Mr_Mud

No. It is just ridiculous that those names haven't been released yet. They haven't been touched in six years at least. There's no sense of entitlement, it is just utterly ridiculous that they sit, unused, on trial accounts or accounts with no global name just because the 'policy' deems that a player's right to hold a name outweighs the requests of a currently active, paying customer. I don't feel entitled to any specific name, it just seems logical to me that with stoneclad proof that these names haven't been put to use in so long, it's about time they could be put back into circulation.

Please try to remember we're talking about accounts with no globals exclusively, here. Something which, at this point, should just be considered fair game. Six years is long enough to decide 'oh hey, I'll check out City of Heroes again'. And if that player who did decide to re-up their CoH account - randomly and six or seven years down the line - remembered every single name they had held on there I'd eat my hat.

So basically you saw an opportunity to have an internet argument but don't actually have any feelings on the discussion at hand? Awesome.

It would be rather silly of you to consider that player's disinterest an assumption rather than a fact after six or seven years of not even logging into the game, wouldn't it?

More to the point, that person would have to have logged into the game sometime in the last few years to qualify as anything other than an ex-customer.

This is absolute rubbish.

Firstly, if a name does not have a global attached that means the player who holds that name hasn't even logged in since gobal chat was introduced. So that's, what? Six, seven years ago? Protecting the right of that player to hold that name does nothing good for anyone involved in City of Heroes except for the individual holding the name, an individual neither NCsoft, Paragon Studios - or, hell, Cryptic - has seen a dime from in a significant time frame. Allowing players to hold names for that long without returning to the game at the expense of people who are still playing is ridiculous.

It's just terrible customer service. I have 84 months worth of playtime built up. I recently clsoed my VIP account due to personal circumstances but before that I had been paying for this game since the day it launched. I find it horrific that the policy on this is that a person's right to hold a name - specifically a person with no global name, I stress - is held in higher esteem than a current player's custom.

Without mentioning any names, it recently came to my attention that support released a name for a player (let's say Player A) from an account with no global attached. When someone else (Player B) attempted to use this case as precedent (a perfectly valid thing to do to challenge an ironclad 'policy' that support itself had broken), support blatantly lied to Player B, claiming that such a thing had never happened - and then removed the name given to Player A from their account for good measure. Absolutely disgusting customer service in other words. This is an MMO - do the GMs think that players don't talk to each other? This tale of woe just highlights why those names that have been off-grid for six or seven years should just be freed up, to stop things like this from happening and giving the whole playerbase a fair shot at grabbing excellent and unused names, rather than leaving veteran players to petition for names that are being protected on accounts that haven't put up any cash for the on-going development of City of Heroes for the best part of a decade.

Release all the names with no global attached or stick to your own, ludicrous policy.

I'm not sure how many concepts these would be applicable to, but I just wanted to say I think they look sick all the same. Could definitely see it working for some Silver Age cosmic characters.

Please stop using condescending smilies. Thanks.

Yes, they are.


Seems to me all we have so far is exactly that - one storyline. Praetorians, praetorians and more praetorians.

IDGAF.

What?

I merely said that they way the storyline has developed - slowly, surely and not all-encompassing - is promising.

In a slight derail, this was only Liefeld et al's vision of the modern age, really. Grim and gritty comics weren't always accompanied by that ridiculous visual aesthetic.

When I said 'forced', I meant that the Praetorians have been forced into every major update since they were retconned (and they were retconned - the issue 1 praetorians are unrecognisable from what we have now). Every single incarnate trial up to this point has been linked to the Praetorians, ignoring something like the Shadow Shard which had unlimited potential for end-game play. I, and I'm sure many others, are just getting tired of them showing up everywhere. There is no need for a Praetorian presence in the updated Dark Astoria, for example. Don't try and shoehorn the new shiny into every new shiny thereafter.

And as I mentioned, the Praetorians were retconned. I prefered them as two-dimensional 'Mirror Mirror' rip offs, to be honest. The grim and gritty sci-fi world of Praetoria is all well and good, but doesn't feel particularly like I'm playing a superhero game, to be honest. Especially with all of the cool reverse-costumes the Praetorians used to wear mostly being retconned out of existence when playing that new 1-20 content.

The Coming Storm has been executed perfectly in my opinion. It hasn't dominated parts of the game it doesn't need to dominate. It hasn't been shoehorned into every update to the point of fatigue. It was hinted at - slowly but surely - and then used for a fantastic new tutorial and a trial which I imagine will be a lot of fun. This is how you build a storyline. Not "oh hey we retconned some old stuff and we like it probably a lot more than you do so it's going to be in absolutely everything from now on, k?"

