InfamousBrad

Seriously? Even trick or treating and presents? So level 1-5 characters can no longer participate in the Halloween and Christmas events?

I wanted to howl, halfway through this answer, because he answered the opposite of the question we've been asking:

Right now, in both Atlas Park and Galaxy City, there are areas where the normal zone mobs are invisible, untargetable, and unaggroable if you're running a mission that phases in other mobs. For example, if you're doing Aaron Thiery's arc, half of the warehouses near him are on fire, and the usual Hellions and Vahzilok and Clockwork are all replaced by Arachnos.

What will happen in that neighborhood, and in similar neighborhoods, during a Rikti zone invasion? Will Rikti spawn on top of you in the phase you're in, or will they spawn out-of-phase with you? How about UXBs? Will the Rikti aircraft fly up to the edge of the phased area, disappear, and reappear on the other side? While they're out of phase with you, can they still shoot you?

What will happen in that neighborhood, and in similar neighborhoods, during a zombie apocalypse? Will the Arachnos (and the warehouse flames?) despawn and be replaced by the zombies? Will the phased mission continue, and the zombies spawn out-of-phase with you?

Are any of the deadly apocalypse spawns in those areas? If so, what happens to them if you're out of phase with them? How about the Jack and Eochai spawns from the Halloween event? Can you trick-or-treat in the phased areas, in all phases, or do the enemies that come running out of the doors only spawn into one phase? During the winter holiday event, do Christmas presents spawn in the phased areas?

Has any of this been tested? I've been asking QA this question, off and on, since one week into closed beta.

The longest break I have ever taken from this game was after issue 7, over just this issue. The introduction of the Patrons system was when they made it finally 100% clear that no, really, as villains, we were never going to get to be Paragon City villains; we were stuck in the Rogue Isles, grubbing away for a bad Cobra knock-off, while the fun villains like the Freakshow and Crey and the Sky Raiders got to work the big-time. And it is always going to be like that.

All these years later, I still think that was mal-design. When I first heard that they were going to allow player-character villains, I assumed that what they were going to do was let us start in a villains-only instance of, say, Boomtown, or King's Row, and that, from there, as we leveled, we would deal with our contacts in our own instances of the same city zones, dodging NPC heroes and NPC cops and NPC soldiers, while over in the heroic instances of the same zones, player character heroes were fighting NPC villains and monsters. And, for all that I now openly admit that (to my taste) the Rogue Isles' maps are better designed (fewer pointless travel time sinks, slightly more rational neighborhood layouts, significantly better looking buildings than anything we saw until New Praetoria, higher detail count, less-stupid street spawns), I still think that, from an economic and a story-telling perspective, the creation of the Rogue Isles was a gigantic game-design mistake.

Not at all. I am nothing less that delighted that, so far, everybody in this discussion understands that, to borrow a phrase from Robert Anton Wilson, we're not talking about objective reality, we're talking about our own nervous systems; we're not (thank the gods) arguing about whether or not the piece of art we're talking about "really is" (fill in the blank), but the much more useful subject of how that piece of art is perceived by your nervous system, versus how it's perceived by my nervous system, versus anybody else's nervous system. Again, to borrow a RAWism, it's not like we can hook up a "glamor-ometer" to get an objective reading off of the game.

Do you really find, say, the border between old Haven and Aeon City to be more depressing than the Hazard Zone gate between Steel Canyon and Boomtown? To me, the environment of the game seems almost perfectly designed to indicate how humiliatingly futile for apolitical heroes to try to punch their way out of the supervillain problem: thanks to Statesman's call, and Freedom Phalanx's example, of superheroes staying mostly out of politics and concentrating all of their energies on just punching out bad guys? Every single year, Paragon City gets worse: yet another neighborhood blown up, yet more villain groups on the street, yet another timeline that hates our timeline so much they have to kill us all and that blames Freedom Phalanx, so they concentrate on Paragon City first.

(Yes, I do remember when the cops stopped running away and started shooting back; I remember that fondly, actually. And yes, obviously, I remember when northern Faultline got rebuilt, again, quite fondly. But where is the memorial, however improv, to the victims of Battle Maiden's attack on Blyde Square?)

