InfamousBrad

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I was hoping for 5th column invasions (read as "Giant Mechman Invasions").

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Like that.

I can tolerate this because unlike last year, they're not over-doing it; this is the first time Hro'Dtohz has gathered enough forces to do several days of bombardment in over six months. Assuming it's even longer before the next time, it's not inconsistent with the fact that probably 75% of the players have saved the world from this guy and ended the Second Rikti War, on at least one of their characters, personally, by now.

But now that we have Ouroboros, it's seriously unnecessary. What I wish Paragon Studios would do is move the bloody storyline forward: rewrite the text of the RWZ missions to reflect a change from having to save the world from world-wide Rikti invasion to having to save Paragon City from Hro'Dtohz's revenge. Move the old missions, the zone invasions, and the LGTF into Ouroboros. (Yes, this would require a new "badge mission" for each side that simulated a zone invasion on an instanced outdoor map. So? What's so hard about that?)

And then give us some story arcs somewhere that explain why we're having zombie invasions every time someone turns in Halloween salvage. Let us defeat that global threat, and move it, and any zombie invasions that aren't on Halloween, to Ouroboros six months later.

And then give us some Boomtown story arcs that actually fill in the gaping plot holes in the BSF and the DKTF, let us find and defeat the base that the 5th Column was using to travel backwards in time and to travel sideways in time to Axis America. While that's going on, do what you should have done with issue 15, and have zones invaded by levelless 5th Columnists. Let that go on for three months or so, and move it to Ouroboros.

And then show us the Coming Storm, whatever it is. And when enough of us have defeated the source of the Coming Storm, move it to Ouroboros. And so forth, and so on. Seriously, give us something for old timers to reminisce about, give us some sense that time passes in the City of Heroes universe, don't trap the public zones forever in 2003. Now that we have Ouroboros, we don't have to take anything away to do so, we just put it where people can find it and travel to if if they care: in the past.

Appropriately, I played it with retired Arachnos Political Officer, now professor of political science and Destined One candidate, James "Jimmy" McCool, a level 45 mace/mace Bane Spider Soldier. I 5-starred it ... barely. It was very, very funny, and it was very easily soloable, but I felt a powerful urge to nitpick it in so many places that I very nearly knocked a star off. Basically, you earned back the 2/3rds of a star I wanted to take away just by over-the-top creativity.

Now, the nits:

<ul type="square">[*]Throughout: In general, you wrote Arachnos propaganda better than I was expecting you to, but with one serious omission. Lots of talk about science and cleverness and so forth, yes, but you left out something that's key to Lord Recluse's propaganda: any reference to strength. Go listen to the "Strength to Take What You Desire" speech again. Praise the player for his strength and/or ruthlessness at least once, not just for his cleverness; we're not all nerds in Arachnos, some of us are bullies. And some of us are both, like Lord Recluse, who should also be flattered for his strength and ruthlessness along side flattery of his genius and cunning.
[*]Mission one: No nits. If I were fanatic about wanting XP in all my missions, or if this had been a longer mission, I would have complained. If it had been as long as I thought it was going to be (the splash screen made me think it would be the sunken Boomtown map, not the plain Boomtown one), I would have complained. As it was, it was nice re-purposing of standard mobs in a custom faction, bravo.
[*]Mission two: Brilliant satire, but I wanted to kill you when I entered the mission and saw what the last objective was. Fortunately, it was a head fake. But if I hadn't been inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt (and give the fake objective the old college try on what is not even vaguely my most tweaked character), I might have quit and 2-starred you right there and then. Risky move, my friend.
[*]Mission three: Funny, but I can not believe that you went there. (Are we to assume that Black Scorpion had a major influence over this simulation?) People with high offensensitivity may end up Reporting For Content, for both sexism and copyright or trademark infringement.
[*]Mission four: Without spoiling it, there's nothing even vaguely plausible about the custom mobs in this mission, not even as Arachnos propaganda. Yes, the hostage rescues were funny, but after all the attention you paid to canon in missions 1-3, it felt really off. There's also a bug in the final fight: the ambushes spawned friendly to me instead of hostile.[/list]
P.S. "Get your parking validated?" Silly humanoid, only tourists drive in the Rogue Isles.

