Ravenswing

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I can totally agree with the Devs that Poison shouldn't be available for heroes

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Except that Spines does toxic damage, so there's a precedent for heroes with 'poisons.'

The AH stuff would be nice, though hardly an essential.
As Shadowe says, the Day Job thing would be impossible currently.
The Zone is already shown.

That leaves friends status and sets.
Well sets would be easy enough, but you can get that from TNT, so again, not essential.

Access to your global friends list might be nice, perhaps on the server selection screen rather than the character selection screen. It has room to put a list up, and it lets you say 'aha! my friends are on Defiant, I'll log in there.'

No. At a rough guess, those are ascii encodes of binary files. Probably pictures, possibly dubious ones, and the site is being used as a file-transfer location.

It needs to be stopped.

If necessary, the new user system needs to be shut down until the thing gives up and tries elsewhere.

That's not garbled, that's encoded. I should know what that is, looks familiar.

Also, there needs to be a Capcha on the login registration.

I'm thinking that 'trailer' is more of an advert to existing players who would like to run on native Mac, but haven't been able to. It's a pretty obvious play on the PC vs Mac trailers and doesn't really tell you much about the game aside from that you can play a hero or a villain.

I very much suspect it will only ever be used as part of an online campaign.

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I guess States is as alone as it's possible to be in many respects - and it must be painful to continually lose friends as they age and die around you. I guess the obvious choice is, dont' make friends

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I like to call it 'Stage Two: Hiding.'
Stage One is Denial, where you carry on going as if nothing was different.
Stage Three is Acceptance, where you suddenly realise what you're also missing by not having friends and loved ones.

Some never make it to Stage Three.

My first 50 took over a year, say about 15 months. That was in 2005/6. My second 50 was created in about August and hit 50 before the end of the year, 3-4 months. And I roleplay a lot.

Now THAT would be offensive.

That was thoroughly amusing. I liked that.

The actual content of the things I don't mind. I dislike systems which make you sit and watch, blocking progress through the game. Personal quirk. I don't believe cinematics and cutscenes work well with MMOs.

Plus, I know it's not a totally common complaint but, I hate cutscenes.

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I have a omnipotent character and i don't view her as goodly

she gained the ability to see everything happening every where and the out come of those decisions


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That's omniscient, not omnipotent, btw.

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she just overloaded with all the information and possibilities that spawn every second

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Which doesn't count then. She doesn't have the processing capabilities to go along with the sensory imput, so she's really limited by what she can comprehend of what she sees. That makes her no more over-powered than any other precog, really.

^^ This, what he said. That's exactly how uber-villains should be beaten.

And the essence of hero-type victory. Facing up to something you can't beat, but doing it anyway. Of course, if there's nothing you can't beat, it kind of takes the fun away.

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What we need is to know why, because without having any reason for him to be this way, and I can come up with loads of them, he's just an entry on super****ery.

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The characterisation in the books goes someway toward explaining his dour nature. It's somewhat classic immortal isolationism, I think. With his friends vanishing (Dark Watcher) or dropping dead one way or another, he's lonely. He's also a figurehead who people tend to look up to. I think he probably needs people like Manticore to keep him going. People who don't believe he's right all the time and question his authority. At least they treat him like a human instead of someform of god.

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Howdy
Zonealarm informed me that cohupdater.eu.exe has changed since the last time it was run. While the exe changes a lot, I've never seen the actual updater change once. Is this fishy?

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Actually, it changes quite often. I seem to recall it gets changed every time they do a pre-download.

Kind of my point. And her point. She's probably not exactly human, but she's not a mutant. Kind of raises the question as to what she is... which she'd really rather prefer not to find out.

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or, if I'm really honest, capable of playing well with others (i.e. not trying to steal the show).

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I apologised for doing just that in Shadowe's Psychonova plot. The way we eventually planned it out it was Nitoichi playing off against Psychonova right up until the point where she stabbed him, and then everyone got to put the boot in. It happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes everyone gets narked at you. OTOH, why shouldn't you have the spotlight sometimes?

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how far do people reckon that 'normal' characters can stretch the limits of expectation and achieve things that one imagines could only be done by a being with superpowers?

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This is something Annette muses over IC from time to time. She's classified as 'normal,' but as far as she's concerned, she's stretching the definitions of the term. The basic idea of the character, power-wise, is that she's good at mimicing what she sees on TV, or actually getting those ancient Chinese textbooks on accupressure to yield useful information.

