GadgetDon

A hero is reactive in the sense that, if all the villains packed up and headed to Alpha Centauri, the hero would be pretty much out of a job. If all the heroes packed up and headed to alpha centauri, the villain would say "Playtime!"

In a good story, yes, it's not just "he's robbing the bank!" "let's rush to the bank and have a big fight". Lots more work to find out what's going on, who is responsible, how to deal with it.

Samurai Jack is reactive to Aku taking over the world and becoming all powerful. Yes, time travel is moving the effect (Jack trying to stop Aku) before the cause (Aku all powerful and rules world), but that's standard time travel story stuff, the cause is still Aku.

The significance of the hero's reactive nature lies in the goals. The hero's goal is to correct the damage done by the villain - lock him up as punishment and to stop doing more damage, and try to repair the damage already done. There's a wide, wide, wide range of ways to deal with that, lots of stories to tell and ways to tell them. But at least in the setup, the hero is somewhat interchangeable - Lex Luthor may be Superman's arch nemesis, but he's run up against most of the D.C. heroes (who deal with him differently based on their unique powers, methods, and habits).

On the other hand, villains are more unique. Consider a plot that a well-written Lex Luthor sets in motion. Swap him out with the Joker, or Catwoman - it won't work, Joker and Catwoman just don't do things like that. Same with the Joker's plots.

Actually, I regularly hear Phipps described as "the sort of stuff we need more of".

And in the end, that's always going to be the problem with writing content for Villains. Content for Heroes is easy. People are doing bad stuff, we stop them. There may be nuances about how we want to stop them, different views of the sort of bad stuff they're stopping (many of my characters are street crime guys who feel really out of place stopping interdimensional evil), but still, it's "stop the bad guys".

For villains, who are doing bad stuff by nature, it's not so simple. There are the gentlemen thieves who steal from those who can afford to lose it (and perhaps deserves to lose it), the straight out thief who'll take whatever isn't nailed down, there's self-centered jackass who knows what he wants and will do what it takes to get what he wants, the megalomaniac is out to rule the world as is his right, the lunatic with twisted thinking that has them not grasp the idea of good and evil, and the flat out sadist who wants to see people suffer and know he did it. (Male descriptors for descriptive purposes only, female villains cover the same range.)

There are those who really enjoy the despicable characters. That's a preference, and no more indicative of personal morality than my interest in Harry Potter and D&D meant I was ready to practice Dark Arts. Me, I've got no interest in that, the villain concepts I'd want to run tend more towards the gentleman thief. So I found much of the content more evil than I wanted to do, while others were saying "but when do my guys get to really let loose and be evil".

Dell keyboard (connected to KVM for Mac and PC) and Logitech Trackman Wheel (pointing device I've used for a long time, perhaps a decade).

And when gaming, Belkin Nostromo n52.

Those are three examples of great stories caught in the lousy story-telling system. World Wide Red is one of my favorites, one of the most evil plots my heroes stop.

There are other great stories. Freakalympics is fun silliness, the council time travel story was interesting. But they're told in the old annoying mission style.

I know there's always a desire to do new stuff. But I'd love it if, say, every other issue or so, one arc gets brought up to snuff. Either simple blue pencil stuff (kill redundant missions, kill hunts or reduce the numbers in the hunts, etc.) or a true revamp with dialog trees, punch someone and then get info or have them follow you, etc.

There's a major bug in AE where text meant to be said when players get close to the NPCs instead gets said when the NPC spawns. I'm seeing some of it in the live game too - The tip mission with the 5th column nuclear triggers, for example, has a first goal of "defeat this one boss". It spawns a Vampire Commandant with an invisible Maelstrom held hostage (though the Commandant doesn't seem to realize it). All the text, including some clearly supposed to be on seeing the player character, spurts out as soon as the first boss is dead.

I'm really hoping this gets fixed in I24, both live and AE.

I've run the summer event by queuing up a lot and, particularly with my corrupter, it highlights the problems.

