RuthlessSamael

Xanatos, by your own argument you cannot prove your assertion that the devs did not plan for an entirely PvE game at launch, simply because it is possible to phrase it as being a negative. I look forward to your ad hominem or red herring non-answer.

Here's an idea that would hopefully not be too difficult to implement. Add actual, for-real money in-game, but not something which can be used to purchase enhancements or whatever, just as something that can be used to fund various nefarious schemes. It shouldn't take more than a few lines (again, hopefully) to add in a cash prize to most missions, whether they're contacts, newspaper, or whatever.

Nefarious schemes don't do anything; they're gold sinks. Maybe add a badge for completing all of them or something. Inexpensive things would involve buying up Dyne labs or distribution centers, more expensive ones would involve stealing the Axe of Exceptionally Unpleasant Magic from a museum or assassinating the mayor of Paragon's sister city who's stopped in for a visit. Really expensive ones involve instigating a coup to take over your very own island nation.

It's better than nothing, and hopefully not hard to implement...Personally, though, I'd give Redside a more developed scheme-based mission system. Basically, you know how every so often you'd get a chance to choose Loyalist or Resistance in Praetoria? Let Villains make similar choices, but more concerning what kind of evil they want to perpetuate (i.e. "sell the death ray to Arachnos or keep it for yourself?"). Heroes, too, while we're at it.

Well, the hypothetical dream would be if the game world was totally, completely, and rigidly defined, but only according to our specifications...Or better yet, magically anticipating our specifications before we'd even thought about this or that particular issue. But of course, that's ludicrously impossible. I can't even imagine how any combination of humans and machines working together with any amount of resources available could construct such a game for even one person unless they already had an excessively intimate bond with that person. Nonetheless it's helpful to keep in mind our hypothetical goal when thinking about ways to improve the game that could actually happen.

As an example, anything the game can safely assume about your character (like gender, in that even if you're a robot and technically sexless, people will still probably refer to you as "he" or "she" depending on whether your chassis is curvy or angular) should be specified.

This gets particularly easy if things like Hero/Vigilante/Rogue/Villain are treated as allegiances instead of alignments, such that "Hero" just means "usually works for or with Longbow," "Villain" just means "usually works for or with Arachnos," and Vigilante and Rogue both imply being more in it for oneself or dedicated purely to ideals not embodied by either organization. Although you'd probably want to rename them if that were the case.

Regardless, the game world is perfectly capable of inferring what Longbow and Arachnos think of the character because Longbow and Arachnos are part of the game world, whereas it can never hope to infer whether my villain is an insane psychopath, a well-intentioned extremist, a man driven mad by revenge, an unwilling recruit being manipulated into using their powers for evil by another, or any other of a dozen motivations. So let me figure out my own motivation and don't assume it for me.

That being said, I'd like to reiterate that there are certain goals that no one ever had any reason to believe would be actually doable in-game, even if they're perfectly genre-appropriate for super villains and video games typically allow the player to achieve their goal if they beat the game. Your villain will never get to blow up the world, because how would that even work? Don't ask the devs to code it when you can't even concept it, and don't ask the devs to code something that would lose them gargantuan amounts of money because you're just so special that you deserve this game feature, regardless of how many people lose their job over it.

Even if Blue Steel thwarts my plot for world domination, I'd still be satisfied if I got the chance to punch his lights out afterwards.

There's no reason to believe that there is any malice intended towards Statesman, and I don't want there to be. He needs to fill that role as a Big Blue Boyscout who always does what's right, and he can do that better as a martyr than in the hands of CoX's hit-and-miss writing team. I don't want the CoX team ruining his character by trying to retroactively paint him as a jerk, even if his creator and real world alter-ego totally was. Statesman saves the world pro-bono, efforts to paint him as a bad guy in spite of that are actually going to come off as contradictory to established lore, and attempting to retcon it as Statesman being Nemesis' best buddy working a convoluted plot would be...Well, a really stupid retcon.

That being said, I'm hoping that pretty much the entire Freedom Phalanx bites it. Basically, every member who is not the personal in-game avatar of a staff member should die, be depowered, trapped in another dimension, whatever. The ones who are personal in-game avatars of a staff member might also go the same way if the staff member in question doesn't mind getting a new one, but I certainly wouldn't advocate taking beloved avatars away from devs just because.

Point of all this being, Statesman is just one man. He's surrounded by other supers, nearly as competent. The destruction of the entire Freedom Phalanx would be a devastating blow to the defense of Paragon City, which would leave a gap into which the players could step in, as the last, best hope for Paragon in its darkest hour.

A few things I've thought about while muscling through all eight pages of this thread.

