InfamousBrad

You're not. But then, I'm a 42 month vet. I know that Spectral Daemon Lords are only a problem if you're a melee user who has no mez attack, and how many of those are there? I breathe a slight sigh of relief when I outlevel Earth Thorn Casters, but that's only laziness on my part. Succubi are annoying, but at least they don't hit all that hard.

Here's my list:

Crey "Tank" Bosses: Most of my characters only hate them for one reason: it takes forever to kill something that has superspeed that runs away at half health. Any of my characters that do lethal damage and have no -dmgres hate them for a second reason.

Malta Ops Officers: But only in groups. One of them, mildly annoying. Two of them, okay, that's really annoying. Three of them: AoE stun everything but a granite brute or tanker ... ick.

Nosferatu: The canonical over-powered elite boss villain (see previous thread).

Positron: Auto-hit irresistable seriously crippling AoE debuffs, followed by AoE attacks at numbers inexcusable for a supposed defender.

Other ones I hate are situational, only when soloed by specific characters. Tsoo Green Ink Men are annoying to my characters that have neither mez nor mez protection; four minions per spawn that have stun? really? this is reasonable? Scrapyarder Demolitionists are a trivial enemy for anybody except a mastermind, to whom they're the most annoying mob in the game; Soldiers of Rularuu in general are the same thing to controllers and dominators, no big deal to anybody else but indefensibly lethal even as minions to them.

Three mobs' AoE debuff attacks have indefensibly long durations, in my opinion: the Night Widows' Smoke Grenade, the PPD SWAT Equalizer's Glue Grenade, and the PPD Ghost's Flashbang Grenade. Is there any good game mechanics reason to have a debuff last that long?

And now you know exactly how I felt about issues 6 and 7.

Look, whatever their virtues, you cannot accuse the Paragon Studios writing team of having any subtlety to their politics, of handling shades of gray at all well, at least not to date. Look at how they've handled (or, to my taste, mis-handled) the entire Arachnos storyline so far. Plausible dictators and their lackeys don't gloat about how evil and corrupt and thieving they are, or about how they want to grind the whole world under their iron boot, not even among themselves; they talk about how corrupt and immoral and thieving and evil the other side are, and talk about themselves as the protectors and liberators of the common man.

So, yeah, no. No matter how much they said at Herocon about how the Praetorians are no longer just the "goatee versions" of Freedom Phalanx and the Vindicators, once they set up Tyrant as a villain, and you can't deny that they have, it was pretty much inevitable that all of the writing will portray Tyrant and his lackeys as mustache-twirling melodrama villains; the only moral ambiguity will be in the matter of how long does it take your character to figure out that the Resistance are the good guys and the government superheroes and cops are the bad guys, and once you figure that out, do you choose to be a bad guy for the government or a good guy for the resistance?

Like you, I would love to be wrong. It's much better writing and plotting that way, and much more interesting. But I don't expect to have been wrong about this.

On YouTube (here) you can see the full half-hour main presentation on Going Rogue that was given at Herocon, it's in there.

To be precise, it doesn't say that there's no level 20+ content; it just says that at level 20, you have to go to Primal Earth. They said in a separate presentation (or so I'm told) that Going Rogue includes new super-hard content for people who are already maxed out level 50s, and that they would be releasing the first information on what that content would be around the time the beta begins. (Which ought to be in at most a couple of weeks, right? Right?) I speculate (and I want to stress that this is pure speculation on my part!) that this will involve either:

• a Praetorian invasion of Primal Earth, a battle between the Heroes and the Resistance versus the Praetorians and the Villains, with Vigilantes and Rogues taking both sides as they feel their internal moral compass (or their pocketbook) guides them (my first guess), or ...
• Heroes and Resistance invade Praetorian Earth to overthrow Tyrant, who is defended by Loyalists and Villains (with the same caveat about Vigilantes and Rogues), or (one last guess) ...
• maybe separate or joint raids against Praetorian Super Mega Ultra Hamidon, the version of Hamidon that got started decades before Primal Hamidon, conquered all of Praetorian Earth except Praetorian (Paragon) City, and as a result has monopoly access to every source of super-heroic power outside of Rhode Island.