We're going to fight a number of AVs in order, often accompanied with bosses (and the badge design usually means "don't hurt the bosses while you work on the AV"). When there's no aggro control, no one able to soak up some damage and try to keep the bad guys from attacking everyone else, there's a lot of death. Team makeup for the summer event has made a world of difference in the times I've run it, in terms of survivability, getting the crowd favor necessary to get the final boss, and so forth.

If you're picking 16 or 24 incarnate level characters, it's not so bad because there's enough you're likely to get some of everything, plus at 50+ you have options to compensate for weaknesses. 8 players at level 2 also usually works all right, at that level everyone is so weak that the AT differences don't show so much.

I watch a fair amount of television. For most of the shows I watch, there are some episodes that are FANTASTIC. BEAUTIFUL. STUNNINGLY DONE. And every once in a while, there's an episode that doesn't work. Plot holes the size of a starship, characters acting completely inconsistently for them, etc. Madeline Weston going all in for undercover work including having Michael be abusive to her. Mrs. Suit going all Nancy Drew about some guys in the neighborhood. Shows that make me wonder what happened to the writers for that episode.

The quality of content will vary. The best hitters in baseball regularly strike out. And when it comes to updating lots of content, sometimes shortcuts lead to mistakes.

I think the new Yin TF is pretty good. It's (looks around, tries to believe I'm saying this about a CoH TF) perhaps too short, might benefit from another mission or two setting the stage for the reveal in the penultimate mission. There may not be anything inherently Yinnish about it, but it's good.

I've done my share of complaining about content, old and new, and I will continue to do so. There are times the writers get an idea and drive it through without realizing, no, it really doesn't work. More often, there's signs of shortcuts being taken, not as good as it could have been. But that's different from attacking the competence or intelligence of the writers. They're working stiffs, like the rest of us. They do some work that's great, some that's good, some not-so-good. A sense of perspective is called for, that above all, the goal is to create a fun game. Usually, good story is part of making it a fun game, but not the be-all and end-all.

Numina needs a complete rewrite of the TF. It was created to be a "grand farewell tour" of all the zones that existed in the then-gameworld when you hit level cap at 40. Now, not only is the level cap higher, zones have been repurposed and just removed from the hunt.

The only think I like about Numina conceptually is a very superhero group comic concept - "Bad things are happening all over the city, You two, go there. You two, go there, you two, come with me". That's proven difficult/impossible to do with the current game engine, which is a pity. And the concept isn't worth the obsolete time-wasting hunt.

So forget the various group red herrings. This is the Devouring Earth task force. Two or three missions piecing together the plot, one mission to almost stop the devouring earth, and the finale.

Synapse and Citadel - would love to see a complete rewrite of them, but simple blue pencil work would make them far better. "There are three missions where the players do the same damn thing in a row. Cut it to one mission. These missions are defeat all without any story reason, make them final goal only. This mission does have a story reason, make it a smallish map."

As for Manticore - I enjoy it mechanically, but yeah, it's kind of a weak story. The problem is that it's 30-35, and 40-45 is where Crey is completely exposed as yup, corrupt from the top down, and you take down the countess. If the Manticore TF proves the Countess is a crook and locks her up, the arc 10 levels later becomes anti-climatic.

So for a story instead, make it one of the "crey scientists get in over their head." They've been playing with arraknoid DNA and working on improving cloning techniques (never revealed in the TF what the cloning might be used for), create a monster that must be stopped - and once it's down, Hopkins shows up, "You've saved the world, 'heroes', but nobody can know what happened here."

To be found guilty of a crime, there's a require known as (I'm probably going to butcher the spelling) mens rea, or guilty mind. You need the ability to appreciate that what you've done is wrong. The Insanity Defense is arguing that, at the time, the perpetrator was unable to know that what they were doing is wrong.

It's what's called an affirmative defense. You must prove that you were insane, the prosecutor doesn't have to prove you were sane. It's also very rarely successful, perhaps too rarely.

