Samuel_Tow

The Knives of Artemis is an all-female society of hired killers. Indigo even refers to them as "that sorority of killers. They exercise very strict discipline and actually have cult-like rituals and rules. In one mission, the player is sent to investigate such a ritual, and a pair of male Malta guards are having conversation about how weireded out they are. Also, according to their description, there are fewer than 100 Knives of Artemis world-wide.

As for Praetorian Earth, that doesn't have a Knives of Artemis or equivalent, not one that is official as such. Chimera, the Praetorian Manticore, does have a secret army of ninja, which in newer content has been slightly retconned into a group of assassins. I suspect you may be able to write your character into that, but you also have to acknowledge that you surrender you will to Chimera. In his story arc in Praetoria, Praetori Sinclair - Chimera - shows himself to be immensely possessive of his subjects, invasively controlling and wholly paranoid as a leader. Serving under him pretty much requires that your character be either blindly loyal or otherwise lacking any will of his or her own.

Son of a *****! I completely forgot about this and have my proposed Bots/Traps build with this thing slotted for damage. GOD I'm so stupid! And I almost did it, too!

Thank you for that, I'll go pull the enhancements out of that power and try to figure out how to salvage that build without planning from scratch. Damn it!

What's a character flaw is you insinuating that there must be something wrong with people who don't do things like you do.

When you antagonise people with passive-aggressive nonsense enough, they WILL dispense with politeness and consideration and simply turn on you. Congratulations - you managed to antagonise essentially everyone else in this thread, even people who might have actually supported you had you not acted like a self-righteous jerk.

My time, my patience and my convenience. If want to team, I will do so. When I don't want to team I will not. I wasn't born and raised on the dark side of the moon. I have played with other people before. Teaming is not a novel experience for me, therefore I am capable of making an informed decision as to whether I want to team or not.

What am I losing? I'm playing the game right now, and my Mastermind is currently idling inside a mission as I type this message. I cannot, in good conscience, subject a team-mate to this, because if I were subjected to this, I would be insulted that my time is being wasted. Do not unto others what you would not have done to you.

Stop patronising people. It's not helping.

I'd say "roll an alt," but I recognise that there needs to be incentive for people to keep grinding Trials because these take a certain critical mass to run. I think that's where an "average" level of power comes in. The "average" is the place where a less driven player like myself would consider progress enough and be satisfied, with the above-average and very-exclusive stuff above that serving as a hook for the less apathetic. Hell, if you move the level shifts down to T2 of abilities, that might actually be the case.

Pretty much this, yes. I've had people ask me to join their teams and people ask me to join my teams and I've never had a problem answering that "I'd like to stick to myself for now, sorry." or "I don't want to team a the moment, I'm afraid." or "No, not right now." and be done with it. If a person answers "OK, have fun." Or "Your loss." or even don't answer at all, that's fine. They didn't bother me, I see no reason to bother them. It's when people try to tell me I'm anti-social that I get irritated and grumpy.

I have mine slotted with commons, and while it DOES build up to some immobilization, it just isn't enough to keep an enemy from running away, and it certainly isn't enough to keep that enemy from moving at all. Especially those elite bosses who have status protection, or who like to use Unstoppable. As I said - I can get some immobilization, but nothing at all like permanent immobilization. No, the POTD doesn't cover immobilization, but elite bosses still have high mag protection from it, and I'm fairly confident they resist its duration.

You know what the real kicker is, though? I... Actually really like the idea of the Well of the Furies. The thing has enormous potential if done right. The well is the sort of meta-story explanation for powers, it's the plot device to explain normally abstract concepts like the beginning of time, eternity, providence and what lies beyond the horizon. As a plot device, this is precisely what we need as way to really surpass all limits and borders, which should have been the whole Incarnate motif. It should have told us that no matter how strong, no matter how ancient, no matter how godly our enemies are, they still have their limits. But by tapping into the Well of the Furies, we do not. Our potential is limitless. There are no ultimate bad guys, because no matter how strong they are, we can be stronger.

