Chase_Arcanum

Very good.

That brings the term "Mary Sue" back to a very narrow and useful context.

... if only more people used it that way.

Yes,

Generally, characters arising from roleplaying games can be natural targets for accusations of "Mary Sue-dom." Accurately, true. I've had GM's that made NPC's that they then made more central to the story (and the story's outcome) than the players. I've had players-turned-GM that put their original characters in influentiual and lofty roles in their worlds. While not NECESSARILY a case of wish fulfillment... it sure looks that way sometimes, doesn't it?

"Mary Sues" often are seen as being more virtuous, more heroic, more capable, and more correct than seems possible... but we're also in a genre where the greatest tales are ones of heroism, skill, and investigation leading to solving great troubles. Are all such characters Mary Sues? Can you not BE a flawed character that, when faced with a challenge, made the RIGHT decision?

Many of our characters could be considered "Mary Sues" simply because... well, they're heroic, our stories center around them, and we assume their roles online. Again, its' overused. ((I personally enjoyed the irony of watching a roleplayer snub more heroic "Mary Sue" roleplayers for not having the depth of character that his immortal-around-since-before-creation-shattered-soul-unjustly-condemned-to-hell had. Wish fulfillment comes in many forms)). Again, its an unfair and inaccurate label that just illustrates the meaninglessness the label has become.

It's rather common for even professional authors to add characteristics of themselves into their work. It isn't necessarily "wish fulfillment" as much as 'writing what you know" but it is to a small degree self-projection. When they become the heroes- the ones who prevail- in their stories, are we reaching Mary Sue-dom? Remember that Stephen King has done this- frequently making authors the heroes of several of his books ... and you can even look at Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as idealized fantasies of youthful adventure by Mark Twain. Mary Sue?

In (critically-acclaimed) Grand Torino, Eastwood's character appears initially too flawed to be a Mary Sue-- he's prejudiced, alienated with his family, generally angry at the world, and dying of lung cancer... but its a story of him overcoming that prejudice and curbing that anger, so they become plot points to hilight his strength of cancer.. Heck, even the impending death emboldens him to his final act of bravery. The character's a hero, eventually showing a strength of character that many would envy. Wish Fulfillment? Larger than life? not so flawed? Mary Sue? I'd never call it that, but others have.


It's an overused term that outlived its usefulness, now so broadly applied and generalized that it lost any value it may have had.

Very very true...

Project Destiny was a constant annoyance that chafed at every villain story I ever made. I didn't want to be pitted against the guy in this great destiny. I wanted to write my characters' own destiny and found my characters' stories constantly hijacked by the pervasive "Destiny" arcs

That's a perfect example of overdone use of Mary Sue, though I think (hope) you do it in jest.

Let's see, a character that predates the lead dev's involvement and was always intended to be a central iconic counterbalance for Statesman, is the name taken for the title that deals with creating the counter to the city of heroes, where the lead developer took the mantle of Statesman?

Mary Sue focuses on wish fulfillment- on the character itself being the core achiever of incredible exception. CoV, he's the antagonist, and one that you, as the player, eventually work against, you "defeat" him by proving your mettle against him. While I'm not a fan of the "destined ones" arc, Presenting a powerful and immortal threat that your protagonists BEAT is hardly Mary Sue.

I always hated the term as grossly overgeneralized, but I went and grabbed the wilipedia entry.

A Mary Sue "is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the "Mary Sue" character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an "author's pet.""

This differs from the OP's in a number of ways- the OP looks at general favorable elements, and if they seem "larger than life" they seem to be "Mary Sue" characteristics. If that's taken forward, virtually any story's protagonist could be considered a Mary sue. Ghost Widow does have significant character flaws and some weaknesses, she's not always right and she's not always on the right side when she wins.

While some may argue that she follows the geeky "wish fulfillment" of a dark, strong lady that's still vulnerable and in need of rescue, but that itself may be an intentional plot lure. That fantasy "lead" becomes the story behind the aspirations of Scirocco... who tragically fails.

2) Statesman: Well, anytime you have a character that you develop to play, there's an easy "wish fulfillment" case to be made, and as others have mentioned, Jack has said that he made Statesman in a Pen n Paper game. That argument is weighed against the fact that Jack played as GM a lot- he had to make characters of many various supporting roles that he couldn't get too attached to.

Not only that, but as Statesman was originally presented in the game- at the time when Jack's influence would have been strongest- he was heavily flawed: not in power, but the effect that power had on him: a growing gap between himself and mankind.

