the larger barrel perhaps houses multiple small barrels on a rotating rack similar to a gatling gun.

Robotics rifles: "Indescribable" science contraptions that don't always resemble an actual rifle, owing their design to the unorthodox technology which spawned them and to the futuristic design of Robotics in general. Any weapon which appears able to fire a basic thin pulse laser beam should be applicable. Again, you could argue that having a larger barrel could be problematic for the smaller beam thickness (though not for the Photon Grenade), but I believe the Death Star is a prime example of how a big hole can produce a small beam. It is fairly safe to assert that the formation of the laser blast takes open-air space without you needing to show it via power effects.

To conclude, I believe that your players are significantly more forgiving of minor misalignments and irregularities than most people give us credit for. Sure, we'll raise all hell when we feel that a good job wasn't done, but considering we've been asking for greater control over our characters, even if that produces unappealing combinations, I believe we'll be able to handle a few possibly unseemly combinations once we understand that we're getting something you originally held back because of exactly the problems in question.

That is my argument.

Well, that's assuming that motivation was spontaneously generated, and by a human hero. Suppose we're talking about someone who's lived a long life, tried many different things and finally decided that someone simply has to do the right thing? Take, for instance, Shen Shao Shi, my old martial arts master. He learned all the Martial Arts he could, lived until he was 150, ascended to the afterlife, learned all he could there, and then simply returned 600 years after the fact to share his wisdom with the world and use his knowledge and skill to protect those who can't protect themselves. At this point, he's neither human nor precisely young, and his motivation is born out of contemplation, ideology and conviction.

That's kind of what I mean, I'm not specifically arguing. I get that "He's a hero, that's what he does!" is a cop-out excuse... But isn't it only a cop-out excuse when you use it as such? When a person has thought about it, slept on it and walked the path of life and still feels like simply doing the right thing because that's what he's chosen... Is that still a cop-out? Honest question here.

What I'm saying is that while it's not exactly sophisticated, heroes who do good because it's the right thing to do are still acceptable as serious characters. Again, not precisely deep or developed ones, but you can see them show up in a serious story without taking much away from the tone. And you can even have them lecture people about being good and pure and taking pride in protecting the weak. They do it because it's right.

Now turn that around, and what's a villain who does it "because it's wrong?" That's a Saturday morning cartoon villain who sings about how evil he is, he hates puppies, kittens and the smiles on babie's faces, his ultimate weakness is laughter and he cackles when he's surrounded by sadness and suffering. Essentially, Robbie Rotten.

So why is that? Why are we so much more willing to accept that someone would be a hero because he likes good, but so much more difficult to take a villain seriously who's a villain because he likes evil?

And what difference do Incarnates make? What difference does the Inventions system make? You're still running the same content over and over and over again, you're just given more reasons to do it. Rewarding players for repetition does not provide more content, and while it may extend player participation for a while, it does so at a terrible cost.

On the flip side, I have to ask... Wasn't this the point of Freedom? Yes, City of Heroes still fancies itself a subscription game of sorts, but wasn't the point of Freedom specifically so that the development team could draw money out of players more directly, instead of relying on time sinks in order to waste people's time?

You ask why people would stay even if they've done anything, and I answer... Why do they have to? They wouldn't stay. They'd come, play, buy and leave, and then come back when the next expansion launched to buy more stuff. Isn't that the whole point of Freedom? Buying in small pieces and buying only what you want, in exchange for being more loose with our money? That's how it seemed to me, and it's certainly gotten more out of me than I'd have paid otherwise.

Yes, I do. I've been here since Launch. I played this game when it didn't have an end game. I played this game when it didn't have Inventions. I played this game when it didn't even have a level 50. At no point at all have I stopped and thought "Oh, I don't want to start again!" City of Heroes is a game of imagination and opportunity. You really cannot compare it to any other game, RPG or otherwise. For all their story-telling might, no BioWare game has ever inspired me to play it over in a different way than I played it the first time.

Every RPG I have ever played has given me choices for the sole purpose of picking the ONE option I enjoyed the most and sticking to it. Why indeed would I replay these games if it'll be the same game all over again? Granted, I've replayed Sands of Time probably 30 times over, and would play it again if I ran out of things to do, but that's besides the point.