The Well didn't need to be sentient, or at the very least it didn't need to be malicious, plotting and scheming. It would have sufficed to have a very basic intelligence which reacted to power alone. The millstone around the neck of the whole story is that we're fighting to earn the favour of the well, and this sits wrong with me, because being given someone else's power is just... Irksome. If the Well were represented as nothing more than potential personified, a sort of abstract entity which had no power of its own, but to inspire, then it I would have embraced it. Without the well, an inventor eventually runs out of ideas. With the Well's help, his inspiration to create never ends. Without the Well, a mage's power is limited to what others have written in the ancient books of magic before him. With the Well's help, he is inspired to experiment, and he becomes one of the people who wrote those ancient books, one of the people whose spellbook will be mentioned for aeons to come as one of the great artefacts of magic.

The Well is a unifying force that transcends class borders. Before we knew about it, we knew that we were mortal, physical beings whose powers are restricted to the environment which spawned us. Gods existed, and they were born better than we could ever be just for who they are. We are not gods, and we can never be gods. The Well serves as the equaliser here. Yes, they are gods, but through inspiration, through perseverance, through the will to bend the cosmos to our wills, we have the potential to match the gods blow for blow, and even exceed them in time. When we have reached the pinnacle of our powers and it feels like there is nothing more to do to move past that end point, the Well appears and inspires us to see the path which we were blind to before, our thinking far too small, mired in the logic of a simpler, less cosmic world.

And the beauty of it all is that the Well didn't have to be magic. It didn't have to be anything at all. The Well didn't have to give us power at all, it could have simply inspired us to seek it out, to train, to persevere and find it, it could have inspired us to tempt fate and force it to bring us close to greater sources of power. The Well didn't have to be a source of power, itself. It could have been as simple as a multiplier - the inspiration which drives us to excel, which drives us to persevere where others would stop and feel that they have enough.

I said that City of Heroes hasn't impressed or inspired me recently, but I was wrong. There was one idea which sent my mind racing, and it had to do with the Well of the Furies. I forget who it was that said it, but it was made clear to me that the Statesman and Recluse have great power, but when they came upon this power, they were mere men with no unusual powers of their own. We have, at that point, grown to match their power through our own devices, strength to equal that of the Incarnates, but without the help of the Well. Now just imagine what the Well could do for us, who start off so much higher than any of the previous Incarnates. If the Well is a multiplier, then we are starting from a much higher base, and our potential may well be limitless. The concept of this revelation both impressed and inspired me... But this is never expanded upon.

And this really is the problem. There was such potential for the Well of the Furies to be used as a device to tell truly unprecedented stories in this game's narrative and style. It could have been used to quite literally exceed all previous boundaries of storytelling and style... But it just wasn't. The Well could have been used to explain the gods and goddesses of the past, telling us how their progenitors were inspired to excel and evolve into divine beings by this source of inspiration... But it wasn't. We could have been the played as special, as a new breed of being that is not "made," by the well, isn't uplifted from simple existence by divine power, but reached divine power by itself, and though this awareness was able to control is ascension.

BUT WE WEREN'T!

Not only was the opportunity to play the cosmic game and elevate us past existing boundaries squandered so completely, the whole story surrounding the Well ended up being just an i-appended retread of the beginning of the game. Instead of depicting us as superseding our rivals and enemies and truly enjoying the power of ascension, now being able to explore secrets too grand to tackle before and face enemies that opposing was never considered, we are simply given the same enemies as before, only power-levelled enough to curb-stomp us into submission. We're made to fight in a mortal's war against other mortals, to fight punks with guns, prisoners and confounded CIVILIANS!

When the Banished Pantheon threaten to bring Lughebu to our world, our contacts quake in their boots, because if he returned, we are ******. Well, now that we're Incarnates, then bring him on. THAT is the cosmic threat we should be worrying about. Have him send angels of death to fight us, have him send his envoys, have him show up in person. We have the power to fight him back. When the Rikti threaten to open a portal to their homeworld and send forth another invasion fleet, our contacts cower in fear, because if that happened, our world is screwed. Well, now that we're incarnates, then they're welcome to try. We should have the power to fight them back. The Statesman was bringing down entire shuttles by himself back in 2004, so it can't be that bad. That is the large-scale threat we should be fighting. Gods, armies and ancient terrors.

