Johnny_Butane

This is what I lean towards supporting.

If you open it up to player created characters, I predict it's going to turn into a a farce where someone who I've never heard of, from a server I never play on, with a long friends list and a lot of Inf, ends up getting the spot after a shameless astroturfing campaign regardless of the actual merit of their creation.


.

That's a terrible idea. The Brawler just can't make a blue miniskirt work with his figure.


This one votes for Dillo!

*hoorb!*



.

Hulk is pretty much the only reason I can come up with. Occasionally, the guy with the 'S' gets mad and hits extra hard, but that's more like Build Up, don't you think?

Rage isn't even how I'd model rage. To me, rage would be a massive damage buff that also gave you a penalty to accuracy or something. You know, just swinging blindly. But it would be like Domination where it just build and builds until you just snap and let it out.



.

Of course you can. We've been pulling swords, guns, arrows, axes, bows and maces out of nothing since day 1.

You know what? Let people make that call themselves.

If you don't want to look goofy in the air, don't use the attacks in the air. I don't care about looking goofy. That's what this game engine does. What I care about is having two attacks taken off the table for no good reason.



.

You call that giant? It's about the size of a patio stone(and less dense if it's asphalt). I can hoist one of those over my head easily. I can't make them curve around corners, though.



.

If Hurl and Foot Stomp were flagged 'near the ground' instead of 'on ground only', this might be a valid point...

If the game also didn't have guns that don't need to be reloaded, large masses of ice forming from nothing (even at 90% humidity there's not enough water in the air) orange flame that burns in the water, ghosts and super powers in general.

You want to suspend disbelief, what's to say my hero didn't zip down to the ground in the blink of an eye and rip up a rock in an instant? What's to say I'm not strong enough to stomp the air and make a shockwave?

Gameplay trumps realism. And in this case, there's a needless limitation in the gameplay with on the ground only powers that should be done away with.



.

Well, some people want to be able to run both CJ and Hover for the defense.

I would like to have a use for Hover on my SS/Inv because I'd like to be able to get Afterburner and not have to take an inferior attack I'll never slot or use.

During his tenure as power guy, I asked Castle if there was any balance reasons why powers like Foot Stomp and Hurl were blocked from being used in flight/hover. He said no, generally that's not a balance point and that it was purely and aesthetic decision.

I never thought it was fair that a power set had two of it's powers essentially rendered inoperable just because of a travel power choice.

Often I've lobbied to have this changed with no result. We have guns with infinite clips that never need be reloaded. We can be on fire while waist deep in water. We can form large masses of ice from nothing in a volcano mere feet from a lava flow. We can call down a satellite strike on a target that's in the distant past, underground in a cave.

But they can't allow a SS character to just throw a rock when in the air or figure out an alternate animation for Foot Stomp? That's bull.


.

They're SS, not EM. No pom poms and it's hard not to notice the Hand Clap. They have a custom Laser Beam Eyes-esque targeted AoE attack, though.


.

Ouch. That stings.



.

^___This___^



.

Shots from the Diabolique trial show the Phalanx with magical symbols around their heads, possibly meaning they're under her control. This silhouette has what could be the same aura.

So, I'm leaning towards it being him, and...oh look, he's fighting off eight or more Incarnates at once.




.

It depends on what you mean by "being" character X. Do you mean this in respect to their standing in position in the world? In that respect, I agree. They've got their premier flying brick already. And the brilliant gadgeteer. And the fastest man on Earth.

Our characters are relegated to third stringers, but at the same time, this is something the devs claim they're trying to address. Getting Statesman out of the way could very well be part of that, and I forget where, but I seem to recall them saying as much.

But, there are other causes that contribute to (what I see as) the same problem that are completely separate from wringing.

Can you *be* Booster Gold? Well, no. Not in my opinion. But it's not the writing, but the system, the mechanics. Booster has hand to hand abilities, ranged attacks and a respectable force field that protects him from most damage. Our system doesn't allow for this very well in my opinion.

Yes, you can put a PFF force field on a Blaster or go Defender, but they'll still spend most of their time on their face. And they'll be waiting until way down the line just to even get that sturdy. Booster *isn't* a glass cannon, so trying to hack a glass cannon into him doesn't fly with me.

Same with a character like Deadpool or Iron Man. You can get a crappy sword temp and put in on a DP Blaster, but that's a poor approximation. And I'm sorry but Energy Blaster/Defender/Corr doesn't fit Tony any better. It's all fudging something we shouldn't have to fudge. Like when the only way do to a character with handguns was a petless MM.

The fact that the devs can realize their characters however they want to, and we all have to look at them, is just twisting the knife. And even if they kill off Statesman, Positron and whoever else, that doesn't make MY Tankers, Defenders or other characters any closer to what they are in my head or better approximating comic heroes any better.

I don't disagree with any of this.

Or this.