Yes, creating an MMO where villains can actually destroy the world is hypothetically possible, but no one has any idea how to make it work even in concept here in the real world where games are actually made, so what on earth makes you think Paragon owes that to you?

That being said, not every villainous plot needs to be destroying and/or taking over the world. I mean, I've got a Villain and a Rogue right now, the first of which does what he does mostly out of loyalty to a higher power and the second of which mostly just wants to be left alone (problem being that as she takes more and more drastic action to drive off her enemies, the more they, especially the heroes, redouble their efforts to end her reign of terror once and for all). I could also make one who just wants to be absurdly wealthy and/or powerful without explicitly wanting to own all the things, or one who's on a quest for revenge against the world that wronged him, or a scientist whose ideas have been mocked because of academic politics and now plans to show them, show them all!

In all of these cases, success of the villainous plot comes down to killing a handful of people, blowing up one or two buildings, and/or stealing a few hundred million dollars, none of which has to have permanent effects on the game world. Particularly if we could go to other cities besides Paragon. The idea for an alternate dimension where you can blow it up, conquer it, or save it doesn't actually have to be another dimension, it could just be Tokyo or wherever. A single, instanced zone far enough away and with little enough to do with Paragon that it will make no difference to the main plot what happens to it.

Also, more things along the lines of the paper, mayhem, and tips missions. The contact isn't your boss, he's either a peer ("I've got an idea for a heist, but I can't do it alone") or a lackey ("hey boss, I was watchin' things down at the Arena District like you said and you'll never guess what I just saw"). Even if the only thing you ultimately end up accomplishing is stealing fat stacks, intimidating the local gangs into being your lackeys, or whatever.

I posted this in the suggestions thread a while ago, but enemies who con grey shouldn't attack your character unless they're attacked first. Then have them add in some dialogue about how Villain Name Here totally owns this turf, and you NPCs should make sure to stay out of his way or we'll all suffer for it. Blueside could do the same thing, where grey enemies will occasionally talk about how Hero Name Here has made it practically impossible to make a dishonest living in this neighborhood. On that note, do things like muggings and break-ins have to be quite so ubiquitous? There's just no way you can end them all, and it doesn't feel very heroic to ignore a serious crime in progress. Can't more criminals just be loitering around, doing drugs, tagging walls, or whatever? Things which, while illegal, aren't the sort of thing the average hero is ever going to feel too bad about turning his back on to deal with more important things?

Finally, creating a computer program that can tell an effectively endless series of interesting and unique (if simple) stories is actually hypothetically doable right now. You don't need a computer to actually be sentient to be a good GM, nor to handily beat out the average human GM (though such a feat, unlike straight storytelling, is not currently within the realm of our understanding).

I don't think the number of people who create CoX-relevant backstories is necessarily a good measure of how good the CoX story is. Most of my characters have little to no interaction with the CoX lore because I didn't know a whole lot about it when I started. Only the more recent guys can really be attached to the lore. Further, even if I really want one or more of my characters to interact with the lore, that doesn't mean it's going to be written into their backstory. I really liked the new heroic 1-7 Matthew Hashaby-Filler Episode-Aaron Thiery arc, and it interacted really well with Samael, but that doesn't mean I'm going to make a character who's Matt and Dana's child, or an old colleague of Aaron Thiery, or whatever.

A good measure of the general popularity of CoX lore would be if you could devise a way to find out what percentage of players, having some kind of actual character at all, enjoy having that character interact with and grow through CoX plotlines. It doesn't matter if they see CoX as filler episodes in between battles between their hero and whatever personal nemesis they've dreamed up, or if they develop imagined enemies, allies, and nemeses as they play through the game. If they're tying their own story to a CoX story in any meaningful way, they clearly like the CoX story.

When idling, they curl up into a ball and whimper instead of posing dramatically.

If you want to get into semantic details, prior to the Well players had total control over their own origin stories and power sources, prior to dialogue being worked into text boxes players had total control over their character's responses, and etc. The fact that the ability to change undetermined things never gave anyone the ability to change determined things has nothing to do with the fact that players had the freedom to determine it themselves. Now I know it's hard, Wing Leader, but try and respond with something other than a disingenuous rant about how creativity of any kind is just impossible if you aren't playing tabletop thinly disguised as a semantic argument.

Concerning territories.

First, if this is going to be a competition, then it's going to be a competition between SGs. Simply put, nothing else is stable. Even if I manage to seize Darwin's Landing for myself by beating up the old owner or running the right missions or whatever, it will change hands way too quickly for it to actually feel like I'm a villainous mastermind in control of something. When I can't even hold onto my territory overnight, it doesn't feel like I'm taking and losing territory whilst building an empire, it feels like I'm competing on a leaderboard.