It really pisses me off that the people at Paragon Studios squandered such a cool opportunity because they refused to think big. I get that there's only so much content you could make for Incarnates and some has to reuse existing assets, but having Praetoria be the end game content is just a bad decision, because Praetoria IS NOT godlike. You can claim Tyrant shared his ambrosia in a can with his followers, but that doesn't make the story any more godlike, it just makes it that much harder to take seriously. Neither the scale nor the scope of the storyline is particularly godlike, nor indeed out of line of what we've been doing in the 40-50 level range. You can call them "Warp Rats," but they're still the same rats I fought at level 1, only with higher stats. That's not more impressive, just more insulting.

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The Well of the Furies had enormous potential to be one of the coolest things to happen to City of Heroes since its creation. I honestly truly believed it could add up to sheer awesomeness. Yet iTrial after iTrial, we keep falling short of the mark, and I keep wondering what the point of this cosmic talk was to begin with if it's just the same old ball game, just with a different name. It doesn't look more impressive, it doesn't feel more impressive, it's not cosmic and it sure as hell ain't surpassing any limitations.

We shouldn't have to learn to walk in the Incarnate system. We learned to walk, run, jump and fly getting there. That's WHY the Well responded to us. We shouldn't have to re-learn how to walk with Ascension boots on. We should be learning how to walk through time, walk to other dimensions and walk across the infinite expanse of space. We should be entitled to this greatness, because it was our power to begin with that earned us this entitlement.

The Well should have been a literary personification of potential, entitlement and grandeur, not just another Rularuu.

The fact of the matter is that those of us who prefer to solo most of the time don't really make much of a stink about it until someone ups and tells us to go back to playing console games, or some equivalent put-down. City of Heroes is already very accommodating to solo play and "anti-social" trolls really don't help anyone. iTrials WERE a point of contention on the matter, but that's mostly for lack of alternative more than anything else.

The thing to remember with people who play by themselves is they won't go out of their way to bother you exactly BECAUSE they're by themselves and not on your team.

To be fair, you CAN start a story with Act 2, but you have to be very careful about it and craft your narrative accordingly. You need to find a way to explore the characters and advance their storyline without the benefit of having an Act 1 to do it. In fact, when I write stories, I tend to prefer to start them from the middle and progress in both directions. As actions advance the timeline forward, they reveal information which puts into perspective the timeline back from before the starting point. It doesn't always work, mind you, but it's doable.

And yet while you CAN skip Act 1, that doesn't mean you can actually skip it. You still need an Act 1, and if it's not at the start, you need to scatter it throughout Acts 2 and 3, because the character exploration in it is vital to a good story.

The price of Trials is commitment, realistically speaking. It's usually not safe to argue that if people are given the same reward/time/difficulty ratios and they pick the smaller team task, then that smaller team task were better. Raids are a self-sustaining system. You need interest and you need a certain critical mass for them to even work. For instance, I don't smoke, but all of my friends do, meaning it's next to impossible to sit on the non-smoking table if I'm with company. I sit on the smoking table not because I want to be there, but rather because I don't want to go to a restaurant alone.

That said, if people do end up opting for smaller-team tasks even in the face of rewards significantly slated towards large team tasks, then that will point to a problem. And I don't think the solution to that problem will be to just go overboard on adding rewards to the large team tasks, nor to go overboard on killing the rewards on small team tasks. I can't say that this will happen, as I believe reward ratios matter more to most people than preferred playstyle, but it's not out of the question. What IS the question is what we do about it if it happens. That has to be on the minds of the developers as they work on Dark Astoria.

Because I feel like soloing at the moment, and it's my choice whether I team or not.

Yeah, when you figure out a way to immobilize Infernal, Nosferatu or Brukholder, let me know, because I'd really like to know. On my end, they ignore Caltrops almost entirely and just shrug off web grenades. If I'm able to stack maybe five on them at a time, they get stopped, but I can't manage to stop them for more than a fraction of the second every once in a while.

Was that before or after Freedom, though? Because I remember that discussion and I think it was a long time ago. Right now, that's slowly becoming an acceptable fact, I would personally love to have "animation packs" in the same way as I'd love to have "weapon packs." Paying for the stuff isn't the issue, getting the art team to actually commit to making it is, and if money is what we'll have to use as incentive, then that's fine as far as I'm concerned.

Also, if I have bad taste, then you have worse taste

To be fair, I don't generally tell people I don't like them unless they insist I should team with them on their terms and I'm an anti-social git if I refuse Believe it or not, that's happened more often than you'd think.