In two of those three guesses, people who buy the expansion will be going to Praetorian Earth at level 50. Or else it's something else entirely.

You're entirely welcome. I couldn't not do so, not after laughing myself half to death all the way through it.

Actually, no, that isn't my original argument, by any stretch of the imagination. In no sense whatsoever did I either say or even imply that you have to fight back (case #1) or that you have to attack a target you could two-shot or maybe three-shot kill from outside their attack range (case #2). What I asked, precisely and in as many words, was, "why wouldn't you?" And more precisely, what do you gain from running away to the base and exiting the zone that you wouldn't gain more quickly and more efficiently by just fighting them, win or lose?

And all that anybody can tell me that they gain when they do this is "I didn't PvP." OK. That's what, not why. Why is that so important? Seven humanoid mobs on the screen, one of which has a player behind the controls; why is it such an unimaginably awful thing that you'd give up on getting the Shivan, give up on whatever other badge you were there for, flee the zone altogether, rather than tab over to them and push a few buttons? "I don't want to." OK, I understood that as soon as they fled the zone. I didn't ask if they wanted to or not, I asked why not? "Because it's not fun" is an unresponsive answer; it doesn't explain what part of it is unfun or non-fun or anti-fun. By superspeeding away or stealthing up and flying away you've already decided not to have fun, you've given up for now on the fun you came to the zone to get. I'm asking about your plan B after your plan A (do whatever without seeing another player) has fallen through. Why is running away less unfun than either winning or losing?

Some people have answered with things that they're actually afraid would happen, thank you. But even those left me scratching my head. Someone was afraid that they might hit the other person a few times and the person they hit would leave. Didn't you want them to leave, in the first place? Someone else was afraid that if they turned and fought, three or six or however many other people would materialize out of nowhere and fight them. If they were going to do that, wouldn't they have done that at the start of the fight, aren't you worrying about something that obviously isn't going to happen? Someone else was worried that they'd turn out to suck at PvP and lose, but they didn't explain why getting sent to the hospital that way is more painful or unpleasant or humiliating than going to (or by) the hospital the longer, slower way of running away.

Which leaves it at "if I don't run away, I might fight another player, and that would be bad." And I remain as baffled as I ever was as to why that's so intolerable, so awful, that people would give up on what they obviously already wanted to do rather than risk it. *shrug* If I don't get an answer I can understand soon, I'll drop it and go back to thinking of it as one of life's mysteries.

What "my notion"? I didn't design the game. I didn't make the rules.

When they designed City of Villains and created the Bloody Bay zone, they put a valuable temp power mission in that zone specifically to create an incentive for casual PvP; that much is obvious, implicit in the design. Yes, you can have a temp power that gives you an elite boss level pet (for crying out loud!). No, you don't need it; it's not like they made the other content any harder when they introduced Shivan Shards. But yes, it does make it easier to solo elite bosses and such. If you want to do that, you can only do so if you expose yourself to the risk of fighting a player from the other side. Don't want that? Do without Shivans. That's how the game is designed.

Now yes, by only doing your Shivan runs during seriously slow times, or on empty servers, you can maximize your chance of completing the mission without having to see another player. And yes, if you suck at PvP and hate PvP that much, I can see why you'd want to. But if your plan to do so fails, you have two choices: run away, or fight. Running away just wastes your time. No, really; it is even slower than losing a fight, and absolutely guarantees that you don't get the Shivan Shard temp power. But if you turn and fight, and lose, you lost nothing. If you turn and fight and win, all it cost you is 15 or so seconds' delay before you get your Shivan Shard, and you get paid back for that 15 seconds delay with a chance to win an extraordinarily valuable PvP enhancement recipe. So why wouldn't you?

You wouldn't because you hate PvP? Look, you decided to PvP when you ignored the loud, shouting, blaring, flashing PvP alert siren. The decision to not PvP should have been made at that point; that's the way the game is set up, the way it's designed. After that, the only remaining decision is not whether to PvP or not, it's whether to try, succeed or fail, or to surrender and run away. I'm not asking why people would avoid Bloody Bay; I'm asking why, when confronted with a visibly obviously pathetically weak opponent, one no more dangerous to them than a +1 minion (because in both of the examples in the original posting, that is all I was, really, to them), they'd choose that moment to decide that they didn't want to PvP?

