Arcanaville

That's an extremely superficial set of information stated to seem detailed. Tyrant being identified as "Tyrant" is itself a retcon: the resistance might call him a tyrant but that's not his title nor his moniker. And we didn't just "know" that Mother Mayhem ran an asylum, we *went there* and defeated her, and this guy called Malaise. Only not anymore, not in the same way.

The devs tacitly admit that the Praetorians are a giant retcon because they had to forklift Maria's entire arc because the players *complained* it was now totally contradictory to the Going Rogue version of the Praetorians. Primarily because in the original canon, the Praetorians were launching secret attacks against Primal Earth first and Antimatter even had a secret base here. In the original canon Praetoria might have been recovering from a war, but so was Primal Earth, and we *visit* Praetorian Earth several times, seeing neither Praetoria nor the Hamidon blasted wastelands.

And the big spoiler reveal in the Underground trial (which I won't specifically spoil here) is itself contradicted by the original canon because in the original canon the Praetorians had contact with other dimensions besides ours. That makes the whole "Primal Earth must be destroyed now" thing totally ludicrous, unless you rewrite canon so we're the first. In fact, that glitch wasn't totally erased in the rewrite of Tina and Maria's arcs, and is still technically a serious canon discrepancy.

Canon is not about getting personalities correct, its about maintaining the history of past events.

Actually, I'm thinking its supposed to be more this:



In Somalia during the whole "Blackhawk Down" thing gunship pilots had to make assaults in the city, with their rotor blades sometimes scraping the tops of walls. And the MH6s were not even as armored as the Apache above. Helicopters have disadvantages in that sort of urban environment. Perhaps the bat "wing" is a military prototype of a vtol apache-lilke gunship with no vulnerable top rotor or tail rotor.

In such an environment, being excessively streamlined would be an unnecessary luxury. I'm guessing what I'm seeing are a pair of armored engines for redundancy like an A-10, an armored high visibility cockpit, and a pair of gunpods in swivel mounts sort of like the swivel gatling gun under the nose of the Apache, only with more firepower.

Some of those parts look like the pivot into wings and the gunpods appear hinged to shift upward, so maybe this is a vtol that converts into something almost like an armored hovercraft.

Except for almost everything we knew about the Praetorians.

Pet peeve: predestination "paradoxes" are philosophical paradoxes moreso than physical ones. They are one of the more well-behaved versions of time travel that one can hypothesize. I tend to be a proponent of Novikov self consistency myself. In that sense, I guess you could say I like predestination paradoxes.

Saying there's a basic template for the manipulation sets doesn't mean they are all identical. The fact that you see dark falling within the general limits of what's already been established for the manipulation sets means you agree dark falls within the template currently established for the manipulation sets as I intended to describe it.

There's also a basic template for the blaster primaries as well, even though they are not all alike either. But we all recognize a blaster primary when we see it, and a radical departure from the basics would be relatively easy to notice. Some have snipes, some don't; some have rains, some don't. But there's still an obvious overall pattern to them. The devs try to play with that pattern to a degree, but they don't radically alter it.

Ouroboros doesn't exist so people can't retcon stuff. Ouroboros Menders are not fourth wall breaking editors. You're talking about time travel, not retcons.

I'm aware of that, but that's not quite the same thing. That was not a case of the devs considering a damage buff, and being tentative about whether it would be too high. That was the devs not willing at that time to overturn a design decision made by the original Peacebringer designers to combine AoE attacks with knockback scatter as a counterbalance.

It would be no different if you asked the devs to make Rage perma and have no crash and they said they thought that would generate too much damage out of the box: that doesn't signal being tentative about damage, that's a very specific case being analyzed.

The fact that time travel exists in City of Heroes makes that sort of retcon even less excusable. It might be cheap, but time travel isn't a retcon. The past still happened, and it doesn't have to be revoked from anyone's backstory, because from their perspective it still happened. And the unaltered past can be viewed in the Ouroboros, so it exists on a concrete level. It might be cheap depending on how its done, but its still better than "I changed my mind, it all happened differently."

The most logical explanation for a 12 hour "physical" move in a datacenter in 2011 is a set of virtualized servers is being relocated to a new virtual server cluster, and the 12 hours encompasses the time to transfer the data to a physically different SAN and restart everything.