P.P.S. If you'd restricted it to levels 20-29, you wouldn't have been able to use the Nemesis mobs you needed to tell your story. If you hadn't limited mission 1 to 20-29, you wouldn't have been able to use the other mobs. So unless you want to recreate your own custom army of radioactive diseased cannibal mutants, from scratch, you made the right choice. And repurposing mobs made it feel more like cheesy simulated propaganda. Not every one will agree with me, but I think the level ranges are fine the way they are.

I'll add to what other people have already said that if you're mid-level for the task force or strike force, clearing (or very nearly clearing) each mission is the most rewarding way to play: maximum XP, maximum loot. For all but the longest TFs, and for all villain SFs, that's what I'd actually prefer: to join the TF or SF that is my level, and play it as designed, fighting our way to the objectives.

But since task forces and strike forces give only merit rewards to people above their level, and since running the TFs and SFs their own level more than once per day gives diminishing rewards, your average TF or SF has at least half of the players getting no reward for anything but the end of the mission. So, by definition, half or more of the players on the team want to get to that end-of-mission as soon as possible.

(What? Inf? Yeah, as if there's anything left in this game that can be bought with the amount of inf you'd get from clearing a TF. You get inf in this game by grinding out merits, using merits to buy reward rolls, and selling your unwanted random rewards to people who got their inf from gold farmers.)

Note that we have no idea what, if anything, Hardcase's powers are.

That's relevant to why people hate getting threatened and pushed around by him: there isn't a single hint in game as to why we should think he's capable of carrying out his threats, no reason to think he isn't just J. Random Thinks-He's-Somebody with a big mouth and nothing to back it up.

I have less problem with Hardcase than most people do. I don't think he's a hero for being a demon hunter, considering that his primary client is a mafia-linked singer who's trying to break a deal with the devil, and that his job consists of protecting mafia-owned casinos and their patrons from demons. I do think that there's one tiny problem with his character concept: if he's as good as he says, how in the heck can Governor Sonata, even as rich as he probably is, afford him? But no, even as a level 39 character, I don't have much doubt that the world's most effective demon hunter has some trick up his sleeve that I can't deal with ...

... but I wouldn't have to take the game's word for it if, just once, I saw him either smack the living crap out of my character, say with some combination of long-duration mag 200 hold and a full set of energy melee attacks, or if I saw him one-shot something way, way above our mutual level, like a giant monster. If he could actually do the stuff he says he could, if we could see that he could do the stuff he says he can do, he'd stop being Muerte from Undercover Blues and turn into Riddick from Pitch Black.

(Which is why if I ran into an AE arc where I easily defeated Hardcase, I'd 1-star the arc on my way out for majorly violating canon.)

Good weekend for it: I'll be out of town, which means I'll have something else to do on the weekend when I can't log in.

In my opinion, Barracuda needs a rewrite. There's no trace of her accent in there, and she's way, way too peppy. Contrasts badly with the Temple of the Waters strike force and with her appearances in the official comic book.

In my case, it'd be a toss-up between Blue Steel and Marshall Brass: both natural origin heroes (at least, I presume Blue Steel is natural origin?), both understand that their high level of achievement doesn't put them above all law, both pushing themselves to the edge of human achievement levels in order to do the thankless job of enforcing the law on people and beings who think that they are above all law. In my opinion, vigilantes, especially solo vigilantes, are never heroes.

When the rumor was that i16 was Going Rogue, I held out some hope that it would be out in time to compete with that other MMO. Now that it's i17 or later? Zero chance. They're averaging four or more months per expansion, and it's only 3 months to September. They are not going to, they cannot, release issues 15, 16, and 17 in the next three months. Period.

I could live with that, but I don't think it's going to happen. I put i16 in December and Going Rogue no earlier than April of 2010.

