Samuel_Tow

I've tried them from time to time, but Search just gives me garbage. I don't know if it's just rotten luck of the draw or what, but I simply no longer have any desire to try. Moreover, I've tried Dev's Choice arcs and left angry and disappointed. It seems "comedy" arcs are just that damn popular, and I HATE them.

To be honest, I don't actually mind having missions and mission objectives that cater to different characters in some way or another. The trouble is that this really has to be planned for and designed for, not just left up to chaos theory, as it were. For instance, one of the crucial aspects of a Stalker is stealth, yet the way the game is designed, you're only hurting your own reward rates if you skip past enemies, since that's where all the XP and drops are. However, imagine if most missions had a hidden terminal somewhere that activated security turrets to help you if you got to it, THEN stealth would help skip enemies to that so that they become easier to fight.

On the subject of traps in general, these would be a lot more useful if the game had more explicit tower defence situations, but with enough time between enemy waves to set up traps and prepare. These days, when there ARE ambush spam situations, they're always targeted at you and they always come in a single, never-ending wave with each ambush stacking with the previous one or directly spawning on top of you. If, on the other hand, I had to stay alive in a room and I knew that enemies would come in from one of those three doors over there and that I would have exactly 20 seconds between ambush waves, then I could use traps to their potential. Yeah, the Terra Volta respec Trial is kind of like this, but the wait time between ambush waves is... Weird.

That said, though, I might still end up wondering if these powers are worth taking at all if these situations are rare. Do I want to take a power I can never really use efficiently, or a power that's maybe not as strong but that I actually have a use for? This shouldn't be such an easy question.

There's no logic in claiming there's no logic without offering any actual argument to refute the logic people have already explained behind why this isn't a good idea. "Is not! Is too!" is not a useful discussion.

I call that an improvement. The game lost its time sinks, the broken characters were improved to not suck (almost all of them) and we learned to play. The game is far, FAR less irritating these days than it has ever been. It doesn't waste my time, it doesn't get on my nerves and it very rarely forces me to do something I don't want to do. I can't see this as anything but a good thing.

"Teams" aren't the only social aspect of this game. Global chat, friends lists and the forums very much do count, and many of us prefer that kind of social interaction. Most of the friends I've made in this game, I've made over disconnected chat or over fan site forums and almost never through teaming with them in the game. In fact, whenever I do team with people, I more often resent them than enjoy them, especially when they're random people I've never met before.

The Hollows before War Witch redid the spawns was pure garbage and easily one of the WORST places for lowbies to start out in. Mission placement was irresponsible, spawn sizes were hazard zone size in an area that wasn't technically a hazard zone and enemy powers were over the top. The Hollows, to the best of my knowledge, was designed to be a 20+ zone as a sequel to the Outcast and Troll storylines, hence why their leaders are in the Hollows, but was dropped down in level, producing an experience that was hideously out of balance for the level range it was dropped to, all because Kings Row proved to be a bottleneck.

Firs of all, you never had to form teams for Frostfire. I fought him in the Issue that the Hollows came out and defeated him by myself. I forget what character I used, but while he was a tough fight, I never needed a team for him.

Secondly, NEEDING a team is never fun or exciting. Ever. Not for any reason at all. Needing a team is a chore, a cost, a negative feature to a piece of content which therefore requires that content to hand out larger rewards to compensate people for the time wasted sitting on their hands while a team forms and for the hassle of herding cats.

Hogwash. Ignorance is ignorance. Any illusions that being ignorant of the results means you get to have fun making mistakes is empty. What's crap is crap whether you know it or not, and playing it without knowing it's crap just means you'll spend 30 or 40 levels before you realise you've wasted your time, then you'll try something that isn't crap and see how much you've cheated yourself. Maybe you have infinite free time, but I do not, and if I'm going to spend my time levelling up a character, I want to make sure that character won't end up being garbage mid-way through with me having to abandon it and reroll. I refuse to allow my mistake in playing Blasters to ever happen again.

Moreover, Gravity Control is not a weak.

