Blood Red Arachnid

And for this, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

No. Stop whining.

If you want to bring up AT modifiers, then that would contradict being power growth since some AT's have a decrease in modifiers as they level. In fact, most do in some form. AT modifiers cannot be called anything more than specialization, unless you count negative growth as "power growth". From the context of this discussion, I assume you don't.

Power growth by definition of having more powers assumes that players have taken those powers. Anyone has seen enough characters with horrible power choices to know that higher level charcter =/= stronger character. This doubly goes with the enhancement system, which is the game's equipment engine. Later powers are also not necessarily "better" than the previous powers (See DPAT and situational usefulness). This also doesn't deal with performance at those levels, which can be horribly skewed to situations or in Blaster's case just downright useless to get more and more and more attacks. In these cases, the AT is objectively becoming weaker despite having more powers.

Strength by proxy means the proxies are powerful, not the character. Making fire into a sword shape instead of just shooting it from your hands doesn't suddenly mean that you've become bullet proof. Likewise, level shifting doesn't encompass the entirety of scaling enemies. If the devs were to make a Level 50 Hellion, they certainly wouldn't just take the previous enemy and change his level value to 50.



So longbow aren't not the same as their lower level counterparts despite having no graphical change, sharing the same name and the same basic weaponry they started with at level 10? But, since the nullifier get a beanbag launcher, that means that the nullifier rifle that was used at level 10 that you are immune to are suddenly better because of the beanbag launcher. If you want to say that because I said level 1 longbow (in actually the staple longbow start at 10 and 20) has the entire case for the idea being incorrect, that is just nitpicking.

Everyone knows that enemies get more abilities as they level up, but the presence of an incendiary grenade doesn't mean you are fighting completely different longbow. It is still the same longbow with a new toy. For this, Longbow are not representing a gradual power progression that somehow grants immunity to previous encounters, but representing relative power stasis where the new tricks of villains they fight are dealt with by having new tricks of their own. Their own skills with the weapons don't reflect growth, but refinement, just like the superpowered enemies they face.

For this, the additional enemies that are tied in with any group that has relative power stasis do not break this mode of stasis. The 5th Column throwing out werewolfs and mechs doesn't change that the grunts are still using the same weapons, and ergo imply stasis. The additional strength of the new enemies do not reflect an inexplicable ascent to being untouchable, but an easily trackable expansion via power diversity. Now, there is a relationship between power growth and power diversity in the sense that being able to do more things and being more refined at doing them equates more power, but nonetheless this doesn't provide a means to grant immunity to previous weapons.


Facts say nothing. It is only through personal interpretation that we can reason about them. Now, whether or not an opinion can be correct or incorrect depends heavily on the way in which it is handled and the realm in which it is presented. If someone says "this is my opinion of things and nothing more", then this cannot be incorrect due to evidence because it is merely the statement about the position that someone holds, and thus is self evident due to that someone holding it and saying so. Someone stating an opinion can be incorrect if they are not stating their own opinion or lying about it, but this is largely inconsequential to the world since people act about the opinions that they do hold, and not the ones they don't.

A person's opinion being correct or incorrect only matters when it is not being stated as an opinion, or not operated on as an opinion. When it is being states as fact is when it becomes subject to evidence and evaluation by other parties. Case in point, the reason why your interpretation of the story is being debated at all isn't because you hold such an interpretation, but because you are both behaving as if it is not an interpretation and you are also not stating it as an interpretation.






Since I have been hard wired to avoid double posts from previous forums, I'll just add this second section to it.

According to alternate interpretations to the "inexplicable growth to immunity" view, the first example you provided above, however factual, is completely meaningless to the consistency of the game. You might as well say the game is inconsistent because roses are red, and violets are purple.

As for the second statement, it is false. The "narrative" of the game is quite abstract, since I haven't seen an explicit statement that says "A Citizen throwing a Malotov Cocktail at a Bone Daddy should not be able to fend off or defeat a Bone Daddy". I have seen the game imply quite the opposite with an entire power origin: Natural. According to Natural Power origins, there are superheroes who are "super" only in the sense that they have trained hard enough and worked out enough to become a superhero, fighting with swords, guns, and smoke. Not only does this imply that every citizen in the game could go Green Arrow on the bad guys, but it means that every citizen is being lazy and/or suffering from a mentality that has prevented them from doing this. Nothing more, since as we've seen from natural heroes, all it really does take to take down a Bone Daddy is to chuck a big enough rock at them.

Stating that natural heroes are unnatural is an internal contradiction to the very definition of natural heroes, so such a statement cannot be true.