It'd be nice if they could pull off a miracle and get i16 out exactly 3.5 weeks after that other superhero MMO releases, to give people yet another reason to come back after they find out how lame it is. I suspect that's what they're trying to do. But that hasn't been their recent history.

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I am a recently returning player to CoX. I previously had gotten to lvl 50 on my villain's character and started a new villian recently. I really got into the story/lore the missions provided for this villain (actually reading everything provided). The villain arcs really provided a fun and entertaining story. However, I also just recently started another Hero character and the mission dialogue and lore really stinks in comparision. The only entertaining mission arc I have done so far is the the entire fautline arc. I am curretly lvl 22 on this character and wondering if the story presentation for the heroe side gets better or should I just look forward to rogue when I can play the villian missions with my heroe characters?

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It does. In places, it even gets as good as the villain content. But, realistically speaking, not before level 20. Most of the level 5-20 "classic" city zone hero content stinks like week-old fish. Once you get to level 20, though, you start getting actual story arcs more often, and most of them are pretty good. RedTomax.com has a helpful "Guide to Paragon City's network of contacts" that'll help you find them.

For electric melee stalkers, Assassin's Shock does not return to the default in-combat stance after the animation plays. If the player moves before returning to the default in-combat stance, they "slide" without playing any animation at all.

Male Arachnos Soldiers don't kneel when Resting if they have a weapon drawn when the power is activated. I haven't checked to see if it applies to female or huge, but it does apply to both guns and maces.

1) There's a Suggestions forum. Suggestions go there. I'm surprised some moderator hasn't moved the thread already.

2) /jranger. What you want is not a chest symbol. What you want is a chest texture, like the various Emblem patterns, so that you can put a chest symbol on top of it, if you want. Or if you want to swing for the bleachers, both, going in opposite directions (chest pattern bar sinister, chest symbol bar dexter) so you can make the "No 'saying no' symbol).

While openly admitting that NCsoft has the right to do with their money whatever they want, I hope that NCsoft has -- frankly -- smartened up enough to have noticed that they had been siphoning money out of City of Heroes to fund the development of other games, ever since they laid off everybody but the Freem 15. And that doing so has been, frankly, disastrous.

A capsule history of NCsoft and MMOs: as people were getting tired of Everquest, three replacement MMOs came out, EQII, WoW, and Lineage. And frankly, WoW won. Won so big that even in Lineage's target market, Asia, people are quitting Lineage to play WoW "because that's where everybody is." It doesn't even have that much to do with how good the three games are, it's just how the market shook out.

So NCsoft invested all of the revenue from Lineage into Lineage II, in the frankly arrogant belief that they could out-Blizzard Blizzard on Blizzard's home territory, and in the deranged belief that they could sell millions of copies of a game that could only run on a couple of thousand PCs in the whole world because of its hardware requirements. (What? It worked for Doom. Once.)

Fortunately, they hedged their bet with a small investment in this game ... which has turned out to be the only profitable game they've had since Lineage I. They concluded, somewhat rightly, that part of this game's success was because it was moving out of the D&amp;D knockoff arena and into an underserved niche. But instead of continuing to invest in this game in the hope of growing the superhero MMO player base to the size of the D&amp;D knockoff MMO market, they decided instead to take the profits from this game, and the declining profits from Lineage and Lineage II, and funnel them all into a long, long series of new MMOs in underserved niches: a parody MMO, a Car Wars MMO, a Starship Troopers MMO, and a battlemech MMO.

I don't entirely blame them for this, but it's time to face facts:

1) Blizzard owns the D&amp;D knock-off market for as long as they want.

2) This is a really, really bad time to be developing new MMOs. Art budgets are so through-the-roof that it is impossible to develop a new MMO to today's art demands and actually make money with it.

There wasn't any fundamental reason why Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, or even X-teel couldn't find customers. All three were very highly awaited by legions of eager customers, and if they had been able to impress those customers, any one of them could have been a million-customer or more game. Except that they all blew through their entire development budget, and then kept on spending money without slowing down, without even finishing the art assets, leaving the game play to be cobbled together on the cheap and never even minimally tested, and that is why none of those games were any fun to play.