Just because a person is found innocent by reason of insanity doesn't mean they get released. The insanity part gets you sent to a mental hospital (and a mental hospital with the capability to keep violent patients locked up - and scare tales to the contrary, they're pretty good at keeping them locked up).

The difference is that, if you are declared "cured", you are released. You were not convicted of a crime, so once released as innocent it's in theory over. But it's also very rare that those ever get released. From all reports, the John Hinckley currently locked up in the mental ward is very different from the one who shot at Reagan, but I doubt he'll ever be released.

Practically, there's not a lot of difference - you still get locked up, lose control over your life or the freedom to come and go as you want and are kept away from the general public to protect them. But there is a world of difference legally. You are being treated, not punished, and making you better is given equal weight to keeping you locked up (and "punishment" carries no weight) - on the other hand, it's a lot easier to force a mental patient to take drugs against his will than a prisoner. Should you be judged cured, you have a right to be released, as opposed to parole and pardon being privileges granted by the state (but in practice your odds of being declared cured are on a par with the odds of getting a parole).

So, if there was a trial, I think the defense wouldn't have much trouble proving that Mother Mayhem was legally insane and unable to tell the difference between good and evil, so she would not be found guilty. But she would still be locked up for the rest of her unnatural life.

Except, of course, this being a comic book world and the revolving door on the mental hospitals is as effective as the revolving door on the prisons.

Content? I consider the content of the game to be the things to do - arcs, trials, strike/task forces, and the like. VIP members get all that. There are some power sets and costume pieces that cost more - but how often did we get power sets under the old system.

Consider Street Justice. I asked for something like that in CoH beta, and have asked for it periodically since then. The answer was, well, there's martial arts power set, there's super strength, so it's all covered. They didn't see the addition of the power set something that would help sell new subscriptions or retain subscribers.

With Freedom and power sets available for real money sale, they can justify creating these power sets that have some overlap with existing ones, but flavors that make them in demand. And I'm happy to have paid for SJ.

I would like more power sets free with VIP, and perhaps the concept that all "cool" sets become paid and more prosaic sets are free needs reconsideration. But that's the win-win to a micro transaction system, things make economic sense to the company to make when they can charge for them that might not when it's just "add one more option to the game", and players get the things they want (and don't have to get the things they don't).

If VIPs have to start paying separately for zone unlocks, feature unlocks, or arc unlocks, there I'll agree they are abusing their members.

Again, that's Maxwell's analysis of why Nemesis did it, and it's the ONLY mission involving Nemesis showing racism as a motivator. So it seems off that it was only there.

Crey is the only villain group I can think of that's an equal opportunity employer (maybe trolls - who knows what their skin color was before they went green). While Nemesis did fight in the Civil War for the Confederates, his battle for power since then haven't shown any pattern of targeting minorities.

Yes, he's probably got more than a few prejudices bouncing around that metal casing he's in. But if race was a prime motivator of who he kills and who he conquers, it should have shown up more in the missions and the lore and his statements as we encounter him. He's regularly shown a willing to kill vast numbers of people for one plot or another, it seems a stretch to say "but THOSE people were killed because they were black." From all we've seen, it's more likely he killed them because for one thing or another they were in his way.

That mission never sat right with me. Because in both arcs and other missions, race has never come up as a major issue. Nemesis is plenty evil, done terrible things. But from every other mission, Nemesis sees the world a "There's Nemesis, and then there's ants", with no real difference between the ants. If he was that racist, wouldn't it show up more often?

Here's the writeup on it link

"It got me thinking: why didn't he just threaten to use that device here? From the records you found, it looks like he was planning this for some time. I think I figured out why he chose that world too. According to Portal Corporation files, through some twist of fate the population of that world was mostly of African descent. To Nemesis, their skin color alone made the lot of them less than human. That monster probably didn't think twice about murdering them."