Several story arcs as episodes of the same story is really not that different from one long story arc telling the same one story. World Wide Red, for instance, is one story arc, but it has at least three different stories in it. One is the Chinese Ambassador imposter Moment, the other Project: Wildflower (seems like someone really liked the Project: Name format), and the other is Director 17 and the overall plot, involving the Kronos Titan(s). This could easily have been done in three separate stories, told in order, each referencing the previous ones, and it would have been pretty much indistinguishable to my eyes.

The thing is... That's not what they did with the SSAs. These really don't form into a continuous narrative CHAIN as they are all paths that off off a common story hub. The main story is Who Will Die, but it only joins the actual arcs all by the same tail end. If you take all the SSAs and thread a narrative JUST through their endings, you'd get a story arc that's about seven or eight missions long, with the beginning and middle of the SSAs not really being terribly relevant to much of anything.

To my eyes, the SSAs are about the worst kind of episodic storytelling, where each episode is more or less a standalone story, but they each end in some event that fits into a much slower parallel narrative. I, myself, far prefer the anime approach to storytelling, where a 26-episode series essentially tells one 520 minute story that's just cut up into 26 segments, each 20 minutes long. But stitch them together, and you have one continuous narrative. The SSAs, by comparison, don't really have a continuous narrative. They depict a whole variety of discontinuous events that all happen to involve a common element, but where most of the events are irrelevant. That makes them less of a broader story and more of a TV series with a loose overarching plot.

That's how I used to use it when I was still trying to use it at all. The idea would be to toss Smoke Grenade at a spawn, then move in with Cloaking Device and place a Time Bomb at their feet. After that, I'd back out and watch the blinking light. At the second-to-last blinking speed, I'd open with Full Auto, so that I can snag all enemies in the spawn with it just as the Time Bomb exploded, ideally killing most of them. If I wanted to be cruel, I could to the same, but substitute Full Auto for the Long Range Missile Rocket which did more damage but was much slower and harder to time.

The thing is, though, that as others have found, this is still far too slow and far too unreliable, and still pales in comparison with what other Blasters could do by comparison, especially something like Fire/Fire and ESPECIALLY what Blasters can do with a decent Epic. It's barely useful when solo, it's utterly useless when on a team, and it's a pain in the *** to use.

City of Heroes seems to have originally been balanced like older, more classic MMOs like EQ and AO, in the sense that you're not just balanced in what you can do in a fight, but also in how you can recover from it. A lot of older MMOs didn't give you many (if any) tools to recover from injury and fatigue, which meant you either have to have a healer to heal you between battles, or otherwise use up expensive consumables. Back in 2004, Rest had a 10-minute timer, and people still claimed it was far better than in most contemporary games where if you got hurt and had no-one to heal you, you had to go back to town or wait for hours and hours. I imagine it was, but better than very bad still isn't exactly good.

It is for this very reason that I agree with you entirely. I'd go one further, actually, and postulate that you can have a game that's both good and challenging without it having to rely on cheap time sinks and awkward mechanics. Hell, most sets in our game that aren't Traps or Devices already prove that.

This is a nice parallel for my own Steel Rook, essentially the second character I ever made. I was leery of making a Blaster at the time since the paper manual didn't really sell them very strong, but a friend of mine wanted me to make a character "like the Brotherhood of Steel from Fallout," and that meant Assault Rifle, which meant Blaster. It took me something like 5 years of getting that guy to 50 through grit teeth, doing everything far slower and with much more difficulty than my namesake - Samuel Tow the Kat/SR Scrapper - ever had to, but I got him there.

I soloed most of the way to 50, so I'd gotten a good habit out of using Trip Mine at my own feet in case someone approached me and Time Bomb to toe bomb spawns, Taser and Beanbag and Cryo Freeze Ray to stop meaner foes and so forth. But every time I set foot on a team, I was essentially without a secondary, and every time I stepped off a team, I was back to very, very slow mode. Eventually, I got sick and tired of fighting everything in tiny baby steps, so I rerolled the Steel Rook as the Bots/Traps Mastermind who prompted me to create this thread.