And ironically, right now, NCsoft owns the superhero MMO genre as thoroughly as Blizzard owns the D&amp;D knockoff MMO. There are three other companies out there that have figured out that somebody is going to make huge money in this niche. Which is why they're spending money like water to try (already completely unsuccessfully in Marvel Entertainment's case) to rush out a competitor to City of Heroes.

But they're 100% doomed to failure, if they can't solve the same budgeting problems that have killed just about every MMO that has come out since WoW. The only way that City of Heroes can fail to expand to the size of WoW (or even bigger, since superheroes are way, way bigger than generic fantasy right now), the only way it can continue to shrink like it has been ever since issue 6, the only way any of those other superhero MMOs can turn this game into Everquest and themselves into the WoW of superhero MMOs, is if NCsoft loots this game of money to pour into yet another guaranteed-fail MMO (*cough* Aion *cough*) and lets it die on the vine.

Paragon Studios knows what they need to do to make this game a mass-market success. They also know they just plain don't have the money to go back and clean up older parts of the game that suck, that new people keep falling into, concluding the game sucks, and walking away from. So they do something much, much cheaper by way of customer retention, like two five-mission story arcs or task forces every four months, when doing things like cleaning up the level 5-20 hero contacts would take much more manpower, manpower they don't have. Manpower they don't have because NCsoft doesn't have any faith in this game, they think (again) that they're going to have better luck with a grindy PvP game with such over-the-top hardware requirements that it can only run on a couple of thousand PCs in the whole world. And because that other game's hardware requirements are so high, so are its art development costs. And so ... City of Heroes continues to wither.

Maybe I'm wrong. Paragon Studios is up from 15 to 45 people. You'd think that 45 people ought to be able to produce, or clean up, content about twice as fast as 15 people could. Maybe what NCsoft has invested in Paragon Studios is enough to make this game the WoW of superheroes, and maybe they can afford to gamble the excess on other games. Maybe.

But given the track record, both of NCsoft and of the industry as a whole, I think it's a crazy thing to bet on.

Wow, not a lot of answers this time. So I feel bad adding to the queue, but this one came up in conversation today: what exactly ARE the Lost trying to achieve with the Outbreak drug? Here's what little we know, canonically:

1) Outbreak uses Rikti technology and grants people the illusion that they have super-powers; if it actually does anything other than make their eyes glow green, we have no proof of this in canon.
2) Outbreak is manufactured by the Lost in Port Oakes, Cap au Diable in the Etoile Islands and smuggled into Paragon City via mini-submarine.
3) According to an alternate-timeline Paragon Times where the heroes didn't contain the Outbreak, the Outbreak drug infects the user with an infectious disease that could result in a highly lethal global pandemic.

None of this makes any sense. I could speculate that the unnamed Lost Pariah who's running the program is trying to make an infectious version of Shift, like the one that Typhoid Willy has in a later villain arc? But at the very least, it's a dangling plot thread, isn't it?

Thank you: four stars is about what I was, by now, expecting to get. I was just curious as to what problems you'd find with them, in hopes that I could learn to do better.

You're exactly right about the Circle of Thorns bosses, and that one drove me nucking futs during the design phase, because there are no human-form CoT bosses that exactly line up with the targeted level 20-29 range. If I restricted them to Agony or Death Mages, I could have it be 20-24, or 25-29, and that's narrower than I wanted. Most of the time I've tested it, I've gotten fewer Behemoths than you did. I don't know what I want to do about that.

From a writing perspective, the biggest problem I had writing this sucker was the overwhelming urge to try to cram 8 pounds of that which promotes growth, and is very powerful, into a 5 pound bag. This was my attempt to fill in some of the gaping plot holes in the canonical level 20-29 red-side story, the places where CoV includes factions from CoH and then never EVER gets around to explaining who they are or what they're doing. In hindsight, trying to cram most of the major plot revelations from "The Tsoo Coup," "The Wheel of Destruction," "The Scroll of Tielekku," "The Library of Souls," and issues 13-15 of the Top Cow comic book ("Awakenings"), into five missions, while trying to foreshadow "The Temple of the Waters" and "The Perfect Killing Machine," was, perhaps, too ambitious.

