Olantern

Every time someone mentions the Warriors, someone else refers to the movie, The Warriors, as well as 300 (though the latter has become less common over the past year). Therefore, you might as well quote those two for the Warriors. Clash of the Titans and Gladiator might also fit.

I've been seeing more and more of this. Most of the chatter in-game, aside from "grats" and "I'll join your ITF" and the like, seems to be about how terrible City of Heroes is, how bad all its features are compared to Game B (usually, but not always, World of Warcraft), how bad the graphics are, how stupid and/or pointless the story is, how writing bios on characters is dumb, how costumes are a waste of time, how anyone with less than a billion influence is a drooling imbecile, how all the servers are dead, and how the game is doomed.

And people wonder why I've become bitter about this game. The game is better than it ever was. The playerbase is gradually becoming dominated by unpleasant people of every stripe. At the rate we're going, I'm wondering how Going Rogue can possibly live up to its promise to revitalize the game. There isn't much the devs can do when all their players want to do is trash the game.

We seem to get this thread a lot, yet I, for one, never tire of it.

I have a bunch of characters, and nearly all of them have some overarching goal, personal story, or motivation that they're supposedly pursuing as they level up. I have plenty of characters who have tangential involvement in the game lore, but only a few where the overarching story actually relies on elements of it exclusively. Here are the ones that spring to mind for me:

-Sidereal Knight, rad/energy blaster. His family has a long association with the Legacy Chain, but after watching their fixation on their work shred his parents' marriage and otherwise mess up his life, he rejected magic to become a scientist. He was (naturally, since this is comic-book land) forced to develop his own magical powers when evil, magical forces began targeting the family, including him, for destruction. His powers are colored yellow-white, like the Legacy of Light's. The most enjoyable moment of his career for me was running through my Legacy Chain/Banished Pantheon arc with him, then having him switch to his Radiant of Light costume for the first time at the end of it.

-Agent Walters, AR/traps corruptor. Denton Walters is a Crey Agent. He began as a running gag in some profiles of my characters I wrote for the old creyindustries.com website, but I eventually decided to make him as an actual character. I particularly enjoy playing a sympathetic Crey character; especially since I can use him to play up the ridiculous aspects of the faction. (For my money, Crey, not Nemesis, is the silliest faction in City of Heroes. A corporation where every single employee is evil and every single operation it performs is illegal or underhanded? How do they ever find time to make any money?) Walters eventually spawned a counterpart, one of my very few female characters . . .

-Analyst Rayce, electric/energy blaster. Arianne Rayce is a Field Analyst of Hero Corps (the blue-on-blue "heroes for hire" guys who adjust difficulty, not Longbow and friends [that's Freedom Corps]0. I really wish its logo were available as a chest emblem. Her alternate costumes, by the way, include a Merit Vendor, a Wentworth's Sales Associate, and an Ouroboros Mender. I'm trying to think of another noncombat faction to use for her final costume slot. Rayce was created as Walters's counterpart for the herocorps.com site, and I decided to make the two boyfriend and girlfriend. (According to one of my global friends, this makes me a pervert for being a male player with a female character ... oookay ...)

- the Dampfjaeger ("Steam Hunter"), claws/energy stalker. "Dampfy" is supposed to be an early-model Nemesis automaton, designed as an assassin but with a more advanced intelligence than later models. According to his backstory, his programming requires him to kill thirteen specific heroes and villains as part of some Nemesis plot of which he is otherwise ignorant. Unfortunately, "a prominent Paragon City fortune teller" (a nod to the Spelunker mission, of course) has informed him that killing the thirteen will cause a cataclysm that will destroy both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. (Though he predates i11, I've always felt this dovetails nicely with the presumable involvement of Nemesis in the "Coming Storm" storyline.) The Dampfjaeger cannot resist the directives to kill the thirteen, or, indeed, anyone who comes near him, but he is also programmed with the superficial sense of "honor" and desire to please the masses that characterizes Nemesis. The conflict in his programming has become so painful that he has decided to locate Nemesis himself and seek reprogramming.

- the Rikti Mage, ice/fire dominator. My first villain 50, back when leveling a dominator was agony. His bio explains that he has rejected the Rikti obsession with technology in favor of the study of ancient magic from the Rikti homeworld that predates, and was used in pursuit of, the destruction of the Rikti gods. (This all makes sense if you've followed the Rikti backstory, by the way.) Unlike Rikti Magi, he is a "pure" Rikti from their homeworld, using its lost "native" magic rather than magic learned from Primal Earth folk. However, like science-oriented Rikti, he despises gods, especially any entity that might seek to control a mortal's will, and therefore spent a lot of his career fighting the Circle of Thorns and Mu. In terms of Rikti politics, he would be an extremist Traditionalist, rejecting not just the changes to Rikti society pushed by the Restructurists, but the last several thousand years of Rikti development as well. His main goal was to find a portal back to the Rikti homeworld; using his powers, he has uncovered evidence that the Rikti gods were actually not destroyed at all, but are preparing to take their revenge on the Rikti people. He resulted in two interesting twists I think I added to the lore. First, I created a Rikti term for gods, demons, and other supernatural creatures, "ais," pronounced "ice" (plural "aiis," pronounced "eye-eese"); his battle cry was "Death to the Aiis!" Second and more interestingly, I implied several times through statements in his backstory materials that the Rikti arose from the Oranbegans of their world, defeating their world's Mu by starving their gods of worship rather than by bargaining with demons. After the Rikti Mage beat the goddess Hequat in Scirocco's patron arc and the events of i10, I consider his story more or less finished; he's notable for being one of the few characters about whom I feel that way.