But the difference is that the Coming Storm doesn't feel forced. It's been introduced from the ground up. The Praetorians were a straight retcon that turned into the driving storyline of the game, and the reaction from a lot of players, from my experience, was simply 'What?'

Something like the Well of the Furies wouldn't have been so bad if it had been the explanation for superpowers when the game was launched. Sort of how Freedom Force's universe was entirely built on the arrival of Energy X to Earth. The problem arose when the devs tried to shoehorn it into the game hideously late in the day; and to make matters worse, decided to shoehorn the Praetorians into everything at the same time.

The problem, of course, being that there are different levels of comic book nerdery and, to the uninformed, the Golden Age and Silver Age are often lumped into the same category when they are in fact hugely different things with their own styles and costume types. A Golden/Silver Age Pack wouldn't work. They'd have to be two different things.

Also, thanks!

PART VII: Out of Time
Yesterday
The Castle, Bavaria
As a brilliant blue light swirled before him, the secrets of the universe perhaps only a step from where he stood, all Michael O’Brien could think about was Excelsior; the monster was stirring from its slumber, a dormant state that was always far too short.

“You have more Ex, right?” He asked Kain, sheepishly.

Sebastian Kain did not immediately reply, his eyes transfixed on the portal in front of him, a gateway through time that – so Michael had been informed – was named ‘the Trace’. A slight annoyance grew visible on Kain’s face as he stared forth into the portal, an understated reflection of the irritation he felt that he had just shown some peasant the true face of God, only for them to spit on it.

For Michael, a few beats of silence passed as he waited for a reply, his mind buzzing with thoughts of chemical sustenance. To Kain, the room was far from silent; it was saturated with the screaming hum of the Trace. In Kain’s mind, the cold room was alive with the awesome sound of power itself.

“I am going to show you something, Michael,” Kain muttered into the brilliant abyss, “And I would hope that, afterwards, you might realise that your selfish pre-occupation is something you should be profoundly ashamed of.”

Michael already felt ashamed. It was not a feeling he was unacquainted with. Suddenly thoughts of Excelsior were replaced with the creeping onslaught of self-loathing.

“Alright. Show me,” he muttered in a tone that could have been mistaken for an apology. Kain reached into his suit jacket and took out a small communicator.

“Brain, align the Trace. Show him the echo,” Kain said, softly. Was that excitement in his voice?

There was a blinding flash as the Trace shifted shape. When the light dulled, Uppercut was sure he could see a blurred vision of a rain-soaked Kings Row swirling in the centre of the portal. There was an electronic crackle as King Brain replied:

“Done.”

Kain turned to Michael, his cane tucked under his arm. He gestured with his left hand towards the Trace.

“After you,” he said, a smile creeping across his lips.

For a second Michael wanted to bolt, to run as far away from the castle as he possibly could. His instant reaction to anything that was difficult: to run away.

He took a deep breath and stepped into the light.


Michael stepped out into a raging storm, but he couldn’t feel the wind and the rain seemed to pass straight through him; the world around him seemed hazy and unreal. He was standing on a street corner in The Garment District. He recognised it immediately. This was where he came to pick up his Ex: a quiet, discrete, unassuming corner under the shadow of an abandoned textile factory, away from the watchful eye of Paragon’s heroes and Arachnos. It was where he had been when Kain had spiked him.

Why couldn’t he feel the rain?

A moment later, Kain stepped out onto the sidewalk beside him as if from no where. He suit remained perfectly pressed, his tie firmly in place. He, too, was unaffected by the violent storm.

“What the hell is going on?” Uppercut asked.

“You are viewing an echo of time, Michael,” Kain said. “Are you aware of string theory?” Michael’s face fell blank. “Silly question. Have you ever read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol?”

A few seconds filled only by the sound of the rain.

“I see… Essentially, we are standing in an echo of time that we cannot affect. This particular echo is a past that never was; I averted it in stopping you from approaching your dealer. However, this past still exists in a parallel universe where I chose not to stop you; we are viewing an echo of the universe in which the eventualities I halted occurred, and their consequences remain concrete.” Kain could tell that his words were being misunderstood. “Just watch,” he said, pointing out into the street; a car pulled around the corner.

From the other side of the street, a man stepped from the shadows, wearing a trenchcoat over a green costume, his face covered by a mask. Michael recognised himself instantly.

