InfamousBrad

Subjective feedback: The elephant labored mightily for 11 months, and then, with great noise and fanfare, brought forth ... a mouse.

Seriously, this is what we get? Two costumes. No new tails. No new monstrous heads. No new monstrous legs, nor do the two skins we get go with costume legs. Both for very specific-looking character concepts: great if you were trying to make a snake with glowing stripes or a copy of Spawn, worthless for anything else. Heck, they both look more demonic than mutant, to me. Out of all the mutant concepts out there, these are the two we got? This will be the only costume pack I don't buy. No temptation at all.

At this late a date, I don't expect this to change, but there are two buildings in Paragon City that, to my taste, completely and utterly dominate the early game, visually. They're both brutally ugly, with equal emphasis on both words: they are brutal looking, and even if they weren't brutal looking, they're ugly. They're way out of proportion to the rest of the city, and their particular architectural quirks make them look like something that I can't imagine ever being built in the United States. They look like apartment buildings that some Stalinist architect would have dreamt up, based on half-remembered buildings by Le Corbusier and Albert Speer, only built in Kyrgistan or Azerbizan by sub-standard labor: ugly, misproportioned, featureless, windowless, and dismally dark. Specifically, I mean this building on the west side of Atlas Park, and this building on the east side of King's Row. And, in fact, I hadn't realized until just now, as I was flying up to it and got a brief graphical artefact, the second building is two of that first building bolted together, face-to-face.

These ugly Soviet-style apartment blocks, combined with the equally Socialist Realist "hero" statues that completely blanket Paragon City, both contribute to my sense that Paragon City is the kind of dictatorship that we're claiming Prateorian Earth and Axis America are, with Statesman as the divine god-king and his personally-approved demigods as absolute rulers as above and beyond the law as the Communist Party was in the old Soviet Union (and still is in the People's Republic of China). These two glaring features of the design of Paragon City are almost certainly what make it easy for me to believe the Arachnos propaganda about what a fascist, dictatorial hellhole Statesman's America is: it looks like a fascist, dictatorial hellhole.

Ironically, there's one other way in which Paragon City looks profoundly un-American, and it's in the opposite direction. One of the first things any foreigner comments on, after visiting America, is just how crazy Americans are about hanging our flag everywhere, and draping it on everything. Every office building and car lot in America has a flagpole, every mall in America has two or more. It gets even more so during war time. But in all of however many square miles of downtown Paragon City, even at the peak of the Second Rikti War, there is one flagpole with one American flag. And even that building, the city hall, still looks wrong, because there's no way in heck that Paragon City's city hall wouldn't also be flying the Rhode Island state flag, too, underneath the American flag. (Ironically, in City of Villains, we do see the Arachnos banner draped all over the city exactly the way the US flag, and other red white and blue banners, should be draped all over City of Heroes.)

But then, if I open that can of worms, it tempts me to point out that in all of Paragon City that we've seen so far, there isn't one single-family home, whether bungalow or mansion, and not one church, not one car dealer or gas station, not one mall, not one airport. An entire city of almost nothing but apartment buildings, office buildings, strip malls, and warehouses. And those buildings all look weird to me, but I realized about a year or so ago that that's just because I'm not from Providence. Around then, I saw a news story that included a long-distance photograph of the skyline of Providence, Rhode Island as seen from the sea, and I freaked out, because it was recognizably Founder's Falls. Providence has, to a midwesterner like me, a very weird looking downtown. But it's still a downtown that's missing a whole heck of a lot of building types.

I'm sorry, I know that nothing useful is going to be done, can affordably be done, about any of these complaints. But you did ask about buildings, and this is my pet peeve with the art design of the game: it would really make Paragon City look a whole heck of a lot more American, and free, and therefore plausible, if we could remove those two hideous and ridiculous buildings, and (heresy of heresies) reduce the size of all the hero monumental statues by about 90%, and put up a heck of a lot more flagpoles, and if any future city zones that got designed included at least some of the missing building types.

