InfamousBrad

Agree. And probably another expletive-deleted co-op zone.

I've dabbled in pro-Arachnos propaganda before, and it's not all that hard for me to do, and I'll tell you why; it's also why I actually find Emperor Marcus "Tyrant" Cole to be a sympathetic figure and why I'm so bitterly disappointed that the Loyalist Path of Responsibility bluntly terminates at level 20. Arachnos, and the Praetorians, are both struggling something that would have to be done, HAVE to be done, in a world that's had supers in it for two whole generations, going on a third: integrating supers into the political system.

The City of Heroes canon suffers from what TV Tropes calls "Reed Richards is Useless." (And this time I mean the word "suffers" literally, as in it's a major and painful constraint on the canon.) In order to make the game world recognizable, in order to minimize the amount of explanation needed before new subscribers can jump into the game and understand what's going on around them, the back story for CoH has to assume that even though there have always been supers, and even though supers have been ubiquitous since the 1930s, the world isn't significantly different from the one that the players live in: WWII and Korea and Vietnam and the Gulf War still happened, the economy went through the same boom and bust cycles, the tech that non-supers use still looks mostly the same.

The way they did that in the CoH canon makes story-telling sense if you accept that constraint, but if you think about it too much, it's monstrous. Trading on his prestige as the man who saved America from Nemesis on Brass Monday, Marcus "Statesman" Cole struck a bargain that, frankly, would have ruined America permanently: in exchange for staying out of politics and messing with ordinary peoples' lives as little as possible, in exchange for spending all of their super-powers only on fighting super villains, super heroes are above an awful lot of the law. Thank Prime for the Morality Missions system, it's finally acknowledging some of the ways in which that would go horrifically wrong.

What Arachnos did looks awful, and in places, it is awful, but it's a lot more long-term viable than what Statesman did to the rest of America. Lord Recluse, in the name of Social Darwinism, has told the supers of the break-away nation of the Etoile Islands that they can seize as much power as they are capable of seizing, defending, and governing -- but that if they do, they're responsible, before him and before the time-traveling all powerful Arbiter Corps and the future-seeing mind-reading Fortunata Corps, for actually keeping it governed. (I've been waiting for a while for this to affect the game world; by now, Kirk Cage should be in HUGE trouble with the Arbiters for his failure to end the Scrapyarder strike and deal with the Ghost of Scrapyard.) At its best, it produces startling prosperity and progress, like in Aeon City and New Haven, because it creates conditions for stable (and born to be 'shipped) triangles like Aeon/Brass/Vines: radical Aeon providing the super powers that keep pushing things forward, conservative Brass being there to keep Aeon from destroying the planet, Vines to serve as the non-super nagging conscience for them both. It's a more stable, more likely to be successful governing structure than the entirely vestigial, entirely pointless, effectively invisible civilian government of "Primal America." (So pointless, so vestigial, that after seven years they still haven't even bothered giving us canonical names for the fictional mayor of Paragon City, governor of Rhode Island, and president of the US.)

And Emperor Cole? Cole is the perfect metaphor for something that's horribly dysfunctional about modern politics in the real world: the awfulness that happens when you hold someone responsible for things that they cannot possibly achieve. After the Hamidon War, a terrified and grateful public begged Marcus "Tyrant" Cole to rebuild society for them in such a way that there will never be another world-threatening super-villain like Praetorian Hamidon ever again. And even if Primal Earth didn't exist, he cannot possibly deliver that. Now that Primal Earth is attacking his homeworld, he's got to be shaking in his shoes; because Primal Earth never had a Hamidon War, even given the lesser devastation of the First Rikti War, its super population (and its conventional military, for that matter) is probably every bit of 100 times what the surviving super population of Praetorian Earth is, maybe more. And one guy has been told, "do whatever you have to, just keep us safe!" Any guy put in that position is going to do just that: whatever he thinks he has to do. And if that guy was an art thief, tomb robber, and amateur classics scholar, who has only even thought about how to govern the world for a few years, who never even thought about politics and government and political science before that? Most of the things he thinks to try will be bad ideas.