“Mikey!” yelled the Freak as he stepped out of the car and into the raging rain. In the car, a kid sat behind the wheel, he couldn’t have been… Suddenly it all seemed to make sense. He had been here before.

“You’re late and pleasantries can wait. You got it?” his past self asked the Freak.

Michael suddenly felt cold. Kain whispered into his ear, a sound that seemed somehow ten times as loud as his past self and the Freak screaming at each other through the pouring rain.

“You’re about to do something that will not only ruin your entire life, but end it,” Kain said, a sinister tone – something akin to spite – suddenly attaching itself to every word that left his mouth.

“Calm down?” Michael saw the rage swelling in his own eyes. “Don’t ever-”

His past self was picking up the car. His heart began to beat like a drum in his chest.

“-TELL ME TO CALM DOWN!”

Michael ran across the street as he saw himself crush the car with the two Freaks inside, their deafening wails filling his ears as their bones snapped and their organs collapsed; as they and the car became one entity.

“This is an echo, Michael,” Kain screamed at him from across the street. “You are powerless to intervene!”

From his vantage point, just centimetres from the scene of the crime, Michael saw the terror in the eyes of the younger freak as his ribcage collapsed into his chest; he saw that terrible final moment when he mouthed the word ‘mother’ before his skull was crushed by cold hard steel.

In a flash, it was over. A bloodied cube of metal lay in the middle of the street; blood washed into the gutter; sirens in the distance. Michael’s past self ran into the darkness, the anger in his eyes replaced with ferocious fear.

Michael could almost hear the seconds ticking by as he collapsed to his knees in the rain.

PART VI: FOREIGN LANDS
Yesterday
The Castle, Bavaria
"... because he was exceedingly useful to me once, Sebastian."

Darkness; distant voices. Was he dreaming?

"I assure you, he will be useful to me. Or it will be your head on the block, Brain. I don't go to this much trouble for junkies and scum."

"Has anyone seen my dynamite? I had some dynamite."

"You miss the point, Kain. It is precisely because he's a 'junkie', as you so graciously put it, that he is so easily controlled. His loyalty is assured for as long as you supply him."

"I'm not sure about this, Blitzman. Surely he's unpredictable?"

"I definitely had dynamite. Or maybe a rocket? Something explosive, anyway."

The voices drew closer; his eyes began to open.

"Judas, not now!"

"... How long was I out?" Michael asked, lifting himself up from the uncomfortable but clean hospital bed he had been placed in; at least clean made a change. With the way things had been going lately he had become accustomed to rotten mattresses and, more often than not, the constant stench of his own vomit. He immediately noticed that there was Excelsior in his system; administered a while ago, the feeling was dull. "And did you drug me?"

All four men present turned to face him. He recognised all four of them, although he had only met two of them previously. Baron Blitzman was a member of the Rogues Gallery; or he had been, he was clearly keeping different company now. King Brain had also been affiliated with the Rogues; he had departed following their mutual attempt to usurp control. Uppercut had managed to make his apologies and weasel his way back in with Mr. Mud and Mindswipe, Brain had been less willing to grovel. The other two he knew of but had never had the pleasure of meeting: Slaphappy's presence made him nervous; from what he knew he was a sociopath. The last story he'd heard involving Slaphappy's name had also involved a grenade and a puppy.

Most puzzling of all was the presence of the fourth man: Sebastian Kain. From what Michael knew, Kain was a politician. Inherently evil, perhaps, but not the kind of evil that hung out with supervillains and psychopaths. Mr. Mud had done some bodyguard work for him, and Mud wasn't in the business of working for monsters if he could possibly avoid it. What Kain was doing in the company of Brain, Blitzman and Slaphappy, he couldn't fathom.

"The sleeper awakes," Kain said, fiddling with his tie. "A week, more or less. And yes, isn't that exactly what you wanted?"

A week? Ex couldn't put him out for a week. They must have sedated him. This situation was getting stranger by the minute, and he wanted out.

"Alright, well this has been great, but I'm getting out of here. Wherever the **** here is," Michael muttered, wincing as he pulled an IV drip out of a vein in his neck; the trouble with having cybernetic arms. He grabbed his mask from a small table set up next to his bed, wrenching it over his face.

"Bavaria, my friend. A long way home. Why don't you listen to what Mr. Kain has to say?" Blitzman asked him, taking a seat at a computer terminal.

"It would be unwise to leave, Michael," Brain softly spoke, sensing Uppercut's rising temper; he had learnt to deal with this man long ago.

"... was it a knife...?"

A beat of silence.