He followed a common thread in superman comics at that time-- an invulnerable and immortal hero of man that was nevertheless growing more and more distant from man. Statesman's generation gap was bad enough-- he's got your great-grandparents' values, interests, & experiences in the modern era-- but he's also been alienated by his apparent immortality-- nothing isolates you more than realizing you're the last man standing at ground zero of a nuke blast. People often associate him with a blend of "Captain America" and "Superman" but I'd throw in a bit of "Dr Manhattan" there... at least how he was initially portrayed.

We've seen less of that lately, though- the stories humanized him more & seemed to help him anchor himself with mankind. The stories have him dealing with the distance rather successfully and the game has him becoming more involved (in the addition of his task force.) I kinda wished they'd taken the opposite tack-- as events progress and more and more is sacrificed, Statesman becomes increasingly detached from man... until a new generation of heroes could step up to the task of filling the vacuum left behind.


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Seriously, though, beware of overusing the "Mary Sue" label. While it may be popular with sneering critics that want to tear down others, its very easy to overuse it- disregard the parts that don't fit just so you can diminish the value of something you don't like, regardless of whether it's otherwise solid storytelling.

... Dammit! Come on! It's morning coffee time. Post this kind of stuff when I don't have something extremely hot to shoot out my nose, please.

Heck, Imagine if they gave you, the MA owner, the ability to assume control of NPC's in the mission, like mastermind pets or arena pet duels. You could have a hybrid "live GameMastering" of an AE mish that blends both PvE and PvP (err.. PvGM). You'd ahve to probably scale down those rewards to avoid the obvious farming potential, but it'd be kinda like what the original Neverwinter Nights GM tools offered.

That was by design, though.

Remember, ED came about close to the launch of CoV. They anticipated many supergroups securing Item of Power Buffs (which, as an external buff, are applied after ED). They always anticipated alternative buffs to be applied on top of the ED numbers. While HOW MUCH of a buff they allowed room for is unknown, nothing in the accessible leaks would have taken you to pre-ED levels... other-player-buffs will still have a place in taking you to the hard caps.

(Granted, there have been some dev allusions that SOME IO enhancements have gone too far in some places, so they might have to be selective on what buffs they offer via Incarnates...)

I guess that's a good way to look at it.

I usually equate it to some of DC's "Infinite Crisis / One Year Later" or Marvel's "Heroes Reborn" titles. That keeps things consistent with the comic book genre.

... and besides, both of those served as a way to cut free of the past and re-imagine and modernize the world in a way that satisfies old users and can attract new ones. CoH2 would have similar purposes of modernization, re-imagination, and opening a new game to old and new audiences alike. To me, it seems like a perfect "end."

Heh... some of us just like taking the "Crazy" part of this thread seriously.

And some of us just like prodding the crazies on.

And some of us are a little of both.

Agreed. Take a moment to STUDY the melee attacks. Virtually all of them are (rightly) full-body engagements. There's a leaning forward posture to dual blades, punches are leaned into, you commit into a sword swing with the whole center of gravity. You can't just run the punch emote on the top of the body while setting the legs to running without getting into... well... laughably ridiculous animations. You'd have to have virtually all new upper-body animations to fit the lower-body movement so at that point why the heck do you separate them?

As I, a casual PvP'er undersood it:

Take a team of 8 buffers, They're all force-multipliers getting the full effect of the force multiplier... effectively hitting every hard cap imaginable at PvE levels. Match them against a team of 8 non buffers- let's use an assembly of 8 blasters and scrappers. No force multiplier in effect, nobody able to get near the buffable caps.

Not much of a contest.

So, the idea was to make it so the 8 buffers' force multipliers would give SOME stacking benefit, but not such an extreme difference.


The problem as I saw it was that it just made it tougher to PUG pvp. If you were a buffer in a field the team was already strong in, they didn't see you as providing much contribution... And it didn't really stop the team-composition issues. People just built a team with a specific blend of innate powers, buffs, and debuffs to give the broadest range of benefit with least possible "lost" to the stacked buffs. Where the intent of I13's changes was to broaden the range of playable PvP archetypes, it made these teams much more selective in who they took!

(One of the guiding principles I've heard about PvP is you don't give any quarter-- you engage with every advantage imaginable and preferrably when every disadvantage is on your foe. PvP teams don't forget buffs or debuffs as much as their PvE counterparts. In PvE, the AI is stupid, predictable, and rather forgiving of mistakes. In PvP, your adversary is usually... well, stupid and predictable, too... and generally they have worse grammar, but your teammates are thoroughly unforgiving and consider you to be dumb as rocks the moment you let your buffs drop when engaging the enemy.