Yeah, nothing of the sort. You never needed a team for Frostfire, what you needed was to know what you were doing. This is why ignorance is not bliss - because you end up having to find other people to play the game for you. And forced teaming does not encourage socialisation. It encourages resentment. When I'm forced to interact with other people at a time when I don't feel like it, I don't feel like opening my heart up to them. On the contrary, I resent the intrusion and regard them as a necessary evil, ruining my fun and probably ruining their fun in the process. I'll team when I damn please, and if I don't want to team, then I bloody well won't. That's the beauty of choice.

Besides, I'm not looking for friends. I'm looking for a fun game to play. If I do make friends with people who play it along the way, that won't be because the game forced other people inside my personal space with about the same grace and dignity as an animal breeder locking two animals together in the same cage. You can't force "friendship" and the harder you try, the harder people resent both you and each other. A fairy tale this ain't.

Yes, and such an MMO will tank, and tank hard. In this day and age, MMOs failing and closing their doors is not the theoretical possibility it once was. It's happened to a great many of them. Moreover, the other two MMOs that had customization and no difficulty settings and all the other crap design features you're so attached to ain't doing too good, and it's not because their development teams have cooties.

Also, "like in real life" is just about the biggest antithesis of fun I can imagine. I already have a real life. If I wanted an experience that's dull, boring and uninspired, I'd walk away from the computer and "experience" my real life. The reason I'm here is because this ISN'T like real life. That's the beauty of it. Here, I CAN be the hero of my own story. Here, good things can happen to me if only I wish for them hard enough. Here, it's NOT like real life.

You just described Champions Online and DC Universe Online.

He lives!

Honestly, as attached I am to some of the oldest pieces, I wouldn't mind a total overhaul like this. The trouble, as I see it, is that you can't just "update" old stuff to look better, especially in a new engine. You have to make new stuff that looks like the old stuff in the new engine, which means remaking... Everything. Maybe not quite from scratch if you use the existing items as templates, but I can't imagine that would be much better.

The thing, though, is that in trying to replicate old stuff, you sometimes end up locked into an inferior design because of how it was originally made, and end up sacrificing potential quality because of it. I imagine that if the cityscape were ever remade in a new engine (i.e. made in a new engine), that the development team might want to make a larger number of building templates or move the zones around so they're not so chaotic, or maybe get rid of the ridiculous beach walls all over the place like Paragon City is built in the Grand Canyon. It might also take a much larger and more successful game to justify the expense.

Mind you, I REALLY want to see this, but I kind of don't want to lose anything in the switchover, especially the stuff I'm already using.

Every player's Mary Sue isn't written in canon. Every player's Mary Sue isn't on the box cover, the banner, the splash page and every loading screen. Every player's Mary Sue isn't held up to other players as some prestigeous but unreachable goal and a hint of what players could never be.

Players are free to make their Mary Sues any way they want, because no other players have to depend on those, because the game generally doesn't account for those and because players don't have the responsibility of making a respectable game for other players. We're here to have fun, and if our fun interferes with someone else's fun, we simply don't interact. The game's writing, fiction and canon don't have that luxury. They're responsible for setting up this persistent MMO world for us to play in.

In short, player characters matter to the player who made them. Developer-made characters matter to everybody, because they're in content everybody is put through.

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On a side note, players DO have the same responsibilities as developers when they create Architect arcs. I don't mind people playing their Mary Sues in their own personal storyline against their own instance of the game's fictional universe, but when I sit down to play through their fan fiction, their bad storytelling becomes my problem, too. There's a general mistake some Architect authors make in asserting that they're writing a story about their own player characters for whoever runs their Architect arc to sort of tag along with. Wrong. Like the official writing staff, they are writing stories about the characters we, as players of these arcs, bring for the ride.

Obviously, that's not a hard-and-fast rule and I'm sure there's room for people essentially showcasing their own characters over the Architect in a manner not dissimilar from an overly-elaborate "Rate My Champion," but I got into this game for the characters I make. They're what matters the most to me.