Marcus "Tyrant" Cole is something far scarier than an all-powerful vengeful god-emperor. He's an all-powerful vengeful god who's an amateur emperor. Given that? I think he's actually doing remarkably well.

Fetch me my fighting trousers.

Fascinating question, isn't it?

In the first mission of the Mender Ramiel arc, our characters are powered-up to a degree that can only be called "omnipotent," to the point where even a mastermind's minions are immune to damage from multiple incarnates at once.

What would the morality of beings who lived like that, and who mostly only lived around other people who were like that, be like? A world where if you stole all of somebody's stuff, maimed them, and left them stranded on a frozen hillside so that it took them days and days of misery before they got to safety, it would all be a rollicking good joke, and if they complained, people would tell them to stop being a big baby about it, it's not like you don't have tens of thousands or millions of years to get over it and learn to appreciate the humor?

And what would it be like to live alongside those beings, during a collapse of civilization, knowing that they were the only hope of civilization being rebuilt, the only ones restoring the technological infrastructure of civilization, the only ones imposing law of any kind? Especially if you knew, in most places, that they insisted that their help for you was conditional on accepting their divine/human descendants, and those descendants' descendants, as our hereditary rulers for all time, because somehow that one drop of ichor in their blood, that one trace of divine DNA in there hypothetically somehow, made them better suited to rule us than we could possibly be? That's what it was like living among gods; and I think that at times, like in the issue 19 Ray Cooling arc "Bad People, Good Intentions," City of Heroes comes close to portraying that.

Let's face it: a world with superheroes and supervillains in it would REALLY BITE if you weren't one of them.

Yeah. I did that TF once with a mastermind, and never again. I never thought they'd come up with a task force that screws masterminds harder than "The Beast Under the Mountain" and "Pirates of the Sky" do, but they managed it. We did not have enough control on the team to lock him down, which meant that my minions never got within combat range of him the whole fight, while they got one-shot erased any time they wandered through an air-strike patch. I might as well have not even shown up for that fight.

The earlier ship-to-ship fight, at the flotilla, was just as bad, because highly mobile fights and mastermind minions do not match. The rest of the team flies or superjumps past a gazillion minions to get to the next (timed!) objective that matters. I have two choices: dismiss my minions, join them, resummon my minions (and have the fight be over before I'm done), or put the minions on passive/follow, fly along with them, and get (rightly!) blamed for all the aggro that follows them to us ... if, in fact, any of them survive the trip, which mostly they don't.

Yeah, no. That's a badge that none of the rest of my mastermind characters will ever have.

Frankly, he kind of is.

(Mods, feel free to delete this message entirely if it bothers you. As a Hellenic Reconstructionist, I'm prone to going overboard on this subject. I'll try to keep it under control, but if I inadvertently stray across the line, just delete the post.)

One of the fundamental problems in post-Socratic philosophy was wrestling with the fact that the Greek gods who were responsible for rewarding virtue and punishing vice were, themselves, legendarily not very nice people, people who engaged in lives of horrific public vice. The conclusion the post-Socratics came to was that this was per-se prima facie proof that the gods were "the lies of the poets," that nothing like the gods ever really existed, and this was part and parcel of the general drift towards monotheism at the time.

Now, here's what this has to do with hubris: the operational definition of hubris, the crime against the gods that the gods punished the most consistently and most cruelly, was claiming to be as good as any god, or better than any god, at anything. Get caught doing it even once, and the god who caught you doing it would kill you if you were lucky, make you suffer for a lifetime in all probability, and if they were feeling especially cranky, make you suffer for all eternity. Why? Because you are not a god. Blood, not ichor, runs in your veins; you do not daily dine on ambrosia and drink nectar. Why does this matter? Your actions have consequences that don't apply to the gods, because you don't regenerate from any wound, you aren't immune to any disease, you will freeze and starve and die if deprived of all of your property -- and, more importantly, that's true of the people around you. If you get the people around you sick, they'll die; if you cripple them, they're crippled for life; if you rob them, they may never recover. That's why there are different moral codes for how gods behave among themselves than how humans behave among themselves, and the gods were on eternal vigilance to keep humans from thinking it would be okay for them to act like the gods do.

