Olantern

Mystic Fortune may have killed the OP's wife, but at least he was wearing a neat costume when he did it.

(N.B. This may be less amusing to those who don't play on Liberty and/or frequent costume-related forum topics.)

That was fascinating, Tyrrano. Thank you for posting it!

As the article implies, using a combination of these automated processes and subsequent hand-editing would greatly simplify game designers' ability to create large, realistic (or "realistic," depending on the game) urban environments. My big wish would be for something like this to be made available to players. Perhaps we'll see it with the release of Issue 163 (estimated release: summer 2031) or City of Heroes 8: Return of the Revenge of the Rogue Vigilantes.

Since the thread here has developed into a place to criticize the game's architecture and building layout, I'll simply observe that while I think many of the architectural elements (textures, buildings, etc.) are quite good, the way they are assembled to make a world is imperfect. Personally, I would have gone with a more accessible city structure for mission maps and cityspaces, even the run-down areas of the Rogue Isles. Instead, probably as an inheritance from the gaming tradition of a game area as a goal-oriented maze to be navigated, the devs went with a design that sacrificed accessibility for the ability to send players along particular routes, both indoors and outdoors. It will be interesting to see if the Praetorian cityscapes are the same.

And, of course, more variety in element design would be nice. Even having the weather be set to "sunny" in one of the Rogue Isles, for instance, would make a significant improvement. I don't see this as happening in existing content any time soon, if ever, but we might see it in future games.

For an entertaining view of Crowley, see the essay "The Great Rough Beast" in Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory.

In my favorite section, Davidson quotes a British diarist named Elsa Lanchester, who had met Crowley, on his appearance. She describes him as having a shaven head and a yellow kilt, or "wearing a heavily jeweled waistcoat and the largest ring I ever saw on a human hand," or "with dirty hands, immense rings, presumably dyed hair, a fancy waistcoat, a fur coat, and tennis shoes." Davidson's summing up reads, "Miss Lanchester, with the British taste for understatement, describes A.C. as being 'an odd dresser.'"

I see the chronology of Primal vs. Praetorian Earth continues to get more garbled. We've been told Primal Shalice Tilman is over 80 years old, while Praetorian Tilman seems to be substantially younger (or would be, if her body were still alive). Don't even get me started on how Praetorian Hamidon appeared several decades before Primal Hamidon.

These things wouldn't bother me if I thought they were concious story decisions by the devs, but I'm pretty sure that they're just more examples of not checking the story bible for inconsistencies before adding pages to it.

Still, some nice background stuff.

I'd suggest asking in the AE forum. You will get a variety of viewpoints and ideas. Be warned, though, that one of the answers you'll get is that you're incompetent for wanting to use a special map for a finale.

Yeah, this has always really bothered me, too.

Replying to the OP:

I play my own stories on nearly every character I level past the 20's, which is about the right difficulty spot for my arcs. I've actually done all my arcs on a few characters recently, rather than just a couple per character, because the arcs' rewards have been so reduced by changes to AE. While I primarily play them as a change of pace and where thematically appropriate (using my Legacy Chain arc for magic wielders, for instance), I also use them as a means of getting through the higher levels of the game without having to do, say, Cadao Kestrel's arc for the 50th time.

I still working on writing AE stories for my own amusement, though I may never publish another. This is because of a phenomenon I mentioned in i16 beta, when AE rewards took their first significant hit, that I refer to as "artist and entertainer." Any creator of fiction, including AE arcs, does so for two reasons. As an artist, he creates them for the pure fun of making them, drawing fulfillment from the act of creation. As an entertainer, the writer gets fulfillment from having the work appreciated, enjoyed, and praised by others. (I didn't come up with this idea; I swiped it from an article by literary agent Ethan Ellenberg, which you can find by searching for his website.)

Right now, AE does an adequate, though not perfect, job of satisfying me as an artist. I can control the story and characters in a wide variety of ways, and I have a good array of choices when constructing an arc. Yes, there could always be more maps available or fancier mission technology, such as the oft-demanded ability to place a spawn at a specific point. Still, I feel that what we have is adequate. (I may be a bit more easygoing about this than some others because I like to save my most creative ideas for non-City of Heroes projects.)

However, AE does a terrible job of satisfying me and, I'm willing to venture, most other arc authors, as entertainers. Even with constant promotion, it's difficult to get arcs played by large portions of the AE community, let alone the game community as a whole. It's even harder to get a handle on an unplayed arc's quality. As this thread shows, people have different standards for what makes an entertaining arc. This results in widely varying ratings scales; many AE community members won't rate an arc with five stars unless it waxes their cars and does their tax returns while reading like a combination of Anna Karenina and that Mass Effect game everyone seems to love. This causes wild variation with the four-star rating, which in turn leads to what a lot of authors call the "four-star ghetto." (This is especially problematic if you yourself feel that four stars is about the right rating for an arc; even though that puts it in the top half of the ratings, it also means no one will ever see it.) The prevalence of farms, many now nonfunctional, and arcs broken by patches exacerbates the problem. Even Dev's Choice arcs aren't immune to the problem; I've been unable to play a favorite of mine for more than six months because its second mission has somehow become irreparably bugged. Finally, reductions in AE rewards drive away large numbers of potential arc players. The best authors can do to combat all these forces is to write an appropriate arc title and a description that determined searchers can find with the still-clumsy arc search feature. All in all, it's just too difficult for an arc to reach its ideal audience for the AE to serve an author's goals as an entertainer rather than an artist.

In this connection, I'd also like to mention that the AE community has really soured me on the entire feature. While there are some nice, helpful people there, I've generally had bad experiences with it.

I imagine it'll be roughly another two to six weeks, just to keep things spaced between the still-new i17 and Going Rogue's supposed release in July (I take that to mean "the last couple of days of July.")

But I think you're all missing the big issue here:

I have absolutely no idea where my hero group's base is. Not only did I inherit it from someone else, but he's someone who I'm convinced isn't even aware the game has a setting, let alone notices it. I'd guess it's deep beneath Talos Island, because I like Talos Island, and because "deep beneath" just sounds cool.

My villain group's base is in an ancient, possibly Mu-era, ruined temple buried under the Nerva Archipelago, though the furnishings were constructed by group members or stolen from other groups' bases. (The walls, floors, and ceiling are all done in one of the ancient stone styles, but the base items are all tech.)

I've been going through and fixing my powers/weapons on characters who had them reset to defaults with the release of i17. So far, 81 tokens is my record, but I believe I have some older characters that I rarely play with a few more.

By the way, I suggested that the devs issue more tokens to allow for fixing that customization reset bug, just on the off chance there's someone out there who suffered it and doesn't have a heap of tokens just lying around, even though most people, including me, seem to have a substantial stockpile, even without counting veteran costume tokens.

My favorite parts have been the new Positron task forces and the new arcs.

My least favorite parts have been temporarily having the markets unavailable, the bug that requires redoing customized powers and weapons (a few of which cannot be fixed in the tailor interface), and the rampant negativity.

On the question of what the evil version of a good character who already has a goatee looks like, everyone knows that in that case, the goatee has a goatee.

Meet the new Ouroboros mender, Norm Isis Heese, who is certainly neither a minion of Nemesis nor a horsie.

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