Why I would replay City of Heroes from level 1 all the way to 50 many times... 15-20 or thereabout, I deleted so many level 50 characters I lost count. Why would I replay the whole game, hundreds of hours of gameplay, over and over again? Because it's a different game every single time. Even if you stick to a handful of ATs, the characters you can produce are significantly varies, and even if you picked the same powersets and builds, each character is still his or her own story.

City of Heroes is built on replayability in a way no other game I've ever seen has been, aside from perhaps the Incredible Machine. If you treat the game like you're playing WoW, then yeah, why bother? But that's not what City of Heroes is. It's not about finding "the one" and pledging your life to that character, and I firmly believe that the game suffers for trying to be that.

That's the same content I haven't seen in sometimes over a year, vs. the same content I ran yesterday. That's why having five Origin contacts in Atlas Park was a good idea - because by the time I made another hero of the same origin, I'd already forgotten most of the missions for that origin. The game offers enough content for at least three playthroughs without repeating anything at all, so unless you keep rerolling when you hit level 10 or don't play a zillion characters of the same level all at once, you're unlikely to repeat things.

Every game eventually repeats itself. It's the nature of game development. The trick is to space that repetition out so it doesn't grind, and there's really no way to space out a small handful of tasks you're expected to run many times their total number with no real alternative.

Enough to keep Cryptic Studios afloat from 2005 to 2007, and enough to keep Paragon Studios afloat from 2007 to 2011. Maybe not enough to make the game a smash super hit WoW-killer, but enough to merit a massive re-investment from PlayNC and the foundation of NCNC, which then became Paragon Studios. I feel history stands to evidence that there are enough of us willing to play a game without "end game" many times over again.

Far as I'm concerned, City of Heroes did well enough doing that for six or seven years before Incarnates were even a thing. It ran well enough for what... Three years or so before Inventions? The MMO you claim cannot be run ran and ran successfully enough to outlast much of its competition at the time.

And what do you do once you cap out the current Incarnate slots? Because the game still has an end. It's just an end that's staggered so much most people are likely to give up before they reach it. And honestly, is having your players stop playing because they weren't making any progress any better than having them stop playing because they won? At least in the latter case, they may leave with a smile on their faces.

And I simply disagree. There's no way to keep people playing without making content either prohibitively hard, prohibitively slow or prohibitively repetitive. Any of these equals boring content, and the Incarnate system as designed and paced includes all three. I'd honestly rather have a game which isn't so concerned with wasting my time that it hurts the experience because of it. I'd rather have a game end and leave me satisfied than have a game peter out and have me leave a bitter, angry man. Like Lineage II, like 9Dragons, like Dragonica, like Aion, like Divine Souls, like Vindictus and a whole bunch of others.

There are plenty of games out there which are all about the end game. I remember many people citing as one of their reasons for playing City of Heroes and not one of its competitors as there being no end game here. I would personally rather have kept it this way. If I wanted end game, there are plenty of games out there that offer it. I've never felt that City of Heroes needed to be more like them.

You're making a sliding scale argument that you really shouldn't, especially since you're doing that instead of addressing the argument I made. Said argument is that at the very least Robotics Masterminds use weapons which can be defined as "weird sci-fi guns." The Retro Pulse Rifle looks like a set of bagpipes to me and that's appropriate to shoot lasers, but not the Shard Cannon?

What's funny is you're saying it's a no-win situation because we extrapolate developer decision to infinity and make absolute arguments, yet you take my argument, extrapolate it to infinity and present that exaggeration as evidence to its fault. If you argue for moderation, then please be consistent with it and argue case-by-case. How, in your eyes, is the Shard Cannon not appropriate for Robotics Pulse Rifle?

For that matter, how are most of the Beam Rifle inappropriate?

Ah, but we're arguing Arachnos, of course. Well, their weapons, too, are usually designed to be strange, inexplicable and over-designed, almost like what guns would look if they came out of a Fantasy MMO that had in it. It makes sense for their weapons to be weird sci-fi guns, too.

Larger social commentary on the dynamics of the forums as a whole aside, do you disagree with any of the arguments I made?

That doesn't stop Munitions Mastery having no redraw with Assault Rifle. The real reason for the redraw - at least what I think is the real one - is that Mace Mastery uses Arachnos maces which Mace Brutes aren't given access because reasons.

This reminds me... There are a lot of toggle effect auras that are designed to emanate from our feet, like Hot Feet. Is is possible to give those an alternate effect when flying that hovers around the midsection?