Traps IS better than Devices in almost every way, because while it's just as good at setting up traps (better, actually), it's also not that bad on a team. Sure, Trip Mine rarely gets used and a lot of the gadgets don't get full use out of them, but I can at least USE them in the first place. And, being a Mastermind, I don't have the insult that is Time Bomb. I have Detonator, instead, which is like Time Bomb only it detonates instantly and I can pick where it detonates by move-ordering a henchmen to that location. In essence, Detonator is like Time Bomb, only ten times better. Sure, I waste a henchman but I can always call another one down. Sure, the Assault Bot is an expensive henchman to lose if I want maximum damage out of detonator, but you know what? It's worth it. For the utility of that power, it is so damn worth it!

To my eyes, Triage Beacon is kind of a halfassed power. It's ugly as sin on a graphical level and very unimpressive on a functional level. It's just a tetrahedron with a low-res texture which broadcasts an EXTREMELY low-res, very uninspiring effect. As ugly powers go, it's the ugliest. Making it fly by making it into a double pyramid and possibly giving it a better texture and effect would be great. It would improve the power's utility by a LOT and it would also also make it look prettier.

Personally, I have a big problem with immobile summons that have continuous effects. If the thing is going to last for 90 seconds and have some kind of profound effect, then it really should follow me around, because if it doesn't, I'll just fight one fight over it and walk past it. Yes, I'm aware that it's good for Elite Boss fights, but you know what? With how broken the AI is, Elite Bosses take off running like idiots and run away from anything you've placed the moment they so much as sniff your Poison Gas Trap, so that Triage Beacon? Useless. Completely. It's only useful if you can fight over it, and when fighting an enemy whose movements you can't control and who regenerates back to full if you don't follow him when he runs, you can't fight over it.

And let's not even bring up the Devouring Earth here. Yes, their eminators are stationary, but they can relocate them an infinite number of times every time you run away from them. If a Guardian drops a Quartz and you hide around a corner so the DE creatures have to run away from it and to you, the Guardian will just run up to you and move the Quartz at your feet. If I could do the same with the Triage Beacon, I could live with it being immobile, but I can't. It's stuck where it is.

This is the big issue for me, as well. The reason these powers were designed in this way is you were expected to set them up around a corner and pull enemies into them, not use them offensively like people are now. I get yelled at for "Ya havsta praise people for their opinion!" on these things, but the fact of the matter is most of the praise Trip Mine gets is NOT for being used like it was intended. People have simply found a way to use Trip Mine offensively and thus break its original design, and THAT is what makes it so popular. If the only way to use Trip Mine were to lay a field and pull people over it, it would be very unpopular. Sure, some would still like it - there are people who enjoy setting up minefields. But it would still be just another Time Bomb to most.

This is the "out of combat" concept I spoke about in the original post. These powers are conceptualised to be used as traps prepared in advance of the fight that you pull enemies over. The sad reality is that pulling enemies has always been, and will always be, slow, cumbersome and inefficient, the tactic people only use as a last resort. To have that as your first resort written into the design of powers just consigns you to playing very slowly, levelling up very slowly and being left behind on teams. And I've seen this first hand. I WAS a Devices Blaster and I'm a Traps Mastermind now.

I don't mind powers that have an out-of-combat application. In fact, I wouldn't dream of changing Trip Mine or Poison Gas Trap in such a way as to hamper people's ability to set up mine fields with them. I suggested a "sticky grenade" redesign for Trip Mine precisely because that way people could still toss down a field of Sticky Grenades just waiting for someone to walk over them and still make a mine field, but people could also toss them at range and into fights in progress. I want the ability to set up minefields, but I want the ability to do more with the powers than just that.

It's such a shame, too. And here I made such a compelling case for why Trials should be removed from the game while I laugh and laugh at all the people who liked them and... Wait, when DID I do that? I forget. Oh, I'm sure it's somewhere in my post. I'm sure you just neglected to quote it, but you totally can if you wanted to.

I do solo every one of my characters to 50, as a point of fact. And yes, I'm aware that everything in the game that is not solo takes time to form. That's the primary reason I don't do it. Were you also aware that hitting your thumb with the blunt end of a claw hammer hurts? No, I'm serious. Try it if you don't believe me. Actually, no, don't try it, because I have good news: You don't have to! Ain't it great?

Well, except for those times when you do, when you have to hit your thumb with a hammer really, really hard at least 150 times before you're allowed to have your new stuff. You don't have to do it all in the same day, though. In fact, I don't recommend it.