Like I said - some enemies are easier for some characters than others. That's fine. I have nothing against Malta, the Rogue Vanguard or Super Stunners, and I mostly play melee characters. They're harder, but not cheating hard. What I'm against is characters specifically intended to mess with specific ATs. That's precisely the kind of design I DON'T want. "Oh, your character is too powerful. Well, to balance that out, we'll make sure you can't enjoy it." There is never any reason to punish players for picking a specific AT.

And, really, the game doesn't "cater" to the strengths of the melee ATs. What makes them so strong is their strengths don't have to cater to the game in return. That's really the biggest advantage. Blasters can do some things, but not others. Scrappers can do pretty much all things, because their powers aren't dependent on what they fight. For Scrappers, there are no "right" enemies and "wrong" enemies. There are just enemies. For Blasters, that distinction is much more solidly placed.

And while you say "build variety," what you describe is pretty much taking the one or two specific Pool powers that everyone has insisted I take since Day 1. Really, ask most people and the answer will usually be the same - Air Superiority, Tough and Weave for melee characters. That's really not where I want to go. In fact, I'm not a big fan of "build" being the answer to every problem, because then I'm not actually playing a game, I'm enacting a script. I played the game in Mids' Hero and Villain Designer, on the Market and on the AT forums. All that's left to do in the game is play the tape.

I'd have liked to see the Supper Stunner self resurrection delayed a couple of second to give me time to back away, honestly. This is the sort of place where knowing what to do would be a greater advantage than "build." It's a lot like fighting the Nemesis Army. If you kill stuff willy-nilly, you end up with enemies with stacked Vengeance and a big problem. If you save the lieutenants for last, you succeed. This kind of situational awareness which nevertheless doesn't break the flow of combat and enforce waiting time is what I find the most entertaining. It's decisions made on the spot in reaction to events as they happen, not choices made long before the mission even started.

If I had a problem with Super Stunners, it's that they give me no time to react even if I were so inclined to. I'm forced to build for it since I can't react to it, and that just bugs me on an entirely separate topic of conversation.

It's an interesting idea and I have seen it before. Isn't that more or less how being held in PvP works, actually? Or used to work prior to I13? I don't know, but it sounds familiar.

Thing is, though, even with status resistance, your damage auras will still keep dropping, and drop so often that it starts to feel pointless to turn them on. That's half the reason I opted out of Blazing Aura and Hot Feet on my Fire/Fire Blaster, especially since Hot Feet requires me to be on the ground to activate, yet still works in the air.

I feel that there's an even more fundamental problem that status resistance can't solve, however: Blasters have no margin for error whatsoever. If your plan of attack works out, you can win a lot of fights. If a single power misses - ESPECIALLY the opening one - you're pretty much SOL right from the start. I could, if I played my cards right, smoke one Malta TacOps with Char while Blaze-killing another before he could hold me with my Fire/Fire Blaster. If you attack TacOps from outside their Flashbang range, they'll open with Burst and thus give you time to speed-kill them before they cycle around to Flashbang itself, so if you smoke one from range, then close in and kill the other mid-animation, then you effectively win. If you MISS with Char, however, you eat Flashbang and the game is over. You can't recover from this outside of downing a break-free, in the "use inspirations or die, I suppose" line of thinking.

What I'm saying is it's not JUST status effects that tanked my Blasters. It's status effects that showed me just how precise my actions had to be to succeed with a Blaster, and even then my success was almost entirely based on crapshoot accuracy. I know it may sound hypocritical that I just got done talking about how much I want my actions and reactions in battle to matter, but even so, I appreciate having at least SOME margin for error to account for unreliable accuracy and just plain old mistakes on my part. Maybe I that Commando is actually a TacOps I hadn't recognised, maybe I got too close to the neighbouring spawn, maybe my control power missed, maybe a lucky enemy hold got through my Personal Frocefield... All of those have the potential do damn near insta-kill a Blaster, yet most Scrappers can absorb one or two big mistakes like this and survive, such that when I fail, it really is my own fault.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I hate instant failure for the smallest of miscalculations, and I feel cheated when it happens. I feel cheated when the only way I can play with any degree of respectable success is to be perfect every time, because I'm just not that good of a player, and because that's very stressful to me. I don't mind failing if I accidentally aggro four separate Nemesis spawns and accidentally kill all their lieutenants like I did with my Mastermind a few days ago (damn Snipers!), because really... That one was kind of my own fault. But failing because Blaze missed one time is just... Ugh!

