Samuel_Tow

Technically, it makes everything thicker, I just meant that it doesn't make the other body parts thicker by much. I guess it's the classic female ideal for women to have big butts and small torsos, and I'm aware of the biology which dictates a larger pelvis, but some concepts just call for a female character that's more muscular built, and currently... There really is no good way to do that.

Hence, more control. I'm glad we agree.

Possibly.

But it doesn't make the "legs" thicker, it makes the thighs thicker, but leaves the calves, ankles and feet still small, making a larger woman's leg look like sausage funnels, at least to me. That's why I usually use larger boots on any female character that I give a high physique slider value.

And I really don't believe it makes the midriff much thicker, or at least I haven't noticed it doing that. If anything, it makes the midriff look narrower by comparison to the semi-trailer butt of higher values, meaning that I then have to up the waist slider to kingdom come just so the woman in question doesn't look like she's made of two separate people.

Mind you, I'm not saying you're wrong to do what you do, I just wish we had more control over our physique. Mostly, I want bigger arms and possibly hands, bigger lower legs and possibly feet and control of the torso in three dimensions. Or at least two dimensions - sideways and forward/back.

This I actually can explain. Both the whooshing sound and the hit sound are low-frequency sounds that can blend together. Those without very good hearing can think they're hearing one sound when they're hearing two. It's kind of like why people think a duck's quack doesn't echo - because the quack sounds a lot like an echo, so people are hearing the echo but think they're still hearing the quack. The Titan Weapons "oil barrel thump" is of a very low frequency AND it's quiet AND it has a fairly narrow range of frequencies to the sound, so it's very easy for it to blend into the background noise, or even into the actual low-frequency "whoosh" of the attacks.

This is especially true in a team environment. My first experience with Titan Weapon combat was on Beta on a Death From Below Trial that had 6 out of 8 people using Titan Weapons. It took me two whole floors before I even heard the hit effects. For the most part, I thought the set was bugged and didn't HAVE an effect. When it was pointed out to me, when I heard it for myself separately and then when I actually listened for it... Yeah, it was there, and it was pretty distinct. But it CAN blend into the background very easily, because it's both unremarkable AND it sounds like part of a lot of other sound effects. For instance, if you play Rage over one of the hit effects, you won't hear a thing because the Rage sound effect covers almost all the frequencies of the Titan Weapons hit effect.

Some people do genuinely fail to hear the effect because there are very many situations where the effect is simply drowned out, and it's hard to hear to begin with. Which, really, is the biggest crime against the set. For a weapon this big, its hit effects should be the ones drowning everything else. They should be loud and attention-grabbing, they should be the kind of sound that pulls your face to the screen and tells you "Something big just happened!" Instead, they're so low-key that you very much CAN miss them, and that's just inexcusable.

I believe that comparison is judgemental more so than descriptive, meaning it sounds less like an actual waffle bat and more sounds "weak." The trouble with these things is real life isn't nearly as impressive as movies have conditioned us to expect with a great many things. The Mythbusters had a whole episode devoted to testing "Hollywood sound effects," and many of them were well off. Actual fists come off sounding more like a slap with none of the crunch and thump and car explosions are much faster and emit a much narrower frequency of sound. If anything, the exploding grenades in Half-Life 2 were much closer to reality, but left the player asking if that was it.

Considering how ludicrous the whole concept behind Titan Weapons is, I don't believe we should be confining ourselves to what a real large chunk of metal would sound like if swung at a real person or even at a wall. To be frank, the resulting sound wouldn't be all that impressive. If you've ever heard sound effects of people breaking rock with hammers or digging tunnels with pickaxes, that's more or less what the Buster sword would sound when hitting rock or thick metal. Hardly impressive for a weapon of that size.

What Titan Weapons needs to sound like is an explosion with every hit. You're not just slapping your enemies with a large object, you're DESTROYING your enemies with your absurdly oversized weapon. If any powerset in the game needed to feel like super strength aside from Super Strength itself, this is the set. Titan Weapons certainly look like superior strength is involved, but they certainly don't sound like it. I hear that exact same sound every time someone opens the large sheet metal gate to my yard. That's not super-powered.

I guess Titan Weapons do sound like your enemies are being blown away with every attack... I just wish it sounded like they were being blown away figuratively, as opposed to being blown away by the great wind your sail of a sword fans up.