Nemesis didn't think twice about starting a highly destructive war against a dimension of peaceful aliens, didn't think twice about overwriting the minds of those aliens, Unai has other missions with worlds that a version of Nemesis wiped out completely or nearly. Outside of this one comment by Maxwell Christopher, Nemesis is depicted as an equal opportunity mass murderer. And even in this comment, Maxwell is making a guess. "They were black, Nemesis used his doomsday device on them, therefore Nemesis killed them because they were black". Which sounds a lot like the "post hoc ergo proper hoc" logical fallacy.

There's another mission with Maxwell where Nemesis has a device to control the mind of anyone he wants, but Maxwell says that Nemesis doesn't use it because he just wants to be loved. That also seems out of character with everything else written about Nemesis.

Nemesis could work as a raging psychotic racist. But based on what we've known he's done, what he's said when confronted or when monologuing, there's no sign of it.

But you're (in theory) following CoH. So CoH can send you a DM, but you can't send them one.

That's all that's needed to deal with any objections to one form of promotional give away or another. "We're giving this away now this way. You'll be able to get it in the future in the store, but get it now and get it free."

And I hope you aren't putting too much stock on exclusivity as a motivator. Making it exclusive during the promotional period so if you want it now, you participate is good, now and free are good motivators. But from what I've experienced of the community "I'll have this to show off and most of the players won't be able to get it" is rarely a motivator and counterbalanced by the demotivational aspect of those who see it and can't get it.

First, thanks to the team for the change.

Second - I don't think anyone is saying "we want the aura in the paragon store today and we want it now!" My suggestion called for addition on September 1, and if it takes longer, so be it.

The thing that has many unhappy is the statement (implied at least) that it will never been in the store. An announcement of "it'll be in the store at some time in the future, we don't know when" would calm pretty much all the frazzled nerves.

The reason for the premium system, where old players can return and play for free, is to lure them back in.

Unwilling to ever shell out $2 per month? Maybe.

Unwilling to shell out $2 to check out this game that has been advertised as "You can play for free" (Actually, $5 since you can't buy $2 worth of points), why bother with premium then.

Actually, been thinking, and if it would completely destroy the economy and put everyone at Paragon out of work for IOed characters to be immediately playable, here's solution #3:

Player unlocks character with IOs slotted, and no invention license (not VIP, reward tier too low, hasn't paid). An extra build is created automatically and switched to, same power choices and slots, but nothing in there. Add a window in the unlocking process where you claim SOs to fill those slots, or teleport them to an appropriate store location with a dialog "You must buy enhancements for this character". There's still the process of buying all the enhancements (which is why I'd call for a dedicated "fill the slots" UI for this situation as opposed to "buy 10 enhancements to fill your tray, manage enhancements, put enhancements in slots, swear softly to yourself because you didn't get the right enhancements because it's been so long, repeat") but the mandatory respec aspect isn't there.

When writing the early content, the devs seemed to equate time sink with challenge and/or fun. "This Task Force has you playing for three hours straight. So it's three times as much fun as this arc people knock off in an hour." "Yeah, but I'm writing task forces in the Shadow Shard. These are so long, the players will LOVE IT." Among the identifying characteristics of this old content are:

Do this. Now do it again. Now again. Now again.

Defeat All. You're only looking for info in one file cabinet, but kill all the foes.

Today's arc/tf will take you all over Paragon city. Won't that be fun?

And of course lacks capabilities added to the game later like cut scenes, talk to someone in game, etc.

The issue where Striga was introduced seems to be where the change happened. Not completely, four meaningless repeat missions but they were small missions, a few more hunts and kill alls that needed, but it's where the change started to happen.

And it's not just the task forces - there are some arcs that have really good stories but so burdened down with the lousy design standards that they don't get played. Freakalympics was a fun story, some cool aspects but locked up in the timesink mentality. There was another arc with a time traveling Nazi. Love the stories, hate the arcs.

What I'd love to see the developers do is update one old arc and one old task force per issue or every other issue. Even if there's no time for a complete rewrite with cool cut scenes and such, just do a little blue-pencil works. "We've got four identical missions in a row. Delete three of them. This is a defeat all with no story reason to do so, just defeat the boss and get the glowie." That sort of stuff.