Incarnate system full-blown--- I could see adding 2-3 "levels" at once, but since posi said their ultimate goal is to add something incarnate to all future issues, I wouldn't expect more.

The coming storm won't be an invasion from Praetoria. That wouldn't fit with the broad allusions we've heard since. The "Coming Storm" that is alluded to seems to be affecting the whole multiverse... seems to be akin to things like the "infinite earths" DC crisis. My guess is we're already seeing some of the initial effects of the storm ever since dark mirror introduced our dopplegangers.


Since this is a thread for baseless conjecture, here's mine for the "coming storm":

Whoever sets things in motion (a nemesis plot?) he may be inspired by Recluse's Victory and/or Project Destiny. In those, Recluse isn't satisfied with knowing that he wins on some other dimension, he want to bind that dimension to this one, bringing his victory here... colliding those dimensions and all their occupants together.

The difference here, though, is this is a "storm" of dimensions colliding into themselves... coalescing with primal earth. It will set off wars and struggles of epic proportion as reality itself twists and cracks to make room for conflicting histories and the myriad possibilities whittling down to one true reality. Some of our doppleganger encounters are from the earliest incidences... the worlds closet to our own starting to merge over... we're not "merged" with them due to our experineces in sidestepping outside the timestream / dimension hopping. Things will only grow more dangerous as the storm proceeds. Incarnates... spread across all these issues... will deal with these cosmic metaspace collisions. We're talking Issues 20, 21, 22+

After the multiverse crashes, one world will emerge. Mender Silos is trying to set things in motion to guarantee his desired outcome. Our mystery letter-writer (Tyrant?) has his own objectives. Their goal is to influence what this world will be- perhaps to be the gods that make the next world, whether benevolent or in malice. We fight for or against these parties to save what we hold dear or grasp at the power we want for ourselves... battling to the very last moment of existence... when all goes white.

At that point, a new city will emerge. Its past and present will be crafted from the remnants of the once-divided universes, and people will remember it as if it had always been that way... because it has. Parts will resemble Praetoria, Paragon, and even the Rogue Isles (all ultramoded) and its inhabitants will be us... and not. This begins CoH's equivalent of DC's "One Year Later" and Marvel's "Heroes Reborn"-- a reimagining of our world and the heroes within it. A universe that's not quite like the one we see as afterimages as we dream of battles that we don't really remember participating in.

It'll be a new city... and world... that's in desperate need of heroes, again. The City of Heroes will be over. Welcome to City of Heroes 2.0.

Meh... DR was needed for PvP because there were too many places where the stacking that was available really exceeded the engine's acceptable parameters. Too many ways to make things ridiculously one-sided...

In PvE, that's less of an issue. NPC's don't complain about facing overwhelming odds, and PC's that feel unchallenged could always use the difficulty slider. You could negate some of the reason for DR in PvE by increasing the range available at the difficulty slider to assure a challenge for everyone... For that matter, if DR was applied, players could reduce the effective impact simply by reducing their difficulty levels. There would be nerdrage, but it wouldn't be nearly as big of an impact on play as it did for PvP, simply due to the nature of PvE

Agreed, though I never thought that the Incarnate effects would be THAT game breaking that they alone would make this a requirement. When they applied ED, they set the thresholds as they were with a number of enhancements in mind-- IOP's, for example... and I'd bet that the concept behind IO's had already been considered. While incarnates probably weren't, you should be able to make each slot meaningful without taking things beyond that design threshold...

Heh... bunch of us at work got that app on our droids/smartphones and rountinely drive a particular co-worker mad.

The big red ball wouldn't work because physics items like a free floating ball aren't shared over the net. This could possibly be coded without doing the shared physics engine part of things.

For example:

You have the soccer ball animation playing & a "pass" temp power appears in try, you target someone and hit "pass." That person gets a timed prompt, and if he accepts, the game does an attack animation that appears as a "pass" to the recipient, then the recipient starts the soccer-ball-playing animations.