She can run at 35 mph until she falls asleep doing it. She can hold her breath for around thirty minutes. She can lower her heart rate to around one bpm, and in combat at will ramp up to 200 bpm or so without apparent bad effects. Her brain is actually supporting two entirely different though patterns, both of them derived from her own personality. She can 'mind meld' with people (a rather involved process requiring close contact and a willing subject).

Most importantly, she can walk into a cave full of Malta (or Rikti or whatever) and she walks out while the Malta don't.

She mostly realises that her actual connection to a 'normal girl' is pretty slim, but if asked, she'll say that she's just a Paragon City girl (which does cover it, really ).

Generally, plots have to be relatively low-level, or heavily combat or investigation focussed to work with her. She can't, logically, take on uber-monsters and hope to survive. Faced with a Kronos Titan, I'd pity the Titan though. I can't imagine the stupid things cope well with something which climbs over them to stab them.

One technically uber-plot which worked for her was the aforementioned Psychonova plot. Psychonova could have probably given her a sound thrashing, but she had several factors on her side: he's a pervy sob with a particular liking for teenage girls and Ni was laying it on fairly thick, he wanted something and so wasn't bringing out the energy blasts too quickly, and he thought he'd fooled her into believing he was Richard, but hadn't done his homework.

So, she caught him by surprise and stuffed a Talsorian sword blade through his chest while kissing him. In comes that business Shadowe mentioned about Shadowe being badly damaged by extra-dimensional energies; Talsorian blades are basically stolen Rikti technology... Luckily enough, it was sufficiently incapacitating that he failed to start throwing energy blasts. Might have been messy if he had.

Minor headline in several Paragon newspapers, page two or three, January 8th, 2009

Hellions die in Blaze

Police have reported the discovery of several dead bodies, assumed to be Hellions, in the wreckage of a building which burned down last night. A gang of Hellions was thought to be using the abandoned office as a hideout. "Evidence is currently pointing to one of their rituals going wrong," said Detective Montoya of the PPD, Galaxy City.

I, me, Ravenswing, doesn't really have any. I guess if I had to pass comment, several of them are a bit too cliched for my taste, Statesman, Manticore, Recluse. Sister Psyche and GhostWidow will always have a place in my heart for their costumes and, as various people have said, the GhostWidow/Wretch arc is really rather sweet (it's one of the few tales I've got through in villains that left any lasting impression).

My characters have somewhat different views. For example:

Nitoichi thinks Borea is great, and Dark Watcher, and has some regard for Lady Grey. She also likes Crimson and Indigo, for being two people who just want the job done (Borea for the same reason, really). Despite hardly knowing the woman, Ms Liberty is definately on her dislike list, but that might have something to do with Longbow. And she hates the Rikti, with a vengeance.

Hell yeah, we had great fun at the Zig... over an IRC roleplay session. Doctor Mechano crashed a light plane full of explosives into the outside wall. Messy. Running battle through the corridors, pitched battle in the rubble. Well good.

Shame you probably can't do it as easily in game.

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Either u a) make it a streets only thing

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You can have teams on the street.

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or you b) Make them react to the team leader only

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Would work, but lacks finesse.

Neither of these get around the fact that it's a stack load of work and an ongoing requirement for a huge amount of storage.

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never seen an action movie ,where the hostage follows you 20 meters behind you, no matter how many bloody pulps u just showed to her/him.All he is gonna be, is probably in shock and UNable to move.

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a. Watch more movies. Rather more rare are the cases when a hostage is carried in a bag over the villain's shoulder. Not if the villain wants to get out alive anyway.

b. I'm not exactly defending the current mechanism as such, but I don't like your proposed alteration even more.

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This idea is NOT to make things easier, that would be just a nice side effect.

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It's a side-effect that isn't needed, for a special effect that would look, IMO, sucky.

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On the other hand, there's Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen. A character who has control over everything, but is done so incredibly well you can't help but feel for his predicament. If someone managed to pull a character like that off in CoH, then fair play to them.

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This and Shadower's comments above. You start falling into something of an angst category, but one which can work if done right. I'm not at this point going to say 'just look at Shadowe' because I don't want him getting a big head, but that character works within these parameters, though his angst stems from a slightly different angle.