Similarly, there are a few auras that eject particles which always assume we're upright, such as Blazing Aura. Is it possible to give those an alternate effect when flying so that the fire ring still blasts out of the torso, and not out of somewhere below a flying character?

This actually reminds me of one of the "daydreams" from Chuck Norris' Sidekicks movie, where the villain talks about putting razor blades in bubble gum and dynamite in candy. I do wonder if I can't make an interesting villain based on that premise... Hmm... Food for thought.

Isn't that the same thing, though? You protect the world because you were hurt and you don't want others to get hurt sounds like very much the same as protecting the world because it's the right thing to do. Or are you saying that because at least there's a reason, it's more than "We do it because it's right!" as the C&C Generals Crusader tanks used to say? I can buy that, but this assumes that "I do it because it's right!" isn't a reason, or at least not reason enough.

This brings up an interesting parity. Are we saying that doing evil because it's wrong is the same as doing evil because it's right? Honest question here.

See, this is where the developers REALLY shot themselves in the foot with a gun loaded with Incarnate Threads. Non-Incarnate content already rewards Incarnate progress to people who've unlocked their Alpha slot - it rewards Shards. The only problem is Shards are worthless for anything past the Alpha Slot, and though you can transfer them to Threads, thread costs ensure you're not adding all that much cash to the kitty, as it were. Moreover, many TFs award Incarnate components, which was supposed to be the reason to run them. The only problem is that those components are completely worthless for anything past the Alpha slot AND they only ever break down to a single Shard.

I get why Matt Miller wanted to institute a new currency which superseded Shards. People were stocking up on hundreds of the things, meaning they could insta-buy any new Incarnate stuff that came out. So, in an effort to devalue Shards, they introduced Threads. The only problem is that devaluing Shards for Incarnate progression also sapped the value of the entire rest of the game save those few Trials. THAT was the capital mistake that made even those who saw flashbacks and TFs as meaningful Incarnate progression to write them off. These are now things you do for the experience of running them, or possibly for the Merits, but NOT for the Incarnate progress. Well, unless you're working on Alpha, but that's just a fifth of the way up, and that's only so far.

Obviously. That's a problem Jack Emmert talked about back in 2004, and I'm sure MMOs have been dealing with it since EQ and AO. You can no more produce a game faster than players can play through it than you can pave a road faster than people will drive on it. But to torture the analogy a bit further, what do you do when your road only goes up to half the towns along the planned route? Do you set drivers to drive around the farthest town in circles until you're finished, or do you just fence off the are under construction and say "The road ends here. The rest of it will be done later."

What I mean to say is that there's a broader question here: Does the game have an end? I don't that in a metaphysical sense - everything ends eventually. I mean are we willing to admit that the game ends here for this character and he cannot progress any further. Said character is still free to travel up, down and around the game at will, but for now, this is where the game ends, and you can't go any higher. Are we comfortable with telling players "You are done. Either start over or faff about?"

Obviously not. Paragon Studios is extremely uncomfortable with this admission, so they tack time sinks on top of time sinks to keep players driving in circles, buying themselves time to build more of the game. But this creates a problem - the game ends. Whether you put an ending in it or not, it ends. Neither people's patience nor their interest are infinite. Obviously, there are exceptions, but even those exceptions aren't eternal. Eventually, the game WILL end. The only question is whether it ends because a player reached the climax, or because the player got bored and went on to play something more fun.

To me - and this is purely my opinion - a goal is worthless if you can never actually reach it. A journey is meaningless unless it has an end, even if said end is not the point. By obfuscating the ending and miring it in time sinks, all you do is burn people out such that when the expansion comes out and new content is released, a lot of us just aren't going feel like being arsed.

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In his CoH dis, Jack Emmert explains that when he and Matt Miller first sat down to design the level 40-50 game, they intended for it to take as long as the 1-40 game. Have you played any of the legacy 40-50 content? Specifically, have you played the Shadow Shard, Dr. Quaterfield or Unai Kemen? Those are just a few examples of meaningless, empty stories padded with endless repetitive missions that effectively equate to "Your princess is in another castle!" All because someone decided that players should take a long, long time to reach level 50.

And now we're seeing the same thing again. The Incarnate system is used as a buffer, a speed bump to keep people away from the end of the game at least long enough for the team to expand on it. But by designing something to be a speed bump, you both kill your replayability and compromise your own content. All for the sake of not admitting to players that City of Heroes is not infinite.