Positron

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City of Heroes AMA (part 1?)

That's a link to the doc, in case these boards get shut down, and because I don't want to clean it up for our forum posting format (if someone ELSE does, feel free to pad your postcount).

Some answers are not satisfying. Some answers are made up, and that answer only exists in that doc. I tried to get everyone who was involved in the stuff at the end to answer the questions as best they could.

MM: Matt Miller (Positron)
JH: John Hegner (Protean)
JAH: Jeff Hamilton (Arbiter Hawk)
SM: Sean McCann (Dr. Aeon)
RG: Ryan Greene (Viridian)
TS: Tim Sweeney (Black Scorpion)

If there is a miracle and somehow CoH is saved, we reserve the right to change any and all answers given in the doc, to maintain suspense and surprise.

CAVEAT: This story was written as a way to introduce a Task Force to resurrect War Witch and at the same time get a new (old) armor for Positron into the game. Since that art was never completed past a VERY rough concept that Noble Savage would never let see the light of day, this was never published.

The writers, however, took some of the events that transpired within as canon.

Please excuse typos and grammar mistakes, this is the first draft and I don't really feel like editing it.

Past Lives

Positron, aka Professor Raymond Keyes, was hard at work in his high tech lab within the Freedom Phalanx base. His current pet project has been vexing him for the better part of two years, and that was figuring out a way to bring War Witch back to the land of the living.

He knew that most people who “die” are simply dead forever, but in a few cases they can be brought back to life. Statesman and Manticore were both dead and resurrected, and he himself was killed by the Rikti during the Honoree’s entrance to this world. If it were not for the Dark Watcher and a quick resurrection spell, he’d be dead forever.

War Witch is a special case. She’s been dead too long for a normal resurrection spell to work. However, her spirit still exists, training heroes in Croatoa. Perhaps the mystical energies tied to that place are keeping her fused with this plane of existence? In his exasperation he wondered if science was even useful in this quest, or if more mystic investigations were to be had. If that was the case he should contact Numina, the Phalanx’s resident magic-user.

“Numina, its Positron,” he spoke over the team’s communicator. “I need some help.”

“I was wondering when you would get around to asking me.” she said as she floated through the wall and into the lab. “War Witch, right?”

“Yes, I was wondering if…” he was cut off.

“You know I am not technically dead, right? Her situation and mine are totally different. I am simply trapped forever in my astral form. Requiem killed her.” She stated bluntly.

“I understand your predicament. It’s just… I think I have reached the end of where science can take me in my quest bringing her back. I need some mystical expertise,” Positron said.

“You came to the right girl,” she replied. “Let’s see what you’ve got so far.”

Numina started pouring over his notes. The two spent the better part of the evening discussing theories both scientific and mystical. Ray never really interacted with Numina on this level before, and he was finding it fascinating talking to someone whose background was so radically different than his. Their conversations veered off of the subject of War Witch and spiritual resurrections, and they began to reminisce about previous adventures, and in general had a really good time.

“Do you remember back in the early 1990’s? There was that one villain, what did he call himself? Morbid Curiosity?” Ray asked.

“Oh yeah, he was a whack job. Average Joe finds himself in possession of a Necromantic rod. Causes all sorts of trouble.” Numina replied.

“Yeah, didn’t he try to resurrect his dead family? Only he didn’t know how the rod worked and we ended up with an army of zombies rampaging through Baumton.”

“Right, Baumton! How I loved the Headquarters we had there.” Numina said.

“That place was State-of-the-art for the 1990’s. Too bad the Rikti decimated it. That was one of the best souvenir collections the Freedom Phalanx ever put together.” Ray added.

“What?” she asked as if a light bulb had gone off in her head.

“What-what?” Ray asked. He looked at the clock and it was 4am. Perhaps he wasn’t as coherent as he thought he was at this hour.

“You reminded me, the souvenirs we kept back then,” said Numina.

“Buried under a ton of rubble, my dear,” replied Ray.

“Didn’t we keep Morbid Curiosity’s Necromantic rod?” she asked.

“I think so, let me check.” Ray went to the computer and hit the Phalanx’s database. “Yeah, says here that the rod is still under the rubble in the Baumton base. Was never declared dangerous enough for us to attempt to extract.”