- Back when my SG friends were more active, in 2005, I had a group where all the characters were supposed to be from Praetorian Earth. Therefore, they were heroic duplicates of various villain group leaders. For this reason, I greeted the announcement of Going Rogue with mixed feelings. Sure, it looks great, and the new version of Praetoria is more interesting than the original, but the retconning surrounding Praetoria wipes out an entire SG-worth of characters' backstories.

If I had her job and unlimited resources, I'd probably take the unlimited resources and retire.

Possibly by loading a hovercraft full of gold and fleeing in it with Positron, while making sure to silence any dogs currently working as devs.*

* This is a reference to a post that ought to have become a forum meme, since, unlike most of them I've seen, this one was actually funny. I encourage anyone interested to spread its use.

Thanksgiving: Paragon City experiences the annual tradition of The Wentworth's Thanksgiving Day Parade (AE arc #347683), featuring (some guy playing) Statesman as Grand Marshal, reformed Freak music sensation 5kvv33k-E P0p, floats with waving Fir Bolg, and people dressed as drum majors who aren't Nemesis soldiers for a change. Oh, and the Gobblers.

It must be seen to be believed.

I recall a while back that an Illusion/radiation controller had soloed Lusca, so that's doable.

I've never really understood the allure of soloing GM's and AV's, but I also hate fighting things that con red or purple. I'd rather take down a lot of weaker stuff really, really fast.

I do understand the allure of solo'ing a Task Force, though. That might be interesting.

I'm glad NCSoft hasn't pulled funding from the game, despite the fact that it hasn't delivered subscriber numbers in the millions. I don't normally expect that kind of reasonable behavior from companies in the entertainment industry.

(Mind you, I think they will cut some of their support when Going Rogue doesn't triple the number of subscriptions, since this is what happened with the release of City of Villains, but that's a separate subject.)

It's good to know I'm not the only one who calls it "Essence of the Furries" and claims it's fermented from crushed catgirls.

I've got a claws/energy stalker, the Dampfjaeger ("Steam Hunter"), who's an advanced Nemesis automaton. Yes, you can get very close to the regular Nemesis uniform; I used the robe with the buttons on the shoulder (robe 3, I think?), some Sharp Epaulettes, the Breather with the cord from the Science pack, and a few other odds and ends. People tell me they target him by mistake during missions, so it must have worked. His energy aura is recolored the darkest white possible, making it look like steam.

My rad/energy blaster has his powers colored to more or less match those of the Legacy of Light from the Legacy Chain, and one of his costumes is as a Radiant of Light, sans helmet. The Legacy Chain shoulders aren't available, but you can get close.

I also have Agent Walters, a Crey Special Agent. I'm planning on making his other outfits look like other ranks of Crey, when I get around to it.

And finally, there's his girlfriend, Analyst Rayce, who is a Hero Corps Field Analyst. You can't get the Hero Corps chestpiece/logo combination on a player character, but you can match the rest of the outfit exactly. Her alternate costumes are a Merit Vendor, a Wentworth's sales associate, and an Ouroboros Mender. I'm trying to think up another noncombat faction to use for her last outfit.

Got a dark/stone tank from 31 to 35, a traps/dp defender (my first serious defender attempt) from 10 or so to 32, a new corruptor to 10, another corruptor from 9 to 14, and a couple of levels on a dominator. The only bad point was a pick-up mothership raid that went south very fast on the first night, so mothership raids have become yet another thing where I refuse to lead no matter how much someone begs me to.

More importantly, I enjoyed almost every minute of it and never had trouble finding teams when I wanted them, even on a "dead" server. Nearly everyone I met was cheerful and upbeat. While my own predictions about the game's future and the population of servers other than the two largest post-Going Rogue remain dark, I've come to realize that it's not the game community, but these forums, that are a morass of jaded negativity, and I've resolved to cut back on my forum time yet again. The actual in-game community is pretty pleasant.

Interesting and not even all that DooOOoom-y, for an article that's nearly all bad news from a player's perspective. (Well, analysis of news more than news itself, but you all understand my point, right?)

For me, the biggest problem with the game is that a majority of the players are now longtime veterans. All the other problems stem from this.

First, it means that a majority of the playerbase have seen nearly everything in the game umpteen times, which makes them want to powerlevel past content, do hardcore min-maxing, and just generally complain a lot. It also exacerbates parts of the game that really do repeat, such as mission instances.

Second, as a corollary of the first, many (I won't say most) players know so much about how the game works that they consider anything less than maximum xp-per-minute to be "sub-par" and "broken." (See, for example, current crop of threads complaining about lacklustre performance of Dual Pistols. Is it "the best" blast set in mechanical terms? Of course not; it has those elaborate, silly John Woo animations that players begged for in a set for years and years, which makes it somewhat slow. Does that make it "the worst?" Of course not. Many players have a similar attitude toward AE; they won't do it [except for farm-type missions] because it's less-than-maximum xp.)

Third, it means a majority of players are jaded, which makes it hard to retain them, leading to some fairly quiet servers. I like playing on the smaller servers, personally, and I never have problems forming or joining teams, but I do notice substantially fewer players around than, say, a year ago. I'm happy to see new people joining the game, as we see here on the forums from time to time and I see in-game as well, but I'm unhappy with the way everyone tells them to play on Virtue or Freedom.

What I'd most like to see would be a large influx of new blood on all the servers. I imagine that Paragon Studios convinced NCSoft to fund Going Rogue with the suggestion that it would do just that, but given that the game is more or less marketed only to current subscribers, I think it's unlikely. At most, I see a few reactivations and a slight increase in the population of the largest servers.

I don't really see any of these as problems with the game's design. All of them are problems that anything six years old with a loyal fan base will develop. It's almost as if the game is becoming a victim of its own successes.