The Rogue Isles only look grittier for two reasons: the sky is cloudy, and the trash pickup isn't so great. So, okay, it's Portland. But aside from "Rikti terrorists casually and safely chilling out in the richest neighborhood in town," you know what I notice the Rogue Isles don't have? Muggers. In six years, we have never seen a single purse-snatching in the Rogue Isles.

Sure, parts of it are over-run with mobsters ... they're almost (but not quite!) as common as the mobsters in Independence Port. Only, in the Rogue Isles, instead of visibly standing on street corners shaking people down in plain sight, they stand around talking (dirty, out of sight) business. (Dockside is, like much of Sharkhead, an aberation in the Rogue Isles.) What's the difference? In the Rogue Isles, they're the government of at least two of the towns, Port Oakes and St. Martial. And especially in St. Martial, they're doing a far, far better job than Paragon City ever can of keeping it safe, well lit, and tourist-friendly.

(Which is why I laughed myself silly when Basse Croupier saw how little the Tsoo had stolen in their casino robberies and pointed out that they could have made more than that per hour, entirely safely, if they'd just come to the Family for a casino license. It's true, you know.)

I think I absolutely do disagree with you, by the way, on another artistic point: the idea that, "They're the bad guys. They're repugnant. You're not supposed to enjoy yourself playing one. You're supposed to suffer and understand that evil is bad."

First of all, I can't entirely tell if you're saying that that's your preference, or if you think that's what the Freem Fifteen were thinking when they first wrote City of Villains ... but I think you meant the latter; apologies if I respond to the wrong point, in advance.

The default storyline(s) for villains, from issue 6 and 7, do not strike me as an example of how you're supposed to hate your character for being bad. What they do strike me as is the story of someone who starts out as nobody, as nothing, as lower than dirt ... who, by proving himself or herself to The Scariest Villains in the World, earns grudging respect, somewhere in the level 45-50 range. My problems with that are the "lower than dirt" part and the "not until level 45+" part -- I wish there was some way to play someone who, while not really feared by The Scariest Villains in the World, gets some respect.

There's a line in the new level 2-5 villain missions where someone (Golden Scarab?) says that due to the invasion of Mercy Island, Arachnos is getting so desperate that they're sucking up to those worthless "Destined One" scums, "treating them like kings and queens." Would that it were so!

I mentioned, earlier, my mafia lawyer character? Mr. Bradley, level 50 mercs/poison -- I used to joke that his only real super power was that he had a cell phone and more money than Thurston Howell the IIIrd, enough to hire special forces types as his personal entourage and toss around the most rare and dangerous drugs in the world as if they cost him nothing. Always wore an impeccable white suit and a Hermes off-white scarf. ... Still got talked to, by almost every contact he worked for, like a level 1 Hellion in ragged sneakers, like a homeless guy who just got off the helicopter yesterday in an orange Zigg jumpsuit. That's what I mean when I complain that they haven't, even yet, made it possible to play a glamorous villain.

As someone who almost completely cannot stand the writing on the hero side of the game, who can only count about 4 or 5 story arcs on the entire hero side of the game that I'm fond of, and who doesn't share your experience of CoV, let me disagree ... not to criticize your taste or your interpretation, just to show you how different it looked to me: there is only one zone, on the entire villain side, that affected me that way, and that's Sharkhead. I have nothing good to say about Sharkhead. One of the reasons I'm most excited about the next issue is so that my villains can FINALLY do their level 20-25 leveling somewhere other than that ugly, depressing, brutal pile of filth.

I'm a very political person, for good or ill, and at its best CoV looks to me like it's doing a better job than CoH even tries to do of asking what governance looks like when there are thousands of people running around who cannot be made answerable to any law. Until we found out, lately, that he's diverted all of his scientific efforts to trying to wrest his free will back from the Well of the Furies, I had concluded that Lord Recluse was a Mad Social Scientist, that Arachnos was his lab, and that the hypothesis he was testing was this: the way to govern, in a world of supers, is to set up competing hierarchies of supers in a checks-and-balances system, while dangling the illusion of winner-take-all laissez fair economics and Social Darwinism in front of them. I think the balancing act between the arbiter corps, the fortunata corps, and the regular military in CoV is brilliant; I think encouraging the most dangerous villains to try to conquer as much territory, within the Isles, as they can actually govern is a fascinating solution; I adore the idea of the arbiters as this ultimate scary time-traveling assassins threat that (in theory) holds people like Kirk Cage or Johnny Sonata to that "but you have to govern it" idea and have been waiting, since issue 6, for the arbiter corps to come down on Kirk Cage like a ton of bricks, maybe even retcon him completely out of existence by time travel, for his failure to pacify Sharkhead and meet the bauxite quota.