“But that rod could be the catalyst we need to bring back War Witch. Its powers and abilities might be exactly what we are looking for,” she said.

“But I don’t want another army of zombies. At least not when we’re not prepared for it!” Ray said.

“We should get that rod. I just know it will be of great help in resurrecting War Witch,” Numina instructed.

Ray put on his armor. Boomtown (as Baumton was now called) wasn’t exactly peaceful and safe. The pair flew off to Boomtown as the sun peeked up over Independence Port.

They arrived at the building that once housed the Freedom Phalanx. Ray punched in a code into his armor and the security measures that he and Manticore put into place to prevent the old headquarters from being looted were deactivated. Positron and Numina made their way into the depths of the place they once called home. Numina, in her incorporeal form, had a distinct advantage in maneuvering through the rubble. Positron was constantly having to reroute power in his armor to augment his strength and move massive pieces of concrete and steel out of the way.

After about an hour they had made it down to Positron’s old lab. It was relatively free of major damage, just covered in dust and age. Memories started to fill back into Ray’s head. Experiments he never finished. Technology he never completed. He was soaking it all in when he heard Numina giggling.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

She pointed to a damaged section of wall that revealed a hidden closet behind it. “Did that look that bad, back then?” she asked.

Positron went over to the wall and forced it open. And he saw the focus of her amusement. His old combat armor. DRS-03. The third incarnation of the original power armor he and Doctor Rudolph Bein worked on. Bein used the first suit, DRS-01, as the villain “Doctor Null”, where Positron had the second one. After the Freedom Phalanx was formed, Ray worked on the DRS-03. The suit he wore today? That is the DRS-08.

“Shiny,” Numina mused. “But then again, it was the 90’s.”

“That’s Impervium, pure and solid.” Positron said. “Notice the lack of any damage or wear, and I wore that armor for years. Man that was a nice suit of armor, I kinda miss it. Maybe after we get the rod, I can take that back to the base as well.”

“It is kinda, I dunno… sexy.” Numina said. Ray couldn’t tell if she was serious or mocking him. He assumed mockery.

“Let’s go, there’s nothing in here that can help War Witch,” he said. And the two made their way deeper into the complex.

Positron was being very careful with every piece of rubble he moved. His suit was doing load-bearing calculations on the fly and he was only moving pieces that had a 95% or more “safe” rating based on the suit’s read-outs. As they got deeper and deeper he found himself clearing more and more rubble, and eventually he reached a near dead end. His suit analyzed four key pieces of rubble. They had ratings of 20%, 40%, 63% and 80% based on all available data. In order to progress he had to risk moving the 80% safe piece.

He powered up the strength augments in the armor once again and grabbed the beam. He pulled at it and it didn’t budge. He overclocked the augment and started to move the rubble. It came free and the room didn’t collapse around him. He breathed a sigh of relief.

The 63% piece now reported as 96% safe with the new data. He casually grabbed that piece and pulled at it. The piece tore apart in his hands unexpectedly. He had forgotten about the overclocking he did on the strength augmentation and literally didn’t know his own strength. Numina heard a rumble and spun around just in time to see the ceiling of the room come collapsing down on Positron.

She started yelling his name, waiting for a response. After a minute that seemed like forever, she heard him moaning.

“Ouch.” Positron said. It was not transmitted through the speaker in the armor. It was muffled, betraying some damage to his suit.

“Oh my, are you alright?” Numina asked concernedly.

“Armor is powered down,” he said but it was difficult to hear him. “And I think I am bleeding. I’ve got one arm… free, I need to…” His voice was no longer muffled, “There! Got my helmet off. I can breathe again. Kinda. I think I am stuck though.”

Positron attempted to reboot the armor to no avail. The system was completely off-line and the pain in his gut told him that was a very bad sign. The core CPU to the suit was located near where the pain was, so whatever broke that was probably pierced through his abdomen.

Numina made herself corporeal and grabbed a strong metal pipe to use as leverage on the rubble pinning him down. Ray struggled to move under the weight of the armor and barely made it free before Numina lost her hold and the rubble came crashing down where he once laid. She looked down and saw a jagged piece of concrete rebar sticking through Positron’s side, blood gushing out of it.