And "set up time" really isn't the answer, I don't think. In fact, I've almost never seen Trip Mines - for all the praise they get - used defensively in a way that didn't take bloody ages. I used to have the habit of laying one down at my feet before I open combat so that anyone who approached me would eat mine, but even then the most it hit was one or two minions. To truly use Trip Mine for its full potential, you kind of have to toe-bomb. Even pulling isn't always successful in getting more than one or two out of ten enemies in range for the explosion. As Arcana mentions earlier, set up time doesn't actually help Blaster performance, but actually hurts it as it takes significantly longer to accomplish anything when you have to set traps up and pull into them than another Blaster would with open warfare. Yes, it's safer, but it's also a lot like having debt, in that your gains are significantly slowed.

In a way, I find it somewhat degrading when pausing the game to set up a trap is seen as strength of Blasters. I'm not saying it's an invalid tactic, just that with as long as it takes to do, it's a last resort tactic, and it's bad that an AT has to resort to its last resort so often. Again, if you could toss these things at range and do so quickly, setting up a minefiled WHILE FIGHTING, that I could see as a popular tactic because it would be "trapping" without having to devote spring break to it. Maybe if you could toss Trip Mine at range nearly instantly but it took two or three seconds to become active so you can't just use it as a hand grenade?

Not quite. Bruising is not unresistable, so its effect is greatly diminished with damage resistant enemies.

They are. There are very few problems we can actually blame on a particular person, but Matt Miller deserves the heat for this one. He said - in his own words, on live Ustream - that offline SG invites probably won't happen because Super Groups are for groups of people and being able to invite your own characters would be counter to that idea. I may be paraphrasing the wording, but the point is "SGs are for groups."

I believe this is wrong-headed and limiting in a way that the game really doesn't need. Forcing people to find other people to get their invites doesn't foster community, it fosters looking for loopholes and resenting the community as a necessary evil, rather than an asset.

Pretty much. I'm not saying Blasters don't have their strengths. There's a reason I was so insistent on playing them for so long. The trouble is they get so very few opportunities to actually use those, especially by themselves. Blasters just die faster than they can utilise their tools.

I disagree. What you're describing is essentially Void Hunters for generic ATs, and there are few things in this game I hate more than Void Hunters. Balancing an AT by giving it situations that suck *** just isn't a good way of balancing, as far as I'm concerned. Sure, I get that some situations are harder than other for some characters, but there's "harder" and then there's "Blaster vs. Hercules Class Titan." There's no need to punish people for having picked a specific AT, that's my point. And that's exactly where Blasters are - their AT is defined by the things it CAN'T handle much more so than the things it can, largely because most ATs can handle most everything.

Also... Super Stunners are supposed to be hard for melee? They drain endurance, I get that, but melee characters have more than enough margin for error to absorb that and kill these guys twice without being in that much trouble. At least, that's been my impression.

This is probably going to make me sound incredibly arrogant to say it, but what was different was my Brute. One of the reasons I suggested we run the Sewers was I'd done this by myself on that Brute the level before and it seemed like a fun idea. I'm not saying your Blaster didn't pull his weight. Hell, you made the whole thing far, FAR easier than it had been by myself, but your Blaster wasn't really facing the brunt of the controls of those control-based enemies. That's really the sticking point - if you have someone to tank for you, then Blasters work well enough. I just don't think they're superior by enough to merit them being as defenceless as they are when alone.

Also, while Electric Blasters get panned, they still deliver serious damage, and do so without needing any setup time. I don't believe we pulled anything in that sewers run, and I don't think we spent a lot of time standing around and "preparing." If you'd brought a Devices Blaster, instead, I'm honestly not sure if I'd have had the patience to corner-pull ever spawn we came across into mines and... To be honest, I'm not sure you'd have had the patience to do it, either.

