Samuel_Tow

Character transfers, eh? Not a bad idea, but I don't think I'd do that. Sam Tow has so much wrong with him I'd need to fix that starting a new level 1 alt would be easier. Or should I bring a 50, even if he's effectively "broken?"

Wouldn't matter to me one bit. Give me enough time and I'll get 'em all back to where they were. So long as I kept access to all my unlocked costume elements and powersets, I can make it all back again. Hell, almost every character I touched in recent years got rerolled, or at the very least massively respecced.

Hell, if we have to start over, I say slap on permanent Patrol Experience (i.e. boost experience gains by 50% across the board) and just roll with it. I'd have a jolly good time, myself.

I can't really brag about having accomplished anything, for as many posts as I have. About the only thing I can take solace in is holding the game's writing to task and letting nothing slide unwarranted, without going whole hog and just announcing the game's story to be garbage like others have. I've always felt like City of Heroes could be a great epic if only our writers would stop trying to shock us and just told basic, solid stories.

And to be honest, for as pissed off as I was I18-I21, a lot of what's taken part in I22 and I23, and what I've seen of I24 made me excited for the future. It finally seemed like our writers "got" it and started putting as much care and attention into the game's narrative as they did in mission scripting and costume design. But even at its worst, City of Heroes still had a better story than damn near any other MMO I've seen.

1. About when did the current implementation of "Incarnates" come into the story and how much shuffling did you have to do to accommodate them?

2. What plans did you have for Ascendants and how would they fit into the story and Prometheus?

3. Was Prometheus ever intended to be an actual story participant, or was he just a means to put context behind the various iTrials?

4. What organisation do the Merit Vendors belong to, who's in charge of them and what is their story? Who designed their costumes?

5. If Mender Silos is Lord Nemesis, how did he break the "Carbon Law" which limits people to only travelling ~5700 years from "current time" in either direction.

6. Silos manages 11 means of time travel, of which the Pillar of Ice and Flame is one. The Dream Doctor mentions travelling through the Dreamspace to be another. Have you planned for the other nine? Is it canon there are no more than the 11 or are those just the ones we know about?

7. How does Holsten Armitage fit into either Time After Time's Project: Destiny and Mender Silos' Coming Storm? Were there any plans to give the man a Steven "Science" Sheridan makeover?

8. Can you confirm that you handle discontinuity within a character's own experience as time line alterations? For instance, characters who I started in Galaxy City are told that, in an alternate timeline, the Shivan meteors fell on Atlas Park, instead.

9. Who are the "natives" of the Shadow Shard and why do they refer to themselves as "the people of Paragon?"

10. What, in practical terms, is the Shadow Shard? Is it just a weird-looking physical dimension, or is it, as one mission suggests, "inside the mind of a god?" The latter would explain how Lanaru's madness could "break" the world.

11. What's at the "bottom" of the Shadow Shard? Say I fell of an island and the safety net teleporters failed. How far would I fall and what would I fall towards?

12. Who and what is Rularuu? Where did he come from? What does he have to do with the Soldiers of Rularuu monsters? What purpose do Faatim, Ruladak, Lanaru and the others who aren't in the game serve?

13. Who would win in a chess match - Nemesis or Nemesis Rex?

14. Who or what is Lughebu?

15. What do literal religious gods constitute in City of Heroes and how can multiple real and fictional pantheons manage to coexist when the stories behind them kind of contradict each other?

16. What is Prometheus bragging about having given to mankind when it was Ermeeth who gave mankind magic and kick-started the first real empire of the world - that of the Oranbegans?

17. Who is the Prince of Demons/Demon Prince and what is his stake in the Oranbega/Mu war? What was his plan and what was he really after?

18. Can you confirm that after The Eternal Nemesis storyline, there is no longer such a thing as the "real" Nemesis, as his mind is instead spread over a network of automatons with artificial brains?

19. What were your plans for Reichsman before we burned the writer of the Khan TF at the stake? Was he intended to take over the 5th Column as a leader? Was there ever intended to be a real revival of the group with a new visual or at least a new agenda?

20. When did the "Nicti" become alien and why? Was it always planned from the start or was this ad-hoced?

21. When, in his personal story, do we see Requiem circa the Imperious Task Force? He's still wearing his 5th Column uniform and fielding 5th Column troops, but was this before he defected to the Council, or is he leading this operation in secret while also working for the Council?