“I won’t lie. This is going to hurt. A lot,” she said as she yanked the rebar out. Ray grimaced and nearly blacked out from the pain, but soon the pain receded as he heard Numina chanting. When she finished he found himself with renewed vigor and full of adrenaline. He punched the safety latches on the armor and crawled out of the broken suit.

He looked at Numina and she said, “Healing spell, it looked pretty bad.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Without the armor, I’m of no use. See if you can go ahead and find what we came for. I will meet you in the lab.”

Numina phased through the rubble, the layout of the place coming rushing back to her. She soon found herself in the vault, where the Freedom Phalanx kept the most dangerous criminals in cryo-stasis. After the destruction of Baumton this place had only one resident, because it was decided that moving him was too dangerous. He remained on ice and under rubble until last year… when Roderick Mueller paid a group of villains to come in here and free Reichsman and reform the 5th Column. The only things in this room now were the decrepit corpses of Longbow and 5th Column agents that died that day. This whole area was a reminder of her own failure. She attempted to stop those villains, but their might was too strong. They defeated her and ensured that the Reichsman would be freed.

Eventually she made her way into the trophy room. Anything really dangerous was removed before the base was sealed off. Just knickknacks remained. Stuff no one thought had any value. Stuff like the Necromantic rod. Numina located the locker Positron said it was stored in and opened it. There it was in all its unholy glory. She picked it up and started to make her way back to Positron’s old lab.

As she passed back into the vault area, the rod seemed to come to life. It wobbled in her hand, and pressed an impression in her mind. “LIVE AGAIN” was echoing through her head. She couldn’t tell if the thought was her’s or the rod’s.

“Live again?” she spoke out loud as if asking the rod a question. That was a mistake. The rod took it as a command and the bodies of the dead Longbow and 5th Column soldiers that littered the room rose up and took aim.

The skeletons and zombies emptied what remained of their clips in her direction. She had no choice but to completely phase out, dropping the rod. She couldn’t retrieve it without phasing back in, and that would put her at the mercy of these undead abominations. She also couldn’t remain phased forever. She didn’t know what to do.

Suddenly a blue beam of energy cut through the room, disintegrating the undead. Numina phased back in and picked up the rod, looking up at her savior she saw the room’s emergency lighting reflecting back at her. It was her knight in shiny armor.

“Man, you can get into a lot of trouble on your own,” said Positron as he stood there wearing his old DRS-03 armor. “And didn’t I warn you about that rod and zombies?”

“At least we know it still works,” she said, betraying a thankfulness in her voice to the man who rescued her.

Positron recovered his broken armor and he and Numina flew back to the current Freedom Phalanx base with the rod. They carefully avoided Dark Astoria and any graveyards on their journey back.

Positron spent the next few weeks bouncing between two projects. With Numina around he would work with her and the Necromantic rod on a solution for War Witch, but his own time was spent improving the DRS-03 armor to a more modern standard. The new armor, the DRS-03 Mk. II, was a thing of beauty. The Impervium was a marked improvement over the alloys he had been using since the Rikti war, and he was able to incorporate the Prometheus energy from his DRS-08 armor into this one as well, returning that comforting blue glow that people began to relate to his hero identity.

But the real issue was War Witch. The rod was a huge step in the right direction, but he needed a few more things to help with that research. Fortunately there were always new heroes around willing to team up and tackle jobs for the Freedom Phalanx. Perhaps a Task Force was just the thing that was needed in order for he and Numina to finish their research…

Someone mentioned a google doc might be a better way to go. I agree.

City of Heroes AMA

Anyone can edit the doc. If someone wants to do the heavy lifting and delete duplicate questions, the designers and I can bust this out a lot faster.

Remember Wheaton's Law when editing the doc. Changes you make are PERMANENT.

(If there already was a google doc made, copy it into mine; I'd like to be able to lock out the doc so the designers and I can answer the questions)

(I pasted in up to Post 12 in this thread to get you started)

I just looked at the thread and... yeesh, I am thinking I should have limited it to one per post... that might slow you all down a little.

Asking questions in this thread is not what you should be doing. You want to ask them in THIS THREAD.

Feel free to comment about the Lore AMA, other people's questions, answers we have given, etc. in this thread.

Again, we are looking at around Sept. 12 as a possible start date for the Lore AMA. (See other thread).

Hey everyone,

I know you guys have a ton of questions about what the planned future of the game was, and me and the rest of the designers are anxious to get that information to you.

