RuthlessSamael

Okay, sure, but coming up with a narrative reason is, again, trivial. Like, it takes time for the effects of your crimes/heroic deeds to sink in. Or, so many people attempt fake redemption/corruption to pull a fast one on the other side that no one's really willing to believe it until they see some commitment...Or if there's really weird, unusual circumstances.

Also, I won't bother to quote him, but TG's assertion that rapid switches are always frowned upon by the audience is flat-out wrong. Every single reason I gave is an example of a perfectly valid plotline that could be well-received, or even one that has been well-received. Half of them were a joke about the way Angel/us switches alignment so many times in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a plot which was really well-received.

Not to rain on your parade, but these things are, in fact, declarations of fact that either can or can not be proven true. It is impossible for either of those statements to be an opinion, because they are objectively quantifiable statements. You could actually make a scale to quantify both of them. Saying that a lack of narrative consistency is not a problem is an opinion. Saying that it exists at all is a factual statement.

If enemies gradually ascend in power throughout the whole game without ever suddenly dumping us back to Hellion-level threats until Incarnate content, then both the statements listed above are facts. The only way you can argue with either of them is with evidence (for example, if there's points in the game prior to Incarnate content that show us to be at pretty much the exact same level as we were at the beginning according to the narrative, despite the gameplay telling us the exact opposite).

This is sort of what I was talking about, but I'm not entirely sure you fully understood me. Getting new powers, new enhancement slots, a bigger inspiration tray, etc. etc. all needs to stay, along with the level numbers, because those are all interesting, visible means of progression. They're part of the formula that makes CoX successful for the fairly wide market it's reached, so you really can't mess with it for business reasons, and I wouldn't want them to anyway.

The upshot being that an end-of-game character will be substantially more powerful than a starting character, but because they've got five toggle buffs going and a dozen different attacks with lots of enhancement slots on all of them, as opposed to the starter character who's still running around with two or three starter powers, no enhancements at all, and only four inspirations.

Tropes Are Not Good. Furthermore, virtually everything you say about the trope is flat-out wrong. It's entirely possible to make the gap between gameplay and story very, very small, or with some concepts, totally non-existent. CoX isn't one of those concepts, because there will always be edge cases like "why can't I use the powers of Empathy to try and talk this archvillain's goon squad into running away? Surely they can't all be pure evil like the archvillain himself, and it would make the fight way easier." That's an edge case, though, particularly since the game never flat-out says that Empathy lets you do that sort of thing.

On the other hand, making the power levels consistent between gameplay and story is trivial in a super heroes game. Just rewriting some dialogue to explain that these guys who look like regular citizens with rocks have actually been imbued with the power of the ancient God of Rock-Throwing Citizens would do the trick, and even though that was the most entertainingly ridiculous answer I could come up with it is still only slightly more silly than the sorts of things that happen in comics (and CoX) all the time.

Your mechanics should match your narrative, not work against it. This is such a fundamental rule of game design that it can be used as a good metric for game design competency. If someone argues that mechanics working opposite the way the narrative says they should is a good idea or no problem, that's a very good sign that they shouldn't be making games (although it's worth noting that this is different from "this game will make us as much money as we need regardless, so screw it, let's just do whatever," which is not a very respectable attitude, but it's still rational and competent).

Cheaters.

That sort of thing is extremely important data for Paragon Studios, because it tells them whether it would be wiser to bump prices up to wheedle more cash out of the big spenders who've proven to be willing to sink lots of money into the game or to bump them down to try and get the small spenders to make more impulse buys and send more total cash Paragon's way.

For our purposes, though, it really doesn't matter whether the game is profitable because of 100,000 people making $5 impulse buys every week or one guy who is spending $500,000 on the game every week because he is insane and also stupidly wealthy. In both cases, the servers stay up and we keep playing.