"Alright, someone explain what the **** I'm doing here. Start with why you spiked the Ex you gave me and then explain why I shouldn't just walk out of here now," Michael's voice had risen; he was losing his patience.

Four men in the room looked to each other; one looked for dynamite. For a moment, no one spoke.

"Let me show you something," Kain said, breaking the tension. He walked away, into the winding corridors of the castle; he leaned on a cane he clearly didn't need. All of this was making Michael extremely uneasy; were these guys just going to whack him? He didn't want to die in some castle in a country he'd never heard of.

"Look, what the hell's going on here?" Michael asked, the bravado disappearing from his voice; he was becoming unnerved. Kain didn't even turn to face him as he replied:

"Follow me; we're going to step into the Trace."

PART V: A FIX IN TIME
One Week Ago
The Garment District, Kings Row
It was raining in Kings Row. The summer heat had subsided to a violent storm; wind ripped ferociously through the streets and the populace had retreated indoors. Those left outside were wasters, vagrants and lowlifes. Michael O’Brien, alias Uppercut, was one of them. He was standing in the shadows of an abandoned textile plant in the freezing rain, his formidable form lashed by the howling wind; not for the first time in his life, it was cold and he was sweating profusely.

Michael’s leg twitched uncontrollably beneath a battered trenchcoat. It had been sixteen hours, forty-seven minutes since the last hit. His head was pounding like some monster trapped in there was trying to escape through his eye sockets. Forty-eight minutes. Every second felt like an eternity. He was late. How could he be this late?

A voice spoke into the wind from the communicator strapped to Michael’s belt.

“Uppercut, you receiving?”

It was the unmistakable bark of Mr. Mud, co-leader of the Rogues Gallery: a coalition of supervillains Michael was mildly acquainted with. Things had hardly been amicable since a failed attempt by Uppercut and some others to usurp control of the group. The battle had been lost, bridges had been rebuilt, uneasy alliances re-established. That didn’t mean he was going to respond. He had more important things to do.

But Mr. Mud didn’t give up that easily.

“Yo, O’Brien. Wake up. We got a situation in St. Martial, we need muscle,” Mud spoke again; he was met with silence. A few more agonisingly painful seconds passed before a final reprimand: “Alright man, you better be busy, because if I find you lying with a needle in your arm in some back alley, I’m packing your ****, you got me? Over and out.”

Thunder roared in the distance as a car pulled around the corner. Michael took a step, before a hand slapped down on his shoulder.

“Say nothing. Don’t turn around,” a voice whispered into his ear. He recognised that voice.

The car’s passenger side door opened, and out stepped a member of the Freakshow. This was it. His heart started to pound, his leg steadied, the monster in his brain briefly retreated.

“I don’t know who you are, buddy, but that guy over there? He’s got what I want. You got ten seconds to take your hand off of me before I break your fu-” Michael didn’t get to finish.

“Shut up. Keep still. Say nothing. Believe me when I tell you I could kill you where you stand,” the voice said. He knew that voice and, strangely, he believed it.

“Mikey?” The Freak shouted into the shadows, sheltering his mohawk from the storm. “Mikey, you out here?”

The monster began to squirm like an itch at the back of his skull; the twitch in his leg returned.

“Give me one reason why I don’t just tear your head off and go buy my Ex?” Uppercut asked through gritted teeth, keeping his voice low enough so that the Freak couldn't hear; bravado. The vague memory he had of that voice told him he was going to do no such thing under any circumstances.

“Firstly, because if you don’t do exactly what I say, this situation results in your death whether I become irritated enough to destroy you myself or not,” the voice replied, a strange calm in its tone. “Secondly, because I have this…”

A gloved hand held out a vial of beautiful yellow liquid.

“Mikey? Yo, Uppercut?” The Freak screamed into the storm. “Ah, **** this,” he muttered, before turning back to his car. “Guy’s a waster anyway,” he said as he climbed back into the car. Faintly, Michael heard his driver – a kid who could have been no more than fifteen or sixteen – reply:

“Whatever you say, boss…”

The car tore off into the distance, splashing a wave of floodwater onto the sidewalk.

“Take it,” the voice insisted. “Dreck is a personal friend of mine.”

A beat passed as Uppercut hesitated. Dreck may have been a personal friend of whoever this was, but he certainly was no friend of his. The monster screamed; his doubts vanished. He grabbed the vial; hastily, he opened a small hatch on his left prosthesis and inserted it, hitting a switch. There was a vile hiss as the liquid entered his blood stream. He had never felt so alive.

His eyes dilated, his chest filled with air; for a second he was God.

Then the world span and crashed to black.