Anyway, the 'interest' with these uber-godly characters comes usually from their inability to act for fear of it all going wrong (which, thinking about it, is where Shadowe's angst comes from, but I digress). Unfortunately, this has a limited lifespan. The character will rapidly become stagnant, uber-powered, or leave, unless there's something else to keep them interesting.

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Now that means the person could do anything and solve everything in a matter of moments but they won't, why I hear you say? Simple, their own will and soul and such will stop them. They wouldn't want to solve everything, they wouldn't want to be the almighty source of fix for the the world because thats not who they are, they understand that they can't do it and so hold back their power and only use it IF they need to because it's the only answer, and if they don't do it then everything would end.

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I think, unless you play that very well, you're going to find it very hard to justify. Not saying it can't be done, because Shadowe is an example of it being done reasonably well, but from what you've written, I think you'll have trouble. Could be just your explanation.

One way of limiting characters like this is to remember that they don't know everything. (If they are actually able to perceive the entire world if they wish then, sorry but there's no helping it, you've created a god and you're a power gamer. Frankly, the player can't know everything, so if you're playing the character that way then you're just asking to be ridiculed.) They can't solve problems they don't know about, and they can't, generally, foresee all the outcomes of their meddling. It might take one of their interventions resulting in something truly horrible happening to teach them not to mess about, but they'll learn.

However, you're still into a situation there where you won't get me involved in one of those plots since my characters would be entirely superflous, and I would make damn sure that character never got involved with any of my plots as well. You have a character able to solve any problem placed before it, and no reason not to. That is the definition of boring.

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Unless it's an integral part of the character (And it rarely is) it's just not needed.

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I could claim that for War Crow, if it wasn't for the fact that his uber-godliness came out of roleplay. I didn't actually plan it as such. He started out as a priest of The Morrigan sent to fight injustice in Paragon City. Just to annoy various folks who were sunk so far into angst that everyone was drowning, I had him discover that, no, actually he was insane. He shifted from being a straight magician to being a willworker (someone who's will is sufficiently powerful that they can alter reality). As a child, he had spent a night on Cader Idris (Welsh mountain), which supposedly means you come down a great poet, or mad. Poor Dafydd isn't exactly a poet. He had made up the whole Morrigan thing and built his life around it. Discovering the truth broke him, and eventually he changed reality so that various things had never happened, he got a happy life, and so did various friends who hadn't entirely liked how things had gone. But this guy changed the whole of reality, and then willed himself to not be able to do it again. And it's integral to the character as is, if not to how he was originally designed.

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So where am I going with this? Well a character that lives in fear of losing control is perfectly fair game and can be compelling, although really would winding it down to just a city block be so bad? (Hell to just a street? Or even people within ten feet?) At least then I'd be able to think it could actually happen and any time it was raised it wouldn't feel so... out of touch.

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Well... by the time you're getting to 'all people within 10 feet' you're at a level just about anyone in the game can accomplish. I know Nitoichi can, and she's just your average level 50 hero with a reasonable AoE. So, I think, as an argument, that's taking it a little low on the scale.

Otherwise, I'm at the same stage as you. I like playing 'normal' people. I got utterly sick of all the half-demon/half-angel/half-naga people in Neverwinter Nights, and Warcraft tends to suffer from similar stupidity. I know we've had the odd half-demon/half-angel turn up at GG. And it's next to always powergaming.

Annette/Nitoichi is one of the most interesting characters I've played recently. She can't level skyscrapers (she can't even leap over them, though I guess given some explosives...), she has poor alcohol tolerance, she gets worried over trivia and acts like a human because she is one rather than because she wants to. If anything, she's actually an exploration of becoming less human through the effects of her lifestyle. She could end up being less human than the godly types.

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Well, yes, I believe there is an ambiguous statement to the effect that no Kheldian ever has bonded with a meta-human, but I don't think it's actually banned by canon.

Source material unavailable at work, so if anyone can peruse ParagonWiki and Red Tomax, that would be great.

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I didn't go through all the mission text on Red Tomax, but the ParagonWiki article seemed really quite comprehensive and gave absolutely no information regarding a preference for powered or unpowered hosts.

Logically, given that a kheldian character has the powers of a kheldian-fusion entity and not the powers of a hero with extra kheldian goodness, they don't do it, despite the fact that it would seem natural for them to do so given they are in a war situation.