I'm not trying to sing my own praises here, either. Crash is a decent Brute, but by far not power-built. What I'm trying to say is that with a Brute on a small team, a Blaster is actually avoiding much of what's the most threatening and that makes a big difference, because Blasters seem intentionally designed without ANY means of protecting themselves. Even Defenders have more of a self-preservation toolset

This is always the case when you talk about costumes in this game, it seems. "This is City of Heroes, not another game. We don't want stuff from other games." Only to turn around and point out that... Yeah, it's pretty much in this game, too, and no-one's talking about reinventing the wheel, just adding more like what's already there.

We already have higher-quality characters in the game and we already have higher-quality costume pieces in the game. I'm just hoping some of those newly-added higher-quality costume pieces will be human body parts at some point, to put it this way.

I don't really think that's entirely true, speaking of sequels in general. Most of the sequels I've seen fail have been the ones that just attempted to retread the same ground as their predecessors and just repeat the same story, game or experience otherwise. To be, for a sequel to exist, it has to bring something new to the table that the prequel didn't have, otherwise it's just an expansion pack.

For instance, take James Cameron's Avatar. Whether you like it or not, it was a movie successful enough to warrant a sequel, but that sequel is not going to be just the same thing all over again. Instead, we'll be visiting this Earth they spoke about so much and seeing the high-tech future that's killing humanity, supposedly. If one was a modern person going back to nature, then the other will be nature going back to technology. I personally like Avatar very much, but when I heard there would be a sequel, I was dreading it, just because there seemed to be nothing else to tell about the story. It wasn't until I realised it was not going to be a retelling of the original story that I became interested.

"City of Heroes 2" that is an exact copy of City of Heroes only it looks better just isn't going to fly. Not as a separate sequel with separate servers and a separate subscription. At least I don't think so.

As far as I'm concerned, the Victorian and Steampunk faces come off as uncanny less because they're uncanny and more because they plain suck. Strip the normal maps off of them and they're still terribad faces. The batch of "new" faces that came before them, which are generally higher-resolution than the oldest ones, are much, much better to my eyes.

Seems like it. The way I figure, the weight of the hammer head is so great, the centre of gravity is actually left of the desk edge, so the whole thing isn't just toppling over. The ruler can't bend down to let the wire slide out because the weight of the hammer head is forcing the hammer handle up, bending the end of the ruler up and creating a depression for the cable to be balanced inside, while at the same time the hammer can't slide off through the cable because of the lip on the handle.

Clever.

I'm talking base slotting here, but the point remains that a Scrapper can survive and thrive in environments of far higher danger and far faster combat than a Blaster with similar slotting. I'm not sure where the end point should be drawn, but when ALL of my Scrappers outperform ALL of my blasters by leaps and bounds, that's where I simply choose to cut my losses and abandon the AT, which is what I did.

I'm really not saying that everything should be a Scrapper, but the fact remains that when I sit down to play, my Scrappers level up and gain money and drops far faster than my Blasters, and the only thing keeping this relatively in check is my insistence on keeping the SAME difficulty settings between all my characters. Once upon a time, Blasters were the lower boundary that put a cap on the absolute highest level of difficulty any of my characters could face - the difficulty a Blaster could handle comfortably. For me, this turned out to the +0x2 without bosses.

The thing, though, is that playing my Mastermind recently, I discovered I was easily capable of handling much higher difficulty settings and aggro multiple spawns on those anyway, thus level up much faster. A Mastermind with fairly crappy slotting can still easily handle 20-30 and even more enemies, bosses included, at the same time, whereas a Blaster under those circumstances would be held and dead within seconds. Sure, said Mastermind fought said fight tooth and nail, damn near died a couple of times and used the bulk of his inspirations, but he won. Any of my past Blasters in there would not have stood a snowball's chance in hell.