I was also fiercely determined to write a Legacy Chain scene that showed them in action, and not just against the players. (I also went to some trouble to insert my own explanation for why everybody in the freakin' Isles knows where the Legacy Chain's library branches are, and I'm a bit proud of that, too.) In act 3, and frankly in all 4 of the first 4, I went to a lot of trouble to change things up, to keep things lively, to provide as many alternatives to boring static spawns as I could have make sense, to have something be happening in the instance when you got there instead of the standard MMO cliche' that nothing ever happens in an instance until you get there. So, yeah, that three-way fight that mixes CoT/BanPan battles, Legacy/CoT battles and hostage-takings, and Legacy/BanPan battles is something that I'm really, really proud of. I guess most people aren't as impressed with it as I thought they'd be. Oh, well.

(The Legacy Chain were never going to help the Circle, the hatred runs too deep. There's at least one line of dialog in there, or at least there's supposed to be, that's supposed to make that clear. Which is why the comic book version of "The Scroll of Tielekku" arc ends with the Circle turning to Freedom Phalanx.)

I'm also not sure I did a good job writing everybody's voices. Operative Kirkland is easy for me; if I grew up in the Rogue Isles, Operative Kirkland is probably who I'd have grown up to be. The rest? Not so sure.

I think of it a having a theme, a common enough theme in comic books: nothing is ever simple. A simple attempt to get the piddliest, weakest, tiniest faction in the Rogue Isles to pay their taxes drops you into the middle of three separate plots to destroy or enslave the world, all of which are working at cross-purposes to each other. The other day, I was joking in a global chat channel that I could write an arc where in act 1, you get sent to the post office to buy a stamp for the contact, and by the end of act 5 you'd be battling to save the human race from extinction. Not thematic enough? Can't help it; it's what I know how to write.

But hey, at least you didn't do what most of the commenters who rated my arc did: knock off a point for having Circle of Thorns in an arc that says it includes the Circle of Thorns. And even if I did only get four stars, I did get the coveted "recommended" rating from Venture. That's not nothing. No reply necessary; thanks for your help.

Suits are almost impossible to do right in this game, because there are neither any pants, nor any skirts, that match the expletive-deleted jackets.

Men and Huge get two pair of even vaguely comparable pants: Pants and Suit Pants. The Suit Pants still don't match any of the jackets in texture, but worse than that, they're a style of cuffed pants that I haven't seen on an actual guy since the late 1970s. So I end up making do with Pants, which are close enough in texture to the jacket, but the patch pockets on the back and the slant pockets on the flat front mark them unambiguously as jeans. At a bare minimum, it would be nice to have a pair of slacks with the same texture as the suit jackets, plain hems, vertical slash front pockets at the side seam, and horizontal slash pockets in the back. Those would actually go with suit pants.

In addition to the same completely unsuitable pants, women get three lengths of skirt (mini, full, and pencil) in five styles: two patterns of pleated skirts, which nobody wears with suit jackets and never did, one leather skirt (even worse), one bridal skirt if you pay extra (with fancy trim that would look stupid with a suit) and one in shiny fabric that matches tights just fine, but looks stupid with the jacket. At the very least, it'd be nice to have one more texture for the mini, full, and pencil skirts that was called Suit, with the same texture as the jackets.

And yeah, pantyhose are a problem, less because of the texture than because of the limited color pattern. You can replicate pantyhose just fine with tights with the Bikini 2 pattern ... as long as you're comfortable with a shade of tan or taupe way darker than anyone has worn since the early 1980s. But this problem probably isn't going away short of a total revamp of the costume creator, because it would require adding colors to the color palette, and I don't foresee that happening any time soon.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MST3KMantra

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Greetings all,

This thread is being opened up for lore questions. This is the place I will start looking for each weeks Canon Fodder questions. I will work with the rest of the devs to put together as many answers as I can each week.