My sticking point, is that when that same concept is attempted by a player, it has to be hacked, or handwaved or fudged. And there are TOO MAN concepts like that. It's very much a case that the rather than being something that helps us facilitate 'perfectly reasonable' character concepts, the power/AT system has, in my eyes, instead turned into a straight jacket that continually wags its finger at us if you dare think someone could possibly learn how to fire a gun and use a sword in one lifetime.



.

Agree in part. Positron theorized the city needed a new incarnation of the Phalanx and took it upon himself to engineer one. But hit efforts didn't work, and it was only until the disparate parts came together on their own that it actually happened. And even then, it wasn't until Statesman came around. The fact that Positron the character was such a Statesman fanboy is what started things rolling to begin with.

To call Positron the 'heart' of the Freedom Phalanx? Yeah, that's just plain not true and disrespectful to Statesman, no matter how you view him.


This I'm OK with. The fire Prometheus stole from the gods is analogous to technology, allowing us to progress as a species. It's fitting a genius inventor be the guardian, IMO.


Everyone's characters are wish fulfillment to some degree. The problem is when you use your position to see your wishes are fulfilled better than other peoples. "MY Tanker is actually an offensive powerhouse. MY Defender can be armored. MY character can have swords and guns and regeneration. Everyone else, you get to watch them. Your character gets what we let them."

I caution you in asking for that. Because they're liable to over correct and then we get buried in this:

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/11/16


Even if they did start writing better, that doesn't change the existing characters or address the problem I feel are at the root of this, namely the powers and AT system.



.

Did you watch the Vidoc? The FIRST thing Positron lists about the character's abilities is that he's extremely tough because he's armored.

And he is. I've seen eight player characters beat on him and he shrugs it off for a good while without even being knocked down.

He's got mez protection and more HP and resistance than any player Defender. He's closer to being "armored" than any player made Defender, and without even being a proper Incarnate. He doesn't even need purple IOs.

So yes, in game and out, Positron the character, along with many of the signature characters, flouts the oppressive rules and AT system that binds player characters. All the while the devs could do better at allowing for popular character concepts that system currently doesn't support very well. But they don't, and that's the sore spot.



.

Yes, with rock salt.



.

It's salting the wound.

And the worse of it, Positron knows the system doesn't reasonably allow many popular character concepts and it's something they're unable or unwilling to address. But hey, his armored ranged hero can exist because when you hold the keys to the sandbox, you can do whatever you want. Lucky him.

The signature characters only underscore the limitations the AT system forces on us. In other venues, like PnP games, the signature characters were used as examples of the classes and characters you could make. For a large part, ours do the opposite.

We've got two Tankers who are offensive powerhouses.
We've got an armored Defender.
We had a Blaster turned Defender who used arrows when players couldn't for five issues. And he tougher than both of those ATs combined.

Red side is no better.

A Mastermind who mostly uses melee attacks.
A Corruptor with a SWORD.
The toughest Stalker on the planet.
A Dominator with a ton of debuffs and wicked heals.
And a mostly ranged Brute, who again, is in power armor.


It all comes back to our characters being inferior to the NPCs, and IMO, spending time 'fighting along side' of the Signature characters in a SSA or anywhere else is just a constant reminder.


.

The initiation mission will not come to pass. Except, perhaps, within another 'gag mission' that uses temp powers like that one did.

We're half way up the tree already. Ask yourself: Is your Blaster or Defender even half way to being able to stand there and shrug off GM attacks like they can in that mission?

The initiation mission is a lie. The devs will always add more civilian thrown rocks and ultra deadly guard towers and moldy robots to destroy any illusion of being a demigod. They'll throw us and 31 other 'gods' at some enemy we used to be able to solo, and have the grapes to insist we are more powerful when if fact we're relatively much weaker.


.

APB probably has the best character creator out there now in a comparable game. We may have more options by virtue of being around for eight years, but we're simply not the best anymore.

City of used to be the best. It deserves to be again. Our characters should look that good and have that level of customization.

But they don't, and they can't. Because that means redoing every costume part, redoing the character rig and by extension redoing every animation in the game. And even if you did do that, the characters would look out of place in the game world and when compared with the enemies, which for the most part still looks like 2007, even with Ultra-mode. So they need to be redone as well.

That's simply too much work to expect to be done, and you may as well be starting over. You can't upgrade graphics piecemeal. It looks like ***. The contrast between the existing old and new costume parts is already bad enough.

So, unless you just plan to slap a new coat of paint on the same jalopy, which is what they've been doing, you've gotta scrap it and start over. The small iterations and improvements haven't been insignificant, but lets be honest, even with the best of the new stuff, the game is from 2004 with some 2007 tech nailed on and it looks the part.

If you're going to do that much work for all new assets and animations, which frankly I think we need, and get us up to snuff with the likes of the APB creator, you may as well be doing a brand new game, hence the sequel talk.



.

.

Really? Was pompousness wiped out when I wasn't looking?



.