Sideways of the above question, though, is basic game design. "Base difficulty" is not really base difficulty. It was at one point, but these days it isn't. Newer content will constantly throw tons of enemies at you, use overpowered enemies and generally spike the difficulty far higher than it really should be. Again I bring up Mercedes Sheldon's final mission, where a Warriors boss summons three boss ambushes, and the last of these summons three more boss ambushes on top of that. Basically, you're fighting seven bosses and at least seven minions for a total 14 people AT BASE DIFFICULTY. Similarly, the Dr. Steffard Ghouls missions has what feel like 30 ambushes that come in an endless stream, then come in pairs, then come three at a time towards the end. Even at base difficulty, that's a LOT of ghouls.

That's why I don't like the idea of balancing characters around what the AI is expected to bring to the field - because this requires discipline that our content creators simply don't have. When content exceeds what the AT was balanced for, some ATs fold while other ATs hold firm, and it's the ones that fold that come out wanting.

Neither is using skin, really. There's a discontinuous, non-matching colour gap between most new faces and our skin textures anyway, so while matching a face to a "tights for skin" top may seem off, it's not that much more off than matching a face to a skin top is already. The necks in this game are one of the most glaringly obvious problem areas of the character model, especially on women.

Phallic broom sled for the win?

If City of Heroes launched now like it was back in 2004, it would have tanked and tanked hard, and not just because it would have to compete with the City of Heroes of today. One of the reasons City of Heroes has gained enough momentum to stay afloat so long was because it was something wholly new and unique. It was a super hero MMO in a day where those didn't exist, with unorthodox combat, no traditional loot and a host of other quirks and quality of life features that set it apart. This is no longer unique on the MMO scene, and many other games have replicated many of the features that made this game successful.

If City of Heroes 2 ever comes out, it has to offer something more than City of Heroes: Again, or else face a VERY hard time. Even for as many things as I complain about, JUST fixing them isn't enough to bring me over to a new game if the rest of it isn't up to par with City of Heroes as it is now. It doesn't really matter if the City of Heroes of 2004 would not have met our current expectations, because City of Heroes 2 would have to compete with THIS City of Heroes, and most of us that have been here for 7 years are so used to it it'll take something BIG to shift us.

Even many of the people who would give City of Heroes 2 a chance seem to suggest they'd want to wait until the game developed and matured some, rather than diving into it at Launch. The thing is, SOMEONE needs to play it at Launch to keep the thing afloat long enough to develop into a better game, and if it's not the people who kept City of Heroes 1 in business through thick and thin... Who would?

That's really now how things work. The opinions that matter most are those of the paying playerbase, because without them, neither Microsoft nor Marvel really matter. No-one "just" invests money in a project, they invest money in a project expecting a return, and the return from a game is entirely based on the opinions of its players because they're the ones paying the bills, the salaries and the revenue.

And besides, both Marvel and Microsoft pulled out and left Cryptic hanging, having to release the game on their own. Their reputation clearly wasn't convincing enough.

Suddenly? I and others have said pretty much this exact thing since Ninja Run came out. It's a neat idea as a temporary power, but it has no business being a temporary power when it should be power customization, instead. That's not sudden. That's one of the older arguments out there.

Well, considering a Scrapper can Shield-Charge/Lightning-Rod/Spring-Attack or plain AoE those minions to death in less time than it takes for them to animate their attacks more often than not... Besides, a Fire/Fire Blaster can take those minions out in Aim + Build Up + Fireball + Fire Breath, more or less.

When it's easy for a Blaster, it's very easy. But it's not this easy very often. A Blaster plodding along at base difficulty with no ambushes or unexpected aggro will make a steady pace, but if that Blaster attempts to push out of that comfort zone like a Scrapper easily could, things cascade into catastrophe very, very fast.

That just makes the zone feel like it's been borrowed from another game and exists outside of official canon and the persistent world that MMOs are so proud of. It makes it, therefore, that much less interesting to me, and that much more of a one-off episode of an otherwise consistent long-running show which will never be brought up again and which had nothing to do with anything.