The only way to take and hold territory would be to join a SG focused on it, and then it's going to come down to a small number of elite SGs duking it out for control over every single neighborhood. Upstarts who manage to seize one for themselves will be rapidly crushed. Even if there are rules in place to prevent griefing (and I imagine there would be) they still just wouldn't be able to compete with the resources of a whole SG.

Now, are you currently a member of a truly elite SG? The kind of group that actually does perform at a dramatically higher level than the game expects them to given their stats right now? Then this new territory system you're dreaming up isn't for you. I don't care if you think you could be elite if you had a reason to bother with it, there are people who have been squeezing all the power they can out of the system for years, and it will be a long, long time before you can catch up.

It'd be much easier and have much the same effect if you just wrote the concept into the missions. In Fort Darwin, they already have you storming a Longbow base with the help of either a bunch of Skulls or a bunch of Infected, depending on which contact you took earlier. Writing things like that, where the story tells you that you're a big, villainous deal in the Rogue Isles, would pretty much solve the problem. Yes, it won't actually be true, and that's a bit of gameplay/story segregation that might grate on the nerves of some, but in this case it's unavoidable, because only a very, very small number of people can actually be the biggest villains around. When you're only improving the villain content for about thirty people per server (tops), you haven't really improved it by much.

If you wanted to add in an actual territory system, I would do a few things.

1) Mobs that con grey won't attack you unless you attack them. Actually, this should apply in CoH, too, and they should stop committing any crimes, too. Redside it wouldn't really matter if they stopped bullying the citizens or whatever. Regardless, this makes certain neighborhoods feel safe and cleaned up after you've outleveled them. As a villain, it automatically makes me think that I have the fear and respect of all the local thugs, while as a hero it makes me think that I've tamed the local criminal element such that they're no longer actively committing crimes. This would actually be a big improvement to both sides.

2) Completing certain missions (new ones, or maybe mayhem missions) should give a villain control of a neighborhood. As many villains can control the same neighborhood at once as they like, and there's never going to be some kind of master list of villains who currently control Mercy City or anything. It's basically like a day job, it's something you just have. Controlling these neighborhoods brings in a steady stream of Infamy while you're logged off, just like patrol XP. However, you cannot get patrol XP and territory Infamy at the same time. There is a toggle between taking the fight to your enemies (patrol XP) and terrorizing your own people to keep them in line (or just for fun, whatever, regardless it's Infamy income).

3) You can also select a villain group to be your personal minions, the idea being that you control a small set out of the total group. So if you choose Arachnos, maybe you're an Arachnos officer, or maybe you control a splinter group, or whatever. Like origins, just leave it up in the air. If you can create your own CVG via AE, you can use them.

4) Occasionally there will be an uprising where a bunch of mobs will try to take the neighborhood back from you. This creates a mission that is always level appropriate somewhere in the neighborhood in question, where your villain group will fight against the other villain group (even if they're the same villain group), not unlike the Fort Darwin mission. The neighborhood's Infamy income will cease until you address the issue. The missions are uprisings generated and do not become more frequent as you gain more territory, so that players won't be constantly responding to uprisings when they'd rather do other content.

5) A quick glance at Paragon Wiki informs me that there are about 25-30 day jobs available to any given toon. If territory is to completely replace day jobs for pure Villains as well as any Vigilantes or Rogues who'd like it to (it should), there should be a similar number of benefits available for territory control. There are about ~35 neighborhoods total in the Rogue Isles, so you could simply give different neighborhoods different bonuses (with some overlap), and then have it work just like day jobs. You log off in the right neighborhood, and you get that bonus when you log back on. After so many days, you get a badge, and certain combinations will give an accolade.

But really, rewriting the mission dialogue to make your villain seem more like he's taking the lead would probably be a much easier way to go.

The game delivered on those expectations for eight years before the Well came along. Just because you, personally, never had them doesn't mean they aren't valid and legitimate expectations to have. Some of us can, in fact, create characters under a certain amount of creative restriction and we can actually tell interesting stories with them even without direct control of the game world. Characters make a story, and if you can't tell two different stories wherein the exact same literal changes to the gameworld end up happening, then you're not very good at stories.

Also, this has been irritating me. Reductio ad Absurdum means proving an argument false by showing that it leads to an absurd conclusion. For example, if someone makes the argument "raising taxes always increases tax income and is therefore always in the government's best interests," you can reduce it to the absurd by pointing out that raising taxes to 100% would cause the entire economy to collapse because no one could actually get paid to do anything, therefore no one would work for money and there would be no income for the government to tax, therefore there must be some point at which raising taxes stops increasing total tax revenue.