This is actually caused by redraw. Titan Weapons doesn't seem to HAVE any when you have momentum. So, if you gain Momentum, use a non-TW power - say, Healing Flames because you're hurt - and then use another Titan Weapons power, you'll animated the attack immediately, but the effects will be delayed by the time of the draw animations. However, the engine won't root you after your animations, meaning you can attack again after waiting for the effect of your first attack, and with momentum, you can stack them.

I'm pretty sure that's a bug.

Say, I wonder if the Dark Astoria storyline will remember Tielekku. I haven't run all of it, so if it does, I haven't seen it, but I'm thinking not. The writers have gone to great lengths to ignore and avoid any and all of Rick Dakan's original stories, so I'd be surprised if Tielekku did show up.

And she really should. At the conclusion of the Scroll of Tielekku, we alter the Banished Pantheon's ritual to warn the goddess instead of summoning her into a trap. Granted, there's no way to tell if she ever got the message, as our contact will point out, but I always read that as an "out" because she wasn't in the game at the time of the Scroll of Tielekku's arc's writing. But now that Mot is awake, shouldn't she be back and take at least SOME part in the story. We have a rich mythology of gods here. Why not use them?

Far from it. The Dark Astoria revamp is the first time I heard anything about Mot. I'm sure he's somewhere in the game's many references, but do you know who I've heard about to no end from the Banished Pantheon? Lughebu. Those guys are going on about Lughebu this, Lughebu that, praise Lughebu and that's half of what their zombies say in total. It's like the Devouring Earth and their Hamidon.

So... What does Lughebu have to say about this? Would he welcome Mot's awakening as a heralding of his own? Would he be jealous? Would he want to consume Mot and grow in power? I know I'm thinking far too big, but really... Wouldn't that kind of clash of the god be cool?

Sometimes I feel sorry for Zwill. He's the bearer of bad news and the guy we tend to unload on when we're told something remarkably illogical from the greater development team. Honestly, I like the guy. He does a good job and he does it with passion.

But DAMN if "headdesk" wasn't my response, too. It's a weird sci-fi weapon that could shoot bullets, lasers, fish or leprechauns. Let US decide whether it looks right for our Robotics Masterminds or Soldiers of Arachnos or what have you. There really is no argument for why the weapon makes no sense. The only argument is someone in power doesn't like how it looks.

Realistic or not, that's actually something I tend to do and tend to like. Real life's over-rated

Ain't that the truth. The "muscle" slider is actually a breasts and butt slider, the "chest" slider is another breasts slider and all of the others only affect the character left-to-right, but add no thickness to any body part. Just strictly width.

Speaking of which, "endurance modification" enhancements didn't exist in the old days. We had an endurance buff and an endurance debuff enhancements that, at some point, were combined into just one enhancement - endurance modification. It's the same thing that happened to the cone range enhancement - it got rolled into range so it now boosts both the range of ranged powers and the range of cones. Pity we never got an AoE radius enhancement.

Yeah, but it was a mistake, and one that was fairly easy to fix. Good thing these forums have infinite eternal edit rights

I want to turn your argument around for a moment, because now that you mention it, I'm starting to think writing for villains can be just as easy if only the story didn't try as hard. Let me explain:

Long ago, Launch hero content was designed to be given out by "Mission Terminals," which is what I believe the current "Info Kiosks were intended to be. This got canned in favour of "Contacts," but their original dialogue still remained largely inert, generic and uncharacteristic. Hence, most of the Launch hero content really applies to everybody, because it doesn't assume motivation. It's just a series of "go there, do that, here's what it accomplishes" but it never assumes why your character actually WANTS to do this. It's assume that's for the good of the people, but you can fill in that motivation box with almost anything and it would fit almost as well. Maybe you're being paid for your hero work, maybe you just want to kill mages (I have a hero like that), maybe you're just a daredevil out for kicks and giggles, maybe you're taking out technology-based villains to reverse-engineer their tech. The possibilities are as broad as your imagination, and most of them fit.