22. Who, exactly, is the Freedom Corps division "Longbow" supposed to represent? Are they just a catch-all term for non-player heroes (explaining why every hero in villain storylines is a Longbow agent) or are they an independent entity?

23. What became of Hero Corps? Was their service ever accepted? Were they corrupt and had they actually sold out to Crey?

24. Who is the Lady Grey and why does she know so much about Incarnates? Is she the "Lady of the Lake" who gave Hero 1 his sword Excalibur like I suspect she is?

25. Who is "Incandescent" and were there any plans for her to show up in the actual game, instead of only being mentioned in storyline? What would she have looked like? Was she hot?

26. How restrictive is the "Origin of Powers" plot thread and the notion of Pandora's Box giving birth to super powers. Are we supposed to trust the contacts on their word (say, Sister Psyche, rest her soul, saying Mutants didn't exist prior to the splitting of the atom) or can we claim that this only affected SOME people?

27. Were villain characters circa City of Villain's release in 2005 really supposed to want to be Arachnos agents and are rumours of this being downsized from an original intention of having villains join a number of pre-existing NPC villain groups true?

28. When, exactly, do the events of our future as a "might and frighting Incarnate" (aka, Mender Ramiel's first mission) take place? It has to be more than 5700 years in the future or past for context to make sense, but wouldn't that put it beyond the events of the Coming Storm?

29. Who are the ghostly reflections I fight all throughout Mender Ramiel's arc, do they have anything to do with the Shadow Shard reflections and do they really share a sort of extra-temporal intelligence that allows them to see time travel events in the proper order even though that's incompatible with chronological order?

30. Who or what are the Talons of Vengeance? Are they really agents of the Furies or are they, instead, just monsters - the Children of Lamashtu?

That's all I have for the moment. I'll post more if I think of anything else.

Up another $5 is about as high as I'm willing to go. I love the game and I want to help, but we have to be realistic here - I also like to eat and have spare cash to buy other stuff I don't strictly need for my survival. Like another large Lego set. You wouldn't believe how expensive those are.

But the question is a bit loaded. City of Heroes: Freedom isn't a full subscription game, so I don't believe that's how it should be judged in terms of cost. I wouldn't be willing to spend more than $5 per month because... Well, because it's "per month." But I'd have little trouble dropping large sums of money for specific one-off purchases. For instance, when Cape and Aura unlocks were made available, I dropped... What was that? $10 for that? Yeah, I can unlock them in-game, but I wanted to support the company and it was an easy sell. $10 for doing ostensibly nothing? Sure. Unlock all the Rularuu weapons with nothing extra? I'd drop $10 for that, easy.

What you have to remember about running a F2P game is that when it's expensive, it fails. Sure, the devoted of us may pay more, but WE aren't the ones who will support the game long-term. Regular, "non-loyal" customers are the ones who are footing most of the bill. It's why Marketing gets chastised for not advertising - because we need fresh blood and a larger player base. It's why I see Freedom as a success - because it was managing to sell us things above and beyond our VIP status. I bought all the costume sets, even the ones I didn't need to, I got almost all the powersets and so on.

"We" can't pay for City of Heroes to stay afloat, and an expensive F2P title will not succeed.

Oh goodie. I tried logging into Champions Online's forums to size up my options and it seems like my account name changed because I used "Stardiver" to sign up for... Something. Rusty Hearts, I think. And now there's no way that I can find to change my user name at all. Ugh...

Sure, why not. I feel special now, being the only one to show up from my country

I need to admit a few things up front. First of all, 5 PM Eastern is midnight on my end, so that should be doable, and if it's on a Staurday with a non-work day the next morning, that should be easy. Secondly, I haven't played City of Heroes since the announcement. I will support the game any way I can, but the game itself has turned into a tragedy where the reality of the game's real-world business model is intruding far too much into the actual meta-game experience.

All of that said, I'll be there, even make a new character for it. But I won't show up as a Paragon City developer. If I'm going to show support for the studio and the game, I wan to do this as "myself." I know I've said many times that Samuel Tow is just a character I made - my first, in fact - whose name I borrowed, but he was the first and only I actually identified with, back 10-15 years ago when my parents were going through a yelling divorce and I needed an outlet for some of my darker feelings. If I want to show up as "myself," Sam is the face I put on, because he's the closes I have to it. He's the only one I've ever been recognised as, and he's been lying forgotten all too long.