What's this got to do with City of Heroes: Going Rogue? Simple: Tyrant, like Statesman, and Lord Recluse, and a handful of others are not beings like us, and Tyrant worries quite a bit that because he's lent them some of the Well's power, mere 50(+4) superheroes are starting to think of themselves as gods like him. And they're not, at least not as far as he's concerned, and as an amateur classics scholar (that is, after all, how he found The Well of the Furies), he worries that humans who start thinking of themselves as gods but who aren't, really, fully divine, are likely to wreck themselves, wreck society around them. So he, like his divine predecessors, thinks that hubris is the worst sin imaginable.

The second time I ran that TF, I immediately ran over to the window while the leader was talking to Odysseus. I was curious to know where, in Talos Island, his office really was?

Here's what I know reliably: the devs should have learned, from the intricate dance you did with Castle years ago, the one that resulted in you reverse-engineering the bugs in his combat-balancing spreadsheet sight unseen, that you are the one player they absolutely should show the exact participation formula to. You are uniquely qualified to debug it.

Yes. Exactly.

Although I'd set the turning point earlier than that; you can see it, in game, even in the original issue 0 content. With most MMOs, you can spot the point at which the money ran out, and it's almost always in the highest-level zones: art becomes really repetitive, and story disappears, because the zone designers are slapping stuff together as fast as they can to catch up with the shipping schedule.

In City of Heroes, it obviously went the exact opposite direction. Atlas Park, Galaxy City, King's Row, Perez Park, Steel Canyon, Skyway City, Boomtown, and Faultline were obviously put together during the time period War Witch is talking about. When the zone designers got to the point where they were designing Talos Island and Independence Port and Dark Astoria, the world design still is random patchwork, like the earlier zones, but there's this sudden and obvious improvement in the writing ... which leads me to conclude that this is the point in the history of the game's development where they realized that they needed to go beyond the Ultima Online and Everquest 1 model of "never mind why, just wander around killing people and taking their stuff" and include more of the elements of single-player roleplaying computer game storytelling, to give people something to look forward to other than "gaining new powers" and "getting more stuff," namely, "finding out how this story ends."

And (as I know by now the developers are tired of my saying) almost all of those old, slapped-together zones are still there, and people still enter them, and still conclude, in their first month after buying the game, while making up their minds whether to subscribe or not, that the game's story-telling sucks. Unless they luck into choosing The Hollows for all of their level 5-15 experience and Faultline for all of their level 15-20 experience, who'd blame them? By War Witch's own admission, if they do any of the other content (not counting Praetoria, obviously), they're right.

City of Heroes desperately needs two things. The single most important thing it needs is a development tools upgrade of some kind, so it doesn't take so many hundreds or thousands of work-hours to redesign a zone and write its content. And then, once they have those tools, the first thing they need to do with them is to yank out the not-yet-redone level 5-20 zones by the roots and bring them up to modern CoH standards.

We may have to agree to disagree; in my case, Leagues taught me that I really wasn't going to enjoy playing my previous main character in the end game. 2XP would let me get a couple of new builds into the endgame in days, not weeks or months. Since none of my 50s are things that I want to grind raids with, 2X threads this weekend would do exactly nothing for me.

Hear, hear. 2XP, on the other hand ...

I've been here since issue 4, and I don't think you're wrong.

This. I listen to advice. But you don't get to give me orders unless you're paying my subscription fee.

During beta, I heard of a 7-person team, not even all of whom were 50(+1), successfully completing a Lambda trial. I'll be dipped if I know how they did it. (That being said, they were not a PuG.)