Somebody brought up ERP. Unfair comparison, because I can give reasons why I don't think ERP is fun. But even if I accept the comparison, this would be like going into Pocket D during an announced ERP event, walking up to a crowd of people at the event, and then running away and fleeing Pocket D as soon as they typed something to you. Why would you do that?

Ga-a-a-a-a-ahhhhchhh. That's the one thing I'll never do. Dueling in open PvP zones offends me the same way that the recipe/badge farmers taking oh-so-polite turns killing each other without fighting back do. They're both tremendously elaborate and badly improvised attempts to avoid actually playing the game the way it was designed. It's like playing chess against somebody but demanding that we prohibit castling and that we eliminate the mad queens rule (the rule that upgraded the queen from a spare king to the most powerful piece on the board) because "queens are stupidly overpowered, lol."

If I were looking for duels, I'd be hanging out in Pocket D by the Arena terminals. (And if PvP gave XP, like it did in WAR, I might well be doing just that. But that's an argument for another day.) I have nothing inherently against dueling. But that's not what Bloody Bay and Siren's Call and Warburg and Recluse's Victory are for.

- - - - -

From what people are saying here, I'm getting the sense that I've stumbled upon the cure for the common gank: show no fear. Don't try to hide, and if you see someone, attack them. Since MMO players, by huge margins, are terrified of uncertainty and unpredictability and are unwilling to risk the possibility of the worst, doing so makes you just like that video I've seen on the Internet of a cat attacking and chasing off a bear. The bear knows that the cat is no harder to catch than a fish, and that it could bite the cat in half in one bite, but it runs away anyway, because it's thinking "the cat obviously thinks it could win this fight; it must know something I don't know"?

The consequences of losing a fight in this game are so trivial that I can't imagine fearing it. Even if I was jumped by surprise by a stalker (and it's happened) and I feared that if I stood and fought them that six more stalkers would materialize out of the woodwork (why? if there were six more stalkers, why wouldn't they all attack at once?), so what? What's it hurt if I fight back and lose?

You suck at PvP? Amazing coincidence; I'm not all that great at it, either. But some day I may suck less, because I'm not afraid to fight, lose, and send the person a tell afterwards saying, "good fight, I have no idea how you just did that, what did you DO to me?" Everything I know about PvP in any game I've played I've learned that way; half of 'em are happy to boast.

And I'm mildly autistic. You can't tell me you fear surprise more than I do. You can't tell me that you fear uncertainty more than I do. You can't tell me that you fear disruption of your routine more than I do. But how can it count as a surprise that someone attacks you in a PvP zone? What's uncertain about it? How did you not know to plan it into your routine?

Look, I'm not trying to troll here; I really am baffled. What I'm seeing is inexplicable to me, it's unimaginable the lengths I see people go to to avoid playing a game that they pay $15 a month to play. OK, I know what somebody's going to say to that: I don't pay to play that particular part of the game. So, okay, a fight threatens to break out and you run back to the base, passing the hospital on your way to the helicopter out. What did you just save? If the absolute worst had happened, if I were secretly on a level 50 fully kitted out with PvP and purple IOs and backed up by a covert strike squad of 25 other hidden stalkers, what can we do to you? Send you to the Longbow base you were already fleeing to, only faster. Taking the slower, scenic route to the helicopter out is that preferable to you? Why?

Not only is that an ambush, it's a player-targeted ambush. And not only is that a player-targeted ambush, it's something I've never seen anywhere else in City of Heroes: a player-targeted ambush that stays targeted on the player who clicked the glowie even if they leave the map and return. He stays aggroed on you, and will run the length of the map to meet you at the door if need be, until he has killed you at least once.

This is not, to put it mildly, one of my favorite missions.

Interesting. New. But not surprising, since if they did defeat it, they'd have exactly zero chance of defeating Lord Winter. Try it with two teams.