Why not write the same way for villains, then? I get that the City of Villains writers went for much more personality in the contacts, but what if they'd gone for the same "Mission Terminal" approach? Just a series of missions which tell you that if you go there and beat up these particular people, you can acquire that particular item. Why do you want it? Who knows? Maybe you want to sell it, maybe you want to keep it, maybe you don't even want it and just need and excuse to beat people up. Whole story arcs can work like this - they start off with wanting a simple relic, then it turns out you're embroiled in a complex situation, then you find the right people to beat up and the right items to steal to walk away the victory.

If anything, our writers are trying too damn hard to make a thrilling, cinematic story and so ending up with stories that are so specific they leave no room for interpretation. But if heroes can be written as simply wanting to help, then why can't villains be written as simply wanting "something?" This could plain money, it could be an artefact, it could be influence, it could be an excuse to kill people, it could be a challenge, it could be a huge number of things, all of them easily expressible by a wide variety of stories.

I like how the Spoony One expresses this notion when arguing against the Vince Ruso booking of making matches needlessly complex: "Just tell a basic wrestling angle. Wrestler A has a title. Wrestler B wants that title. You don't have to make it so complicated!" Really, villainy doesn't NEED to be complicated. It's a fairly basic motivation which gains depth through context and characterisation, and with the tools provided, I believe we can handle both.

That's not what I meant. For me personally, madness is not a sufficient explanation, because "madness" is just another way of saying we don't know why a person does the things he does. Consider the very simple (and VERY repetitive) line from Assassin's Creed civilians when they see the protagonist doing Parkour: "He must be mad!" If a character does something that seems completely out of the ordinary and we have no explanation for it, we conclude he must be insane, and insane people just do weird inexplicable stuff.

I'm not trying to judge, believe me. Character motivation is sacred to me, and whatever works for you, I can respect. I'm just sharing my view on the subject of madness and insanity.

Interesting point. So, what you're saying is that you enjoy villains who don't have to deal with guilt, essentially? They don't feel they're doing something wrong, even when other people do, so they don't have to feel bad about it, and by extension you don't have to feel bad about having them do it... I honestly hadn't thought of that. Oh, and do correct me if I presume too much, I'm just musing for the moment. I do like this idea, though - it gives you a villain who can do some pretty evil things, but who's still free from the moral backlash of being evil to begin with. It's a villain that, on a visceral level, is pretty easy to feel good about. I'll have to try that.

I think there's something to be said about "playing by different rules," though. When I say a villain recognises he's doing something evil but does it anyway, I don't mean that he does it BECAUSE he recognises it's evil. Often, my villains do evil deeds because they really don't care one way or the other. They know right from wrong, they just don't really mind doing the wrong thing if it suits their needs or, hell, even if it strikes their fancy.

Consider the basic double standard. If I infiltrate your organisation, steal your secrets, blow up your generators and kill your scientists, then that's just aggressive business, so what are you crying about? If you infiltrate my organisation and do the same, then you *******! How dare you! You'll pay for this! In this case, it's not that I play by my own rules ("the rules only apply to other people" isn't a rule), but rather it's that I do whatever I want, rules be damned. If they suit my objective, then why not make use of them? If they're against my objective, then why not break them?

In a way, villains who simply reject people's rules and play by their own are a lot more... Respectable? A lot easier to sympathise with, at least. That's how games like Saints Row, for instance, manage to be so easy to get into the spirit of even though you're running people over in the street, buying meth labs and running a prostitution ring. It's because the game sets up an alternate system of morality rules that, once you accept them, you can play by and still feel like you're doing the right thing, even though you're actually doing the wrong thing. Cops are bad, gang members are good, guns are lovely, that sort of thing.

By contrast, a villain who's aware of his villainy is a lot more amoral and a lot more difficult to sympathise with. It's the sort of villain that you just can't shame. You can tell him all the ways in which his plan is evil and repugnant and selfish and he'll just reply with something like "Oh, cry me a river!" A person playing by his own rules still respects SOME system of rules. A person who simply doesn't care about other people's rules is playing by no rules at all, except what suits his needs and objectives. That's a LOT harder to justify.

And yet... For some reason, these are the kind of villains I create the most and feel most comfortable playing. Part of it is precisely BECAUSE they don't feel the need to justify their objectives and their actions. They're simply strong enough to do what I want without needing anyone's approval. Just like heroes are a power fantasy in the sense that if I were one, I'd have the power to do the right thing, so villains are a power fantasy in the sense that if I were one, I'd have to power to not have to put up with other people's ********... So to speak. Not that I'm evil in real life, honest!