You probably couldn't make it a fully-fledged soccer game, but you could have some simple guessing mechanics to make it fun for those waiting moments. Give the passer a 3 pass animations "" and make the receiver pick one. If he picks the same one, he gets "whacked" by a ball that bounces out of view... the sender gets a point. If he picks the others, he successfully catches it and can "pass" it to another (or return it). You have a simple "killball" game for a small team to play while waiting for people to assemble for raids, based on basic "shell game" mechanics and non-physics animations

ditto

That's my point. Pre-I13 PvP was at a crossroads- either do something drastic, hoping to increase participants, or let it continue to fade into obscurity, because it's a resource drain. They tried the drastic change and it failed.

It's now at the point where you have to seriously question the resources it demands. Setting things back to I13 just means spending resources on a aspect of play that brings marginal & diminishing value to the overall base just so it can continue being of marginal & diminishing value to the overall base.

We need to expand that relevance to convince the devs that it isn't wasted resources. Ironic as it sounds, we need to get more people to play the current system to encourage the devs to revisit it and CHANGE the current system.

IRL, I always was a big, solid, precise, but... well, not slow but... deliberate hitter, my styles is more like a bear's than a cat's. I also rely more on my ability to deflect/absorb a hit than dodge it. I hate that. I've always admired those agile in body and mind- the ones that can't necessarily land as heavy of a blow, but have the precision, the speed, and the presence of mind to plan combinations and anticipate foe action so incredibly well.

This game (as with most MMO's) lacks solid dodge animations. I know the reasons WHY someone with superreflexes keeps feet so damn firm on the ground, but it does leave lacking the FEEL of agility. Fortunately, the offensive powers and the ability to maneuver while fighting help to make up for this.

That's why I love many / most of dual pistols animations (barring empty clips- holding the guns in wrist-breaking directions just bugs me something fierce... at least in most of the other shots, the gun is held somewhat solidly). It has the flourish of agility, the direction-changing spins can be cinematically attributed to a hero immersed in the battlefield, swiftly turning to face anything from anywhere. The afterimages following behind the character hint at matrix-like agility. Its bullet-ballet, yes, and it makes no sense in reality, but it sells the style rather well.

Now, I could easily see a pistols set that didn't have the flourish, but had something that felt like... well, Unforgiven's gunplay.... Clint wouldn't shoot like our current powerset, thats for sure. I'm still happy with what we got.




On the other hand, though, I haven't seen the one Samuel mentioned, but I can already tell it wouldn't be in my top ten. No matter how great it is, there's just something I despise about the whole "bigger...badder..." mindset. I've seen it so overused to hide story flaws that I've come to hate even the hint of it when used with solid stories.

true- heck, or make an "issue badge" that has a respec attached, like the vet rewards.

But would it matter?

Look, the change was made because the numbers of PvP'ers were already reaching unsustainable numbers. They made a drastic change in the hopes to turn that around, because without a turnaround the PvP population wouldn't merit much dev time.

Yes, it backfired... it pissed off many that LIKED the drawbacks of the previous system while failing to attract many of the people they hoped by (theoretically) opening more builds up to competitive play. Heck, many of the casuals, like me, decided not to bother learning the new rules. We just found our fun elsewhere (which is easy to do, when the PvP experience (while fun) has some of the lowest moments of jerkwaddery I've experienced in the game too.)

It did NOT have the desired effect.

...but the PvP population is even smaller now. Many have sworn that they'd never come back. How many people that DON'T use this system will return and stay if the system is reverted? We already know that the beloved pre-13 system was craptastic at attracting and retaining users, after all, so we gotta rely on getting back those that quit due to the change...

I sure couldn't sell the idea of putting ANY dev time into it if the best results of a "revert to pre I13" effort is "the same people that play and complain now are playing and kindasortamaybe complaining less now, the ones that quit over it aren't coming back, the few that liked the change are clamoring that their fav characters are gimped, and the ones that ignored PvP continue to do so." Heck, I'd have a better time making the case to roll the dice on ANOTHER total PvP revamp that had the potential to attract a market that was untapped before.

agreed.

Well, as a counterpoint, "bullet ballet" is a pretty big part of the action genre- heck, even the brutish tough guys like John McClaine are more often shown shooting while diving, leaping forward, or spinning around... Even in superhero comics, the heroes that use pistols are often shown firing them in dynamic mid-action poses that make firearms instructors scream in frustration. It's pretty much part and parcel of the genre. Only the quick-to-die bad guys ever seem to have solid footing and proper firing posture...

On the other hand, the archery heroes in comics, while capable of trick shots, often show deliberation and planning, selecting what they do with their decisive shot, which could explain some of the boring nature of that animation set