Sam needs a new costume, he needs a new sword, and he needs to be used more. Now that I don't have to worry about Incarnate to-hit or Super Reflexes or Inventions or all the other game-wise challenges that kept me playing other characters, I want to resurrect Sam and show up as him. I may not win a costume contest with him, but that's fine. I'm not there to win. I'm there to show support. For the studio, yes, but in my eyes, for the game more than anything else.

"City of Heroes is a place where dreams are born" has become sort of my motto since the notice of foreclosure, and that's the part of the game I most want to emphasise. I want to show people that this is a place where our imagination can run wild and produce things you just don't see anywhere else.

It's a good thing to see the Champions community is kind and welcoming. That wasn't the case last time I visited, back when it comprised mostly bitter, hateful ex City of Heroes players. I really appreciate the welcoming sentiment, and that alone may be reason enough to get me to give that game another try. Plus, they actually HAVE muscular women!

!!!

But at the same time, I really just don't like the game itself. I don't like the copper/silver/gold money system, I don't like the "bags" inventory, I don't like the loot (there OR here), I don't like the combat system and I REALLY don't like the art style. Plus, most of the missions are over-world and lack any real story. Maybe that's improved, I don't know, but being sent into a field to open crates and recover parts for someone is busywork. It's the exact same thing I complained about in City of Villains - it's meta-game work with very little story attached to it.

But what really turns me off is that the game simply doesn't take itself seriously. You can improve combat and loot and artwork, but you can't really change a game's fundamental design choices, and taking the piss out of comic books is one of those design choices. Me, I'm not a big fan of comic books and prefer a more general "sci-fi meets fantasy" setting, but even so the constant parody of comic books gets to me. In fact, the constant references to comic books grate a lot. It's why I never tried the DC MMO - I don't like Detective Comics.

All of that is not to sound ungrateful - I'll give the game a try at some point. But it is to say that my problems with the game shouldn't take anything away from its community. I appreciate the gesture, but the game just ain't my thing.

It's not surprising the dev team would be looking to save the game. This was their baby, not to mention their job. It's heartening to hear our efforts are having an effect, though. As hopeful as I am, I did not see that coming. Corporations don't tend to react to player pressure, especially corporations which just axed a product with no warning. I'm guessing City of Heroes being basically profitable lends a lot of weight to the situation. If the game were failing, we'd have had no weight of argument.

Honestly, if this tragedy does get salvaged in the end and we do manage to help Paragon Studios stay together, I envision a much closer relationship between developers and players. But that's still just wishful thinking.

So THAT'S why I left you on ignore when I cleared out my list following the foreclosure notice. Well, there's that mystery solved.

Holy guacamole! There is a lot of stuff to digest in here. It'll take me more than a full day to read, and I can imagine how long this took to write. I spent most of the last hour reading through the 5th Column entry, and I'm reminded of why I fell in love with the game's original backstory. So much of the original content had so much backstory that it's truly amazing. As I read back on those origin stories, I get a sense of a real, living world where characters have lives of their own outside of what they do on-screen, and that's just amazing.

I LOVE seeing these stories, and I'd have loved to see the game go on to expand on them so much more. THIS is the stuff I've always wanted to see make the story headlines more than anything else.

For me, it's World of Tanks for the moment. Mind you, I HATE PvP environments, but I like the game just too much. Plus, I've finally gotten good enough at it to have SOME degree of meaningful progress. Probably won't last for "years," but I'm still counting my options at this point.

What I WON'T be playing is any Fantasy MMO or RPG. I'm sick to death of those. I was sick to death of those 15 years ago. Not only do I care nothing for the genre, I'm sick and tired of games trying to be as big and complicated as possible in some effort to "immerse" me in the dullest, least exciting part of any fantasy - the day-to-day grind. Because, as we all know, I secretly dream of being a peasant who spends his day mining rock and forging trinkets. What's more epic than that?

I'll be looking at sci-fi games of the future, specifically sci-fi games with more vision than to just copy WoW with a different skin (i.e. not Warhammer 40 000 Online). We'll see how that goes.

Yeah, I'll be honest here - I care about my characters and the game as a whole, not my "loot." If I have to start building from scratch, I'll start building from scratch. Better than not having a game at all, I'll tell you that much.