On the other hand, if Alice says "raising taxes will help increase tax income in this specific situation" and Bob responds by saying "but that would mean raising taxes to 100% would be a good idea when it's not," that's a Strawman Argument. Alice never said that raising taxes would always be a good idea, just that it would be a good idea in the specific case being discussed.

Know the difference. It could save your life.

It's curious how often people prefer playing the hero to the villain. It would seem to fly in the face of so much of human nature.

And just as mysteriously as it appeared, the bug is gone. This despite my having tried it twice last night. Odd.

Whenever I try to enter the mission door to the Mercy Island Bank for the CoV mission, the game crashes. On a possibly related note, I recently left the room for a few minutes while Mercy Island itself was loading, and when it came back I had been inexplicably punted to the login screen. I had to close the game and reopen it to get to my account, since attempting to log back in immediately resulted in being told that the account was already logged in.

I'm wondering if it was always planned this way, or if it was an Author's Saving Throw?

Regardless, the only real issue I have with the new lore is that it treats humanity's power-mad nature as a new thing. We've always been that way, because that's pretty much how evolution works. The species that's best at manipulating its environment always wins, and killing other species is a pretty straightforward and efficient way of manipulating problems away, while subjugating them turns a problem into a bountiful resource. Nature is a competition to see who can become the ultimate killing machine and humanity won by a landslide sometime around 15,000 years ago. All (admittedly limited) knowledge that we have states that everywhere and everywhen, life itself is designed to kill.

Guess who has a shiny new VIP account!

Global Name: Burning Samael
Server: Virtue (if anyone wants me to switch to Union, that's still a palatable idea for about another 24 hours)

Characters:

Burning Samael: Focused and sometimes merciless in his defense of the city. He's known to be investigating something magical to do with eyes, spiders, and nightmares. Works as private investigator for supers for fairly low rates.

The Blind Girl: All personal interactions suggest she is shy and withdrawn, polite and non-confrontational when approached, yet this does not stop her from burying dozens of innocents in the foundations of her criminal empire. Motivations and origin currently unknown. Mouth is sewn shut, communicates solely by writing in a notebook enchanted so as to never run out of paper and always open to the spot she wants.

At least two other supers have been created for roleplay purposes, but even their existence is a secret I'd prefer be discovered in-game (even if it probably won't take very long).

Type of RP: Casual conversation and in-mission, more than willing to get involved with others personal arcs. Each character holds secrets tied in with CoX lore in general, get to know them well enough and they'll let you in eventually.

Can be contacted: In-game mail, forum PMs

Times on: Typically from around 9-12 PM, but not on Tuesdays.

Timezone: Mountain Standard Time

It's not necessarily that they can't be Incarnates. All of my characters are low-power enough that becoming an Incarnate of practically anything would be a step up in power. Even the ones intended to be heavy hitters (mostly Wicked Samael comes to mind) isn't so cosmos-crushingly powerful that being imbued with the power of a being who plays chess with entire civilizations wouldn't be a step up.

It's just that it's not always the direction we want our stories to go. Most of the other plots don't really change our character very much, leaving us to decide whether our characters are changed by the events or not. The Well changes us by making us the Incarnates of something, though, it's not just a raw power source that can be used for any purpose to any end.

Incidentally, if they intend to have an option wherein you punch out the Well of the Furies and take all its power for yourself, they should have made that obvious from the beginning instead of waiting until the very end to reveal your own character's plan to you.

My copy of Going Rogue has finally arrived, however after installing it I get a black pop-up window with a series of three error messages like "Error parsing command line argument 'setregion NA'" Afterwards, the game will launch, but it takes an unusually long time to load, and it will not let me log in.

My issue appears to be identical to the one listed here, with the exception that I'd previously had the free version of the game installed with no issues. There was never a response from the OP after further information was requested, so I assume his support ticket (or whatever) went through.

I'm running Windows Vista on a Toshiba Satellite laptop, if that helps.

Freemie players should be getting a lesser experience. You get what you pay for.

No one else cares. It's not an objective design flaw when Paragon makes a game that other people like instead of you, and they never promised you the 5th Council would be important or even go on existing. Your bruised feelings are just that: Yours. So you deal with them. ParagonWiki is down because boo SOPA, but there's not even that much difference between the two villain groups to begin with. Given that "Champions clone" is your idea of "innovative game design," I'm guessing you just hate change.

So really you're just another guy whining because his favorite villain group isn't getting the spotlight all the time. Seriously, I3 was seven years ago. Get over it. It's all kinds of stupid to continue holding Paragon accountable for that.