The game is afoot!

~M

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*cough* "each week" *cough*

There already is an official farming thread. Use it.

If it burns when you question, I advise a visit to your doctor, who will probably prescribe antibiotics.

Come on, you've been here for five years. You must know by now that the developers never release any answers to any questions this far in advance. So what's the point of asking them? Enjoy the game as it is now (or as it is about to be, on the test server) and let the future take care of itself.

When I'm intoxicated, I usually also have something more entertaining to do than sit in front of a keyboard.

And seeing how poorly some people handle their intoxicants (which, being a religious Dionysian, is a pet peeve of mine) makes me want to make at least some people have to hook up a breathalyzer to their global chat access. I know it's not their fault, because they grew up in a culture that does exactly nothing to teach you how to handle intoxicants, expects you to figure it out by trial and error, and is then constantly and endlessly surprised each time yet another of them destroys themselves by getting it wrong.

But some otherwise perfectly pleasant people turn into raving monster @holes when drunk, and it's wearying. I feel like I'm way too old to deal with it gracefully.

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Why is Mercy Island half destroyed? It has never been explained that Arachnos had to attack it, but its massive level of devistation implies one hell of a bombardment.

And why is St Martial showing the same levels of devistation in some parts? ...

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If you do all of the Snakes arcs, including the level 45+ ones, you get most of the answer on this one. One of the surviving Incarnates from the Age of the Titans, Stheno the Gorgon (sister of Medusa) lives under Mercy Island. Once she has hatched what she considers to be enough Cobra Trueborns, she tries to take the surface of the island. The gap between attempts runs to centuries, but the most recent one was only barely before Operation Destiny, probably some time around 2003 or 2004. What you're seeing is what's left of Darwin's Landing after Arachnos resorted to house-to-house fighting and aerial bombardment just to mostly reclaim the surface from the Snakes, to mostly push them back down into their holes. That's also why there's a separate Mercy Island to Port Oakes ferry, it's part of a joke of a quarantine that's blatantly unsuccessfully trying to keep the Snakes from reaching the other islands.

Beats me on St. Martial. My guess would be mad science gone awry (since whatever it was, the Freakshow obviously hope to dig it up), but there are no missions that refer to what went wrong in the Black Mariah neighborhood, nor any history plaques. I hope you get an answer on that one. As for the other end of the isle, it just looks like it does because it's a slum. All those fancy tourist hotels' minimum wage employees live somewhere, after all, and all the trash from those tourist dives has to get dumped somewhere.

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*low whistle* Damn Venture, you tryin' to make War Witch cry?

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I would bet money -- a small sum, but money nonetheless -- that Melissa "War Witch" Bianco didn't go anywhere near the 5th Column TF or SF. I haven't run them, but the description sounds way, way below her average work. I'm not going to say she hasn't done one or two really lame arcs before (Captain Petrovich comes to mind off hand), but generally she does better work than this.

Because, yeah, if nothing else? ANY of the native villains siding with Nazi Statesman is just unimaginably stupid.

But Venture's right, I'd also bet money on that. This close to their planned ship date, they're not going to rewrite those arcs from scratch. They should, no matter how late it makes i15, and they ought to back them up with at least some non-TF, non-SF missions to make the return of the 5th Column some kind of a meaningful event, but they won't. Lame.

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Where did the original recipe for Superadine come from?

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I forget the source, but I'm pretty sure I remember the canonical explanation: Nemesis. (He is, among other things, a chemical engineer.) He was fascinated by Dark Watcher, but couldn't capture him because the rest of Freedom Phalanx were too good, and he couldn't find another plane-walker to experiment on. So he decided to flood the world with superhero origins in hopes of catching a level 1 mutant with the same powers as Dark Watcher. It worked. He leaked the results of those experiments to scientists who set up yet another Nemesis front corporation, called Portal Corporation.

(It is, unlikely, however, that, upon discovering the secret of interdimensional travel and setting up a corporation to develop it, he said, "This is a triumph. I'm making a note here: big success. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.")