I find heroes and villains to represent two different kinds of release, both representing different sides of feeling powerless. Heroes represent release from the frustration of being unable to live up to our aspirations while villains represent release from the frustration of having to kowtow to other people. If you have EVER felt like you wanted you put your hand through your screen and punch another person over the Internet, you'll know what I mean. That's exactly what many of my villains do. When they need to step on someone to get what they want, they will. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, moral or amoral, legal or illegal. The only thing that does matter is what my villains want.

I think what you just described is essentially a higher ideals villain, and a pretty well justified one, at that. I actually have one of those, myself: Alexander believes that the world needs to be saved from evil and dreams of constructing a world where no-one has to fight to survive ever again. It's just that the way he goes about doing this is the way of a genocidal monster and unrelenting dictator, and his definition of "evil" is so loose as to include pretty much anyone he doesn't like. The man is polite, elegant and kind in his peaceful interactions. In his aggressive actions, however, he is a cold, calculating murderer with no sense of compassion, ethics or morality. If he deems you evil, you are nothing more than a piece of garbage.

Granted, that's probably not what you meant, but I'm simply listing someone whose goals are superficially positive and whose personality is welcoming and inspirational, but who is nevertheless completely rotten on the inside. That's my way of marrying the two ideas, at least. If you're talking about a good, kind person who regrets having to do the evil deeds he does and really would like to find a better way... Then I just don't think I could work with this person as a villain. Maybe a rogue, at most, but again - to me, these are hero material more than anything else. In a sense, giving a person who really, really wants to be good some plot reason to be unable to stop doing evil just bugs me.

I guess that's where I draw the line: My villains don't regret being villains. They may not always be happy with their lives, but it's not because they're really sorry about what they did. Usually, it's because they can't have what they want.

Please understand that I say this with the utmost respect for you, Arcana, but this is a very simplisting way to look at heroes and villains. "Villains commit crimes and heroes stop them" may be the basis of super hero comics, but it's also hugely limited and largely uninspired. It's little more than a game of cops and robbers with set roles that you can put any hero or villain in and the story would work just as well. I happen to believe that villains aspire to do more than JUST commit crimes and heroes aspire to do more than JUST stop crimes.

Oftentimes it's said you can't stop a crime before it happens. Ignoring the fact that you CAN (act on a death threat, find who sent it, put him under surveillance, catch him hiring a hitman), an other analogy I feel is better suited here: You can stop a fire before it happens. It's called fire prevention. There are more ways to help fight crime than actually stopping crimes in progress. Developing better security systems is one way, improving police response times is another, infiltrating known criminal organisation and arresting their members before they have a chance to commit more crimes than they already have is another still.

Similarly, villains don't always have to be plotting crimes for heroes to stop. This is where my villains' greater plans and motivation come into play. Even though their ultimate objectives are something heroes would want to stop, the way to achieving those objectives isn't always done through committing direct crimes. Tyler, my cyborg villain, wants to destroy all humans and replace them with a race of sentient machines. The trouble is, he only has one truly sentient machine so far, and he's currently working on creating more. He's not really committing any crimes, he's just working on his science. Any crimes he commits to procure materials, steal research or take people's brains to use in his machines are only incidental to his greater goal.

This is an assertion that I really don't like. Ask Bill Z Bubba if his heroes are selfless Honestly, though, I almost never write heroes whose actual goals are fighting crime. To most of them, that's just incidental to their larger objectives, a side job, if you will. Yeah, it's the right thing to do, so if one of my heroes learned about a major crime about to be committed, then of course he'd jump at the chance and lend a hand. But they don't spend their time patrolling the streets or listening to the police radio waiting for crimes to happen in order to respond to them. On the contrary, they have their own lives, their own work, their own pursuits that they spend the most time engaged in.

The Steel Rook runs a major corporation engaged in security technology, as well as a network of various science labs. He only intervenes in person when his security drones can't handle a situation just on their own AI. Inna is an ancient cosmic being heir to the very power of creation, so she spends most of her time training her body and mind to channel and collect that power, as well as tracking down Kragoss, the entity which seeks to usurp that power and bring an end to all created things. Yes, she helps people in need, but that's part of her training. Commander Tarara is a time traveller from over a million years into a perfect utopian future, trapped here with her squad when that utopian future disappeared when someone messed with the timeline. She helps people because she's a good person, but most of what she does is look for ways to restore her timeline and save her perfect world.