You know, you said that the consistency of this game was quantifiable. So, what quantity is it measured in? Is it Joules? Kilograms? Amperes? Slugs? Surely the consistency you are referring to as quantifiable isn't the statistics definition where you are measuring the already numerical outputs and measuring the deviation of these numerical outputs, because that isn't a quantity. That is a scale, relative to each phenomena in an experiment that requires a preconceived hypothesis to be tested against to have any real value to an end.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph.../OpinionMyopia

The interesting thing about the leveling system of this game is that you don't really have stats that increase as you level up. Your HP increases and your damage increases to scale with the HP and damage increase of enemies and other players. Otherwise, the superiority of any party is carried out through a function of each other's levels, and little more than that. The power system in the game, therefore, is relative just to the immediate spectrum of levels near any players. The only balancing on enemies that needs to be done is done so due to power slotting and expanded abilities, and not under the assumption that enemies should get bigger and bigger guns due to the inexplicable nature of heros to become immune to those guns despite having no power to explain why.

There are several groups in the game that persist from low to high levels. Taking longbow as an example, since they're enemies that span ranges from 1 to 54. The grunts you fight at level 1 for the most part are identical to the grunts you fight at level 54. Now, if you take the position that level = absolute power, then you are also taking the assumption that the Longbow grunts can go from pushovers to incarnate strength inexplicably, and saying that this is inconsistent. The basis for this inconsistence being that other groups you find at those levels do not grow in those levels, and thus somehow our characters should have magically become bullet proof to their guns as we went on.

The important factor that everyone forgets is this: Why is it that paragon studios would arbitrarily make it so one group (the longbow) rises forever in levels, and another (Vozhlok) just abruptly stops after awhile? Do they just put enemy groups on a big dartboard, throw darts while blindfolded, and go "Them! Those guys we'll put up to level 54!"? The real explanation isn't as exciting: the levels of enemies is directly related to how relevant they are in relation to the game's story. The Longbow continue to show up in stories and plots all the way up to the Rikti War Zone, and thus have levels to reflect the content in which they are written. The Vozhlok, however, have their stories end quickly, and so cut out at a much smaller level. There are groups of people who want continuations of older enemy groups, like the Vozhlok and the Tsoo. If continuations were made, they would no doubt be at higher levels to be relevant to the gradual progression in levels the players have.

Take this into account, and it is easy to see the leveling system in the game as a different and more logical way than one that is attempting to maintain that magic bullet immunity necessitates that future enemies always have flashier explosions and bigger guns. The levels, with all their relativity in power, are to reflect a chronological progression and not a power progression.

There are all the little details as to how conning works and experience plays a role and how all Enemy 1 vs Enemy 2 would have to occur in the same timeframe and thus necessitate being scaled to the same level, but that is all tertiary to the real point here: You indeed can "see" something different because the way you "see" things (and thus your subjective opinion) isn't the only way to see them. This "my opinion is right, all other opinions must be wrong" attitude should've been broken by middle school.

The violation of consistency is opinionated because it is based wholly on the assumption that the game is trying to tell a story in a particular way. If one sees the level progression in the game in a different way than another person, then the violations in consistency of the "attempted story" become little more than subjective. Likewise, anything that is not plainly stated cannot be objectively inconsistent since it requires interpretation on the part of the audience.

For future reference, all things "can or can not be proven" since there is no alternative.


EDIT:

I actually played an online game once that didn't have great character progression and levels, but still garnered many ours of gameplay. In, Monster Hunter Tri, a great game IMO, there were no levels for you to progress through. All of the strength that your character gained was through equipment that could be swapped, taken out, and even outright ignored on many instances. Even then, the skillsets (the main benefits of wearing armor) are largely customize-able, meaning that a character's strength came largely from a player's ingenuity in making their build.

The real progression of the game was the skill of the player, and not the strength of what the player played. Quests and game content was made to be gradually unlocked at a pace where the player possessed the skill capable of defeating the next round of monsters, not where you're equipment or any sort of level was supposed to come into play.

Making an MMO based on these qualities alone is hard, which is why I believe the MMO version (Monster Hunter Frontier, a foreign MMO only) had to introduce several levels of strength in items to keep players playing.

... you really can't tell? Guess I should give some examples then.


This is a case where his "opinion" is listed as fact. Contrast it to this:

In which it is clearly listed as opinion. There are words such as "I see", "should have", "I want", all of which put this phrase into the context of personalized ideals. In this sense we are dealing explicitly with abstraction and hypothesis. This realm of reasoning is seated to be subjective, and are unambiguously opinion. Also pay note that there is a distinct personal insertion in to the paragraph, indicating that it is Sam's point of view that Sam is discussing.

The previous statement was not. It was concrete, laying down statements as fact as follows:

*The game is consistent with power growth in content that is not incarnate trials.
*The game is inconsistent with power growth in content that is in incarnate trials.

Neither of which are to be disputed or up for debate. This phrase was put out there not to express his opinion, but to correct me on a matter of fact that I got wrong. Is it any wonder that I would react with hostility?