Really? Maybe it's because I saw the villain arcs first, but I really wasn't impressed with the hero arcs. For one thing, I thought Keith Nance was very poorly written. And what the heck is this S.A.M. nonsense?

I'd swear that the version of Protean in the hero mission has a shorter wind-up time on his Power Siphon than the version in the villain arc; I was consistently able to joust him on a villain, but not on a hero. And either there's something weird with that map or there's something weird with him, because in the hero arc, Power Siphon was firing around corners and through pillars, whereas I was able to dodge him in the villain arc just by getting a catwalk between us.

So, having only run it so far on a tanker, and having discovered that even with a Shivan and a full tray of inspirations that I was never going to take him down, I auto-completed the mission and I haven't seen the final cut scene. But I don't expect to like it, because I hated basically everything involving the "good double." I particularly loathed the game mechanic of him supposedly off doing his own thing in the same mission map as me, when I could easily tell that he was doing no such thing. It was just completely unconvincing, really fake.

It also boggled my mind that the first arc paid 5 merits for what amounts to one multi-part mission with one easy-peasy EB in it. Heroes get paid just for breathing, I swear.

Despite having a level 50 mercs/poison, I am not the world's biggest fan of */poison. Aside from having one completely broken power (that stupid trap), I think it's mal-designed. But that being said...

I think it'd be an excellent idea for you to take the ally rez. At level 49. Probably not before, though, because it makes far more sense for you to load up on powers that actually help your team kill enemies and powers that help your team not die. Given a choice between taking the ally rez and Leadership powers, it's not even close, for example. I could even make a case for taking Tough before the ally rez, if it keeps you up and healing, keeps your minions fighting, longer. I could make a case for taking Provoke earlier than the ally rez, making it easier for you to tankermind for the team when things go south.

But there are two level 45-50 bits of content, already, where it's a big hairy deal if somebody goes to the hospital: the Hamidon raid and the Barracuda strike force. If somebody hosp's out of a full Hamidon raid, they probably don't get back into the zone. If somebody hosp's out of the Barracuda SF in the last mission, they lose the temp power that they need to have to complete the mission, and can't get it back.

But before then? Skip it. Take stuff that's more useful more often.

I didn't get any "free" rewards. What I did get were the two veterans reward badges that, by my calculations, I was owed. It's fascinating to me that the two times I submitted support tickets on this, I was told (both time) that the error was on my part, that they had recalculated my award eligibility dates, and that they were right and I was wrong. I guess they changed their minds eventually.

Mercy Island on Training Room 02 has turned into a Phantom Zone -- attempt to log in or zone in there and you get disconnected, character stuck, cannot be logged into.

And, by the way, character transfers off of 02 are not enabled, so I can't transfer that character back to Training Room to continue playing.

I'll second Brad Guigar of Evil, Inc., and add Aaron Williams of Q-Force: Mightily Mediocre Superheroes and PS-238.

I would throw $5 or $6 at iMids, especially if it wasn't ad-supported. I would also love a free or really cheap iPhone app for CoH Vault if/when it ever ships. But what I want even more than those two is an app like Wikipanion, only for ParagonWiki instead of Wikipedia.

Yeah. See, that's kind of my point: for two years now, instead of giving us new instance maps, the art department has focused heavily on one-time-use only special instance maps that only appear at the very end of the newer story arcs, and here and there throughout task forces.

But this doesn't change the fact that by its very design, people spend most of their time and do most of their leveling in story arcs that re-use the same 18 instance palettes. I'm pretty sure that they think that's the best return on their dollar. But part of how they used to keep the game fresh for us was to beef up even the regular missions, to the tune of at least a couple of new instance tilesets per year.

Look, here's why this is on my mind. During the last re-activation weekend, I was at a party with the guy who first dragged me into City of Heroes back in 2005. There turned out to be another guy there who'd played the game heavily back then, who overheard when I asked if they'd been back at all for this reactivation weekend. And they both gave the same answers:

"I logged in for the last re-activation weekend. 5 minutes in, I saw the same (expletive deleted) warehouse, and logged back out." "Yeah, that was my reaction, too. I never want to see that warehouse again."