To say that heroes are reacting to some kind of need of others is just limiting to their potential motivations. I really do prefer heroes who have some kind of project that they're pouring their energy into, rather than looking for needs to satisfy. There's nothing wrong with that, obviously, but I can only really have one or two heroes that do that before I want new things.

Similarly, villains don't always have to be proactive, either. Granted, I'm sort of arguing against myself here, but villains can react to hero actions just as much as heroes can react to villain ones. Hell, practically the entire new Mercy Island storyline is a reactive one. Longbow have pushed into the Isles and occupied Fort Darwin. Villains need to react to this development and push them back. More abstractly, if the Steel Rook developed a full-proof security system that ensured bank vaults can never again be broken into, then villains would need to react to this and find new ways to break open those new vaults. In fact, a lot of my villains are children of circumstance. I mentioned Duriel, my insect hive queen, recently, and her only reason to be on Earth is she reacted to an opportunity given by her ally, who offered interstellar travel in return for military assistance.

Now, granted, you can spin all of that to explain how heroes are finding some need and reacting to it while villains are manufacturing that need and taking opportunities to act on it, but what I'm saying is you don't HAVE to. It limits the story potential and pigeon-holes characters more than is strictly necessary.

And this is where things get muddy. Are you serving other people's interest or your own when you're getting paid to be a hero? Are you serving other people's interests if your reason isn't to help others, but as a way to feel better about yourself? Are you serving yourself or others when you're the devoted, loyal servant of a villain? Are you serving yourself when you truly believe that killing lots of people will make the world a better place? Again, you can spin that, but I honestly see no benefit to doing so. It imposes abstract rules based on semantics that force stories into a certain type of narrative without really contributing much to the quality of those stories.

You know what? I don't mind that. I've always been willing to pay for comfort. If that means paying for a 3D movie and then paying to NOT see it in 3D, that's better than not seeing the movie at all because some ******* marketing exec decided to not run a single non-3D showing in the only decent cinema in town.

And now you know why I'm violently opposed to 3D whenever it's suggested for City of Heroes. Well, part of the reason, anyway. I had the same experience with Kung Fu Panda 2 - the ONLY non-3D showing that day was scheduled to start half an hour before I even checked for tickets, and then my friend couldn't make the next day, so the thing fell through almost entirely.

3D is a gimmick that I hope would just die already. It hurts my head, it's more expensive so it's butting out regular, non-3D stuff out of the spotlight and it really, REALLY doesn't add all that much to the experience. And now people are trying to sell me 3D TV sets and games that boast about having mandatory 3D, like that Green Lantern thing. "Now with double the headaches!"

And that's AFTER the change which let contacts sell enhancements in the first place. Back at Launch, they only sold inspirations. With stores not on the map, you'd be forgiven for thinking enhancements could only ever be gotten from drops. The only reason I even suspected that stores existed is I ran across the Science store in Steel Canyon, just because it's located in a place that newbies on foot would pass by frequently to get to the winding staircase.

Funny story here. The stores were not on the in-game map, but they WERE on the paper map that came in the game's box, as fairly large dots on a fairly small-scale map of the city. I went around looking for them, comparing the in-game map to the paper map, and eventually found all of them. Since they weren't on the map, I had to memorise their locations so I wouldn't have to bring out the fold-out paper map every time, and thereafter spent half my time on a team directing people to the specific origin store in the specific zone we were in. And even THEN, that only helped me up until level 30, because the 30+ vendors are not in stores and their locations are not on the paper map. I had to as on the forums for those, but by the time I really needed them, I'd already found VidiotMaps.

So, yeah - if anyone finds it odd that I know the layout of Paragon City by heart to the point of never having to open a map, that's why - because I had to deal with a map with nary a third of the markers on it that we have now.

To each his own, and that's not really the point. Not all women have shoulders narrower than their hips. Lisa Cross is hardly the only "big" woman out there, she's just the only one I could think to name by name.

I don't know the genders of the developers off-hand, especially those of new names on the forums. If I got the gender wrong, then I apologise. It won't happen again.

Either way, what Dink did is awesome regardless.

*edit*
Also, fixed.