One of the things that so enthralled me as a new player to City of Heroes back in the day was this large, persistent super hero world which had rich backhistory and complex inter-faction dynamics where, when things happened, I could think for a moment, snap my fingers and go "OK, I see why that happened." Not so in Croatoa. Banished pantheon happened "last Halloween" seven years ago and then stuff happens.

There is no story to Croatoa and no progression to it. There is a setting, but no story takes place in it. It's a random events plot. You are told to do things that sort of happen but have no larger reason to have been done and result in no lasting effect. You clear a building of ghosts, and this effects the story by... Making sure that one building which will never be brought up again has no ghosts in it. For the moment.

Croatoa has a very, very thin story that, if stripped of all the filler, would be about five missions long, and most of it centred around Skipper LeGrange, with the rest of the missions being basic maintenance. I get that some "proper" story arcs are a "Your princess is in another castle!" plots, too, like Unai Kemen's To Save a Thousand Worlds. I get that, but those aren't that common, and even then they have more of a central plot. Croatoa just has missions not terribly different from Paper or Scanner ones, and then suddenly your contact has had you faff about enough to give you the next mission which actually advances the plot.

And it ends with a TF that I've never done and now that no-one wants to do it, I never will. I don't know how the story ends, if it ends or if it's any good, because I could never be arsed to farm the Quick Katie at the high point and I don't really have the option to do that now. I HATE zone arcs that end in a Task Force I will never do because all that does is rob me of closure and make me resent not just the lack of ending, but the entire story in general, and the zone right along with it. The Hollows did this, Striga did this and Croatoa did this. It wasn't until Faultline that it was done right in my opinion, and that's where a "zone arc" had an actual proper story, not an excuse to hunt Fir Bolg in an area where Fir Bolg don't seem to spawn over and over again.

Personally, I see temporary powers as a gimmick that I'd rather not be saddled with. They take up tray space, consume inordinate amounts of endurance and just make me jump through hoops. Granted, none of those in Croatoa are all that bad... For the simple reason that I can take them out of my trays as soon as they drop and the missions remain winnable quite easily, but that's tolerance, not approval. It's a lot like the Rikti War Zone where you're forced to babysit an NPC ally nearly every mission.

Honestly, this kind of bothers me. I know I espouse the virtues of writing "our own characters" as being a major selling point of the game, but I kind of thing this should be restricted to players doing it, not the game's official writers and developers. While I don't really mind other players making characters that, if they were placed in a common situation, would infringe on mine. After all, we're the stars of our own personal stories. But when it comes to developers pedalling their own characters, that strikes a foul note with me, and if I ever disliked the Statesman as a character, it was very likely because he came off like Jack Emmert's Mary Sue author insert. Not a good thing for your game's poster child.

Matt Miller seems to embrace a practice of letting writers write their own stuff at the expense of shelving what might otherwise be legitimately interesting story angles, just for the sake of letting them write their own fiction. Well... At some point or another, I feel all writers should be forced to write for someone else's fiction. This means they'd have to research said fiction, research said style and research the characters inherent in it, as opposed to just free-handing everything and warping the storyline to fit every whim. Especially as someone who's getting paid to do this, even in part, writing for someone else's fiction at least some of the time ought to be mandatory. It's good for the game and it reigns writers in a bit more so they don't let a ridiculous story run away with them.

Maybe Rick Dakan's work has been tapped out, but I honestly doubt it. A lot of it still has interesting angles to it, and whether Rick himself expanded on these or not, our current writers can and really should do it. No, it's not their baby and no, it's not their own story, but not every story we write has to be. People have been writing fan fiction for years and years, and some of it is very good. Hell, most "expanded universe" books are pretty much fan fiction the original creators allowed.

Basically, I would really hate to have good story angles abandoned completely because "old stuff is old." Yes, Dark Astoria has the potential to return to some of the game's oldest factions and stories... If our writers want to go that route. Because it also has the potential to completely bastardise and reinvent who Lughebu is and what the Banished Pantheon stand for by ret-conning everything with the Well of the Furries.