I'm still playing. But frankly, I do know how they feel.

Another historical note: "back in the day," back before City of Villains (issue 6), new player characters didn't even get to see all 8 of the instance palettes there were. You played your first 4 levels with nothing but offices, warehouses, sewers, and wet caves. It was a minor revelation when you saw your first dry tunnel at level 5, and a really big, mind-blowing deal when you saw your first Oranbegan cave at around level 12, your first tech lab at level 14 or 15, and your first Council lair at level 20.

I still distinctly remember trying hard not to be impressed the first time I saw Oranbega. And not even trying not to be impressed when I saw my first tech lab; after months of offices and warehouses and caves, that first high-tech lab (in my case, the Tsoo Rage lab) was The Coolest Thing I Had Ever Seen.

The old game was even duller than the game we play now, but it did have that sense of progression to it.

Instance palettes at launch: 8

Instance palettes added 2004: 1
Instance palettes added 2005: 4
Instance palettes added 2006: 3
Instance palettes added 2007: 1
Instance palettes added 2008: 1
Instance palettes added 2009: 0
Instance palettes added 2010: none yet

Total added over 71 months: 10
Time since last instance palette was added: 23 months.

- - - - -

Issue 0: 4/27/04
* office (regular and abandoned)
* warehouse (regular and abandoned)
* sewer
* wet cave
* dry tunnel
* tech lab
* Council lair
* Oranbega

Issue 1: 6/29/04
* instanced outdoor

Issue 2: 9/16/04 - no new instance types

Issue 3: 1/4/05
* cargo ship

Issue 4: 5/4/05 - no new instance types

Issue 5: 8/31/05
* mixed (sewer to tunnel, office to tunnel, etc)

Issue 6: 10/27/05
* Snake tunnel
* Arachnos lab
(also included 2 office re-skins, 2 warehouse re-skins, 1 wet cave re-skin, 1 tech lab re-skin)

Issue 7: 6/6/06
* Mayhem
* Arachnoid tunnel

Issue 8: 11/28/06
* wrecked tech lab

Issue 9: 5/1/07 - no new instance types

Issue 10: 7/24/07
* Rikti tunnels

Issue 11: 11/28/07 - no new instance types

Issue 12: 5/20/08
* Cimeroran ruins

Issue 13: 12/2/08 - no new instance types

Issue 14: 4/8/09 - no new instance types

Issue 15: 6/29/09 - no new instance types (included 5th Column lairs as re-re-skinned Council lairs)

Issue 16: 9/15/09 - no new instance types

- - - - -

Presumably the interiors of Praetorian buildings won't look exactly like Paragon City or Rogue Isles buildings? We can hope. But the fact doesn't change: there are still only 18 instance palettes. If you want to be generous and count Paragon office, Paragon abandoned office, Rogue Isles office, and Rogue Isles abandoned office as 4 different palettes; count Paragon warehouse, Paragon abandoned warehouse, Rogue Isles warehouse, and Rogue Isles abandoned warehouse as 4 different palettes; blue wet cave and brown wet cave as separate palettes; tech lab and Longbow lab as separate palettes; and Council and 5th Column lairs as separate palettes, you can push that up by another 10. Since that's just changing decals on the same models, I personally don't.

And there still hasn't been a new instance palette added since the Cimeroran excavations of May 2008. There's a reason why people think that they're seeing the same maps over and over again -- it's because they are. There's a reason why people think they've memorized every turn and every spawn placement on the maps we have -- they have.

Yes, I realize that creating all 20 or 30 variations on a new palette is a time consuming job, and that each of them then has to be tested (ideally, better tested than the Arachnos labs were when they were first introduced) to see if they've produced any new AI pathfinding bugs. But didn't Paragon Studios hire about 30 or 40 people a while ago?

(Credit where credit is due: the wrecked tech lab, Rikti tunnel, and Cimeroran excavation instance sets were beautiful, beautiful work.)