No idea if City of Heroes runs on bare metal or virtual systems, but these days the unusual circumstance is running on bare metal, not running virtualized.

I'm pretty sure that specific functionality doesn't exist within the game engine in any form.

I would consider the changes to Energy Aura to be a powerset retcon.

Somewhat to that point and somewhat ironically, I (my main) have a lot of the "difficult" master badges and arm missing a lot of the "easy" ones. I have Master of Tin Mage, Master of Lambda, Master of Keyes. I'm missing Master of STF, Master of LGTF, Master of ITF, Master of 5SF, and Master of 5TF. And the reason is that I've been fortunate that the few people running Master runs on the Incarnate trials and the two Incarnate task forces in the past on my server have generally gone out of their way to ask me to join. So no matter how intrinsically difficult they are, I eventually get them. But Master of STF runs for example are actually rarer, and I never see when they happen, and there is zero chance that's going to magically happen on the typical PUG run. I have a better chance of soloing a Master of STF run than having it happen randomly.

Hopefully, I'll get on a successful Underground run soon and at that point I'll have all of the Master badges related to incarnate content. But it might be years before I have all the Master badges for the older task force content. "Easier to execute" is not the same thing as "easier to acquire."

Positron by his own admission has, by his own definition, allowed retcons to occur. He all but admits such in his post, when he contextually links to Going Rogue and the Praetorian Clockwork in his references to "bending" (his quotes, not mine) and retconing history. The Praetorians themselves are a significant retcon, even if their original usage was limited prior to Going Rogue.

No, its not a good reason. The reason "I need more different stuff to do" applies equally to people who want to continue to play at the level cap and those that want to play different alts. In this game, we don't prioritize one over the other, and everyone who either knows that or should know that should also know that sort of reason is therefore inoperative here on its face.

A good reason would be some reason that *justified* prioritizing the players that play at 50 over the players that play at 20 beyond "we all get there." We all generally get there, but we don't all stay there.

If the early levels are just transitory, and there's nothing to do at the higher levels except absurd stuff, then I'm assuming you're here to subsidize my play. Which I do appreciate everyone who chooses to do so, by the way.

That's not a good reason to focus most or all of the new content on the level cap. That's not even a bad reason to focus most or all of the new content on the level cap.

Its called a flight sequencer bug, I think. It never happens to me deliberately, only randomly.

Canon Cannon

Thank god for that.


Wait, this is a good thing, right?

Also known as the "Scotty rule" of time estimates: always factor in a few hours for scotch in between miracles.

So the servers' location is being upgraded? Are we getting the rack with the better view now?

I doubt that would be better, but if some guarantee were worthcoming I'm sure it could be arranged.

Basically, yes.


What you've done is created a system whereby each individual player has a *separate* canon, but there is still canon. The question is still, should the writers of the game be allowed to change *your* history as you see it. It happened to you, you experienced it, you incorporated it into your story, only now it didn't happen.

I21 destroys Galaxy City. It was here, and now its not here (or at least, only its ruins are here). What if the devs decided to retcon it out of existence instead. There never was a Galaxy City. It wasn't destroyed, it was just never here at all. That's fundamentally different.

I thought about it, but that would only encourage people to deliberately avoid Antimatter altogether to get the badge. You'd have people "forget" to leave the hospital to guarantee getting the badge.

Psychologically speaking, I think there's a big difference between a league voluntarily deciding to have some people sit it out in the safety of the hospital, and the game presenting that choice individually to each player and rewarding them for not participating.

True, but in the case of Willpower the *vast majority* opinion was that it sucked, not just that it wasn't great. In the case of TM, the majority opinion (to a lesser degree) was that it was "average." Even by the devs own admission TM was aiming to be a competitor to Kin and Rad, two of the sets considered among the most powerful. I just think they outdid themselves a little.

There are some trial badges that are components of the master badges that can fail due to problems outside the control of any one player. You can lack the firepower to do Separated properly in BAF, and then end up with too many buffed 9CUs that most players do not know how to deal with. Avoids the Green Stuff and Loves a Challenge can take practice even if you know what you're supposed to do. But most of them just require executing a proscribed strategy consistently, and human error factors into most failures of most of those badges. Failure and repetition is often the cost of formulating a strategy that eliminates random avoidable factors.