One thing we all realized is that finding a job is hard work, most of us have spent our days following up leads and getting our LinkedIn pages in order. A couple Job Faires this week have also consumed up the time we would have set aside to answer your questions for a day.

After talking with John, Sean, Tim, Jeff, and Ryan we're thinking sometime mid-next week (Sept. 12) would be the earliest we could coordinate. We will of course keep you apprised of the situation.

Our answers SHOULD be considered canon when concerning anything to do with Issue 24 and previous. Anything after that is speculative and should be treated as such. We'll note in the answer if it's anything different.

One thing you CAN do right now is start getting a list of questions you want answered together, and post it here in this thread. Now inevitabilities of scale mean that someone is likely going to ask a question that is already covered in lore somewhere. Lore junkies feel free to answer those questions before we get to them to make our job easier.

Also, I'd like to keep this thread as CLEAN as possible. Questions ONLY. Comments are appreciated, but let's put those into another thread. If I have mod rights, I will delete commentary posts in this thread. If I don't I'll just report them and have Zwill delete them.

To the designers: Please don't answer questions in this thread until we have a chance to vet the answers. Unless you want to see yourself get contradicted by someone else.

This is the hardest thing I have ever had to write.

Just over nine years ago, the best man from my wedding, Sean Fish said they studio he was working at was looking for designers and wanted me to interview for the position.

Wait, let me back up.

I met Sean Fish through a good friend of mine, John S. Sean and John starting playing CCG's and I was crazy jealous of him monopolizing John's time. He was "John's new best friend, Sean." Little did I realize how cool of a guy Sean actually was.

Wait, let me back up.

I met John S. at the first Amber (diceless RPG) game that I ever played. John was a legend in Amber circles, his name was in the rulebook! And here he was in MY GAME! I soon found out that he lived incredibly close to me and I was driving him to the once per month game and we became great friends.

Wait, I need to back up again.

I got invited into my first Amber game because one night at DunDraCon (an RPG convention here in the bay area) I was wondering around and saw a guy I had played ONE game with the previous year, Jim K. Jim was sitting alone and we soon struck up a conversation. Hours went by of us chatting about everything and soon one of Jim's friends, Jeff K. showed up (around 1 or 2am) and said he just played the most amazing Amber game of his life and wanted to run Amber now. I told him my roommate was a HUGE Zelazny fan, and we were both instantly invited into the game.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that invitation was the DEFINING MOMENT of my entire life. I can trace my career back to it, I can trace meeting my wife back to it (a chain of friends back to Jim and Jeff and another Amber game that spawned from the first one), everything. If I hadn't chatted with Jim that night, I never would have become Lead Designer of City of Heroes (I am sure Portal Corp has cataloged these universes). Yeah, that's just how my mind works.

OK, I had to tell that story to brighten my mood up enough to get through this. This will be incredibly hard.

When I interviewed for Cryptic I had been unemployed for nearly a year. I am sure I landed the job by promising Melissa Bianco that my Star Wars Galaxy character would make her a house for free, (just hit up "Carbonite" on the Flurry server, I told her.) I loved writing the missions I got to write, designing the Enhancement System, determining the XP curves and implementing them, then launching the game. Next up was Badges, and implementing that system, then Craig Zinkevich called a bunch of designers into a room and said "we want to do something for Halloween, anyone have any ideas?"

I proposed that players could literally Trick or Treat in our game by clicking on doors. Craig's eyes lit up and he looked at the engineer in the room, who was lost in though. "Yeah, we can do that" the engineer said. Magic. I believe it was my idea to freeze over the lakes in Paragon for the Winter event too (my memory is hazy on that one).

When I took over the reign of Lead Designer I was extremely happy. I inherited the work of Zeb Cook, Jack Emmert, and Rick Dakan, and I was determined to make them proud. I grabbed the lore and ran with it. I invented things that would likely never see the light of day (how many remember my post about Gargarin Space Station and the Armstrong Moon Base?) I made the universe of City of Heroes my personal RPG campaign, and you were all my players. I loved getting new designers who had the same passion as I did, and letting them run wild making their own RPG campaign for you all to play in.