I find nothing, and I mean nothing, gritty and depressing about the single best part of CoV: level 10 to 20 in Cap au Diable. No, not even Peter Themari. He's a malevolently awful person, but without even realizing it, he's let himself be channeled into a useful role, neutralizing potential threats to the government. Yeah, I felt about about what happened to Pyriss, but as bad as it was, ... well, let me answer that question by explaining my take on Westin Phipps.

As bad as Peter Themari is, Westin Phipps is absolutely worse. He is a bad person and revels in being a bad person; the more people he tortures and kills, the happier it makes him, and the more he can trick stupid people into thanking him for it, the more he squirms with puppyish delight. But about halfway through his arcs, I realized something: Manticore is actually worse. And that's why Arachnos needs someone like Westin Phipps in Arachnos counter-intelligence. If Manticore succeeded in the destablization op that is the main plot of Phipps' arcs, every supervillain weapon in every Arachnos lab, up to and including the nuclear-tipped missiles in Warburg, would fall into the hands of petty criminals and terrorists from all over the world. Arachnos is evil, but it's an evil government, with territory to defend and interests to protect; it can be threatened, it can be negotiated with. The raw chaos that would break out if Arachnos crumbled from within, as somebody like Manticore or Pyriss or LeoKnight or Blue Phazer (or more recently, Strongheart or what's-her-name Siren) want ... well, we've seen that future, we've seen what happens after an Arachnos Civil War: "Agony Hall," the death of almost the entire human race. Sorry, Ms. Francine, but given a choice between siding with Phipps in defense of the status quo or siding with you and Manticore and sending us all to Agony Hall ... I'm with Phipps. He's not my friend, I don't like him, I won't be inviting him over for dinner any time soon, and I'm not proud to be photographed with him ... but thanks to clueless politically naive dupes like Ms. Francine and short-sighted wealthy terrorists like Manticore, Arachnos needs guys like Phipps.

(I wish it didn't. I'd rather work for guys I trust, like, and respect, like Marshall Brass and Arbiter Daos. I'd also like the option of having more contacts, especially by level 20, treat me with the same respect that I get out of the newer contacts in Sharkhead, that I get in dribs and drabs from contacts in St. Martial, that we get in First Ward. People in Hades want better food and drink, too; what we want and what we get are seldom all that closely overlapping.)

I said I wouldn't say anything good about Sharkhead, but even Sharkhead has Villa Requin. Even Mercy Island has upper Mercy. Everywhere you go in the Rogue Isles, the most powerful villains, and their minions, are building governed places, nice places to live with little or no street crime, no rioting, no anarchy on the streets, plenty of jobs. The Snake Uprising in Darwin's Landing was in 2005, and by late 2006 it already had the lights back on, construction cranes deployed, businesses re-opened, and rudimentary shanties for the people whose buildings had been destroyed. Whereas here we are, 10 years? 11 years? after the First Rikti War, and Founder's Falls is still overrun with Rikti terrorists, the cops and the US military don't even try in Perez Park, and Baumton doesn't even have so much as a single blue FEMA tarp.

Contacts throughout City of Villains, for the most part, treat you as a low-life mercenary up through around level 45, and I don't like that part. But at least you're a low-life mercenary working for people who are, yes, selfish people trying to get wealthy and powerful, but they're doing so in a system that makes them contribute to the common defense against mainland aggression and makes them provide jobs and safe streets to the populace they conquer. That's actually kind of neat.

So you can earn your IO in 20 game sessions if you play each trial once per evening. Or you can earn it in 60 game sessions if you only play the BAF.

I think you just made my point, not yours.

And if reading the Broadcast channel in Atlas Park doesn't cure 'em of playing City of Heroes, nothing will.

(Emphasis added.)

Now that we have rocket-board flight, I really, really want motorcycle and Vespa superspeed. No matter what disads come with them. Come on, you already have the motorcycle model in-game, the Thugs bruiser uses it as part of his summoning animation.

Flying carpet!