I learned so much about MMO's over this time. I tried to make an MMO that me and my friends would want to play. One that wasn't frustratingly hard. One that allowed us to play together no matter what level difference there was. One that allowed us to collectively play on a "Task Force" where our progress was saved even when we were logged off.

Nowadays a lot of MMOs get compared to World of Warcraft, because most of them are trying to emulate WoW. I would get new designers in and they would wonder why we had some systems that were NOTHING like what WoW did, and I have to explain to them that we were released seven months before them. It is a testament to the game that we were able to survive the Warcraft juggernaut, we had them beat in a lot of different areas. That's not to say WoW is a bad game. I've told people "You don't get 12 million players and still be a bad game" there were lessons I learned from WoW, just as there were lessons I am sure they learned from CoH.

But you want to know the most amazing part about my time on City of Heroes? It's pretty easy... look in a mirror. Seriously, it's you guys. CoH has THE BEST community in the gaming space, HANDS DOWN. We have players that praise everything we do . We have players that put us to task for our game balance. We have players that reverse engineer our math. We have players that criticize our storytelling. We have players that are passionate about the lore. We have players that make machinima movies and write stories where a character I created has a romantic relationship with a character they created. We have EVERY POSSIBLE TYPE OF PLAYER, and in the end I know they all LOVE City of Heroes because they ALL STICK AROUND, even the ones that apparently we could do no right in the eyes of!

And I want everyone to know, in my entire time posting on the forums, I have never, ever, put ANY player on Ignore (even though I have been sorely tempted). When I read a thread, I would read EVERY POST in it, everyone was entitled to their opinion, and I would be doing them a disservice if I didn't at least read their complaint (even if I didn't agree with it).

So the big question is, "what am I doing next?" Honestly, I don't know. I've got some ideas, and rest assured that once I have something to talk about, you'll hear it on the twitters (@MMODesigner) Yeah. I changed my twitter handle, but if you were following @Positron_CoH, everything switches over for you automagically.

I am going to miss the hell out of this game, but most of all I am going to miss the hell out of you guys. We had fantastic plans for the future, stuff we were working on right up until Friday. Stuff that would have made the passing of Neil Armstrong seem eerily coincidental. I would have loved to read your comments about the stuff we had planned.

So this isn't goodbye. I will end up somewhere and I hope that I can "run an RPG" for you all again someday.

Until we meet again,

I can vouch for that really being Chris (BAB) and Floyd (Castle).

We're at lunch now. I'll post more later but I am sharing your thoughts with the team.

If we still have forum access next week the writers and I will do an "ask us anything" about CoH lore. And we mean ANYTHING lore related. If we not know it we'll make it up on the spot.

I only am playing this year to fill out the minimum number of players, had #2 pick, ended up with:

Funny enough, this decision was made long before even I worked on City of Heroes.

I was told that this was done this way so that powers that targeted allies/other players could easily exclude yourself as a potential target. This was done to promote more "team play" as many of the original designers had a distaste for tankmages and/or 3rd Ed D&D Clerics (can buff/heal/do everything by themselves).

I learned how to program on Commodore PET computers at school. The first computer I owned was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (the US version of the ZX-80, I think). I don't think I ever successfully loaded anything off the tape drive for it. For Christmas I got the 16K RAM upgrade pack and I was STOKED.

Eventually, my paper route got me enough money for a Commodore 64 & Floppy drive. A ton of my formative years were spent gaming and programming (which mostly involved copying line for line programs out of magazines). I think the stuff I played the most was Lode Runner (making levels) and Adventure Construction Set/Bards Tale Construction Set (making RPGs).

My dad then bought an IBM PC (even though I begged him to buy an Amiga). For Christmas the next year I got an Amiga 500.

The first video game console I ever owned was called "Video Pinball" from Atari. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Pinball. I played the crap out of that before we got an Atari VCS (eventually renamed 2600). By the time the 5200 came out, I was well into PC gaming. I did own a TurboGrafx-16 and a Sega Genesis, but since those were the #2 and #3 consoles, I missed out on a lot of games. I owned an Atari Lynx, and not a Gameboy... again missing out on games.

I think that the lesson I learned from always owning the "second tier" systems, computers, etc. was that if I wanted to be at the forefront, I had to adopt what was popular, even if it was technically inferior. I think this is why I bought into the Apple ecosystem today. Apps are generally released for iOS first, accessories are way easier to find, etc.