Yeah, imagine that - I don't want to put up with a hassle. Chastising me for it would be very relevant if my complaint were that I want to run Trials but I can't, whereas my actual argument is that I want Incarnate powers but don't want to run Trials on pain of death. No, I won't get on Trials if I'm not willing to wait or put one together. Be still my beating heart. How will I ever live now that I can't run forced teaming content. Erm... Quite happily, come to think about it. I don't have to deal with a hassle and I don't have to leave the game with a headache. Yes, I'm missing out on so, so much.

So what you're saying is I want to run team content but can't? Wow, I did not know I wanted this, but thank you for... Wait a minute! I DON'T want to run team content at all. I never have. What I want is to NOT HAVE TO run team content in order to make progress. See all those TFs you chastise me for not being able to run? I don't want 'em. Any of 'em, really. I'm perfectly happy just soloing my way to 50.

See those clusterhug Raids you chastise me for not being able to run? I don't want them, either. I'd be perfectly happy to solo my way into Incarnate progression, but err... I can't. Because I can't make progress in that system worth a crap without 12 other people. I don't WANT to run Trials. I don't want to be able to run Trials, because I don't want to run them. I don't care if I were able to run Trials because I wouldn't run them. I don't want to run Trials, I want an alternative, and that doesn't exist. And I'm not sure Dark Astoria will be it.

No four people is my ideal. That's four people, including me. And that's not my ideal, that's my realistic compromise. Three people, including me, is my ideal. How many Task Forces ever get run? Well, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but if I had to guess, I'd say I don't give a crap. I don't run them but once every month or so, and if TFs disappeared from the game entirely, I honestly wouldn't be able to tell.

Leaving the room and meeting people in person... Now why didn't I think of this before! Right, now to charter a flight from Europe to North America so I can meet Nuclear Toast for lunch... Oh, I don't have to, he's coming to Europe on vacation some time soon. OK, but I can still fly to the US to meet the Vulpish One for dinner and... Eh, screw it. I can't afford the air fare ticket anyway. It's much easier to log into City of Heroes and chat with those guys and team with those guys. Because, you know, that's kind of one of the perks of the Internet - that you can have friends all over the world without them having to live in close proximity to you. But sure, let's go and abandon one of the major selling points of an MMO and rename it MMA - Massively Multiplayer Anti-social.

What's really funny is I keep being told I'm anti-social for not wanting to team with 20 strangers I've never met before and for not wanting to befriend and bed every player I met... And then I'm being told if I want to be social, I shouldn't be teaming with 20 people I've never met and trying to befriend them. It's so hard to take irate posters seriously some times, but that just makes it all the more funny.

To actually offer MY opinion..I think Trials with 8 or less will be a bad thing, seeing the death of the big leagues. And some people actually ENJOY these. If you can get the same rewards for doing an 8 man incarnate trial, as a 24, who is gonna bother forming the 24? And Leagues. 4 quite different and varied options. Giving us 8 man trials will damage leagues and be too similar to single team TFs.[/QUOTE]

You are now talking about the wait times. I just wanted to point that out. Because if people see 24-man raids as intrinsically inferior to 8-man raids, then clearly there can't be that many who actually enjoy 24-man ones over 8-man ones. Of course, that's a pretty rotten thing of me to say, even though it's probably the truth, but after you having spent a whole post doing your best demonise me, I felt it's only fair that I return the favour. I mean, you worked so hard on putting together your straw man of me - and it is a very pretty straw man - that I just couldn't walk away and let all your effort go to waste. I mean, if I don't resemble that straw man, then you would end up looking like a right fool, so I might as well go ahead and make a fool of myself for your benefit.

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Ah, I had almost forgotten what it's like to have a malicious poster go off on you and try to burn you to pieces. In a way, ignoring several people here on the forums has robbed me of that kind of adventure. I'm almost reconsidering that decision. ALMOST!

I actually don't have a problem with concluding a story with great finality. You obviously need an "out" to explain why you can still visit old locations and still fight old enemies in the streets who say old things, but you can usually just say "Well, change takes time. You've won, now sit back and wait for the consequences of your actions."

But wrapping up a plot line doesn't mean you have to exhaust every shred of backstory it had to its name. What makes a world feel living and organic is the sense that there will always be more story to it than you can ever realistically explore, that there's a whole world of adventure out there that you're just seeing the small part that's immediately around you. And that's a problem with Praetoria - it has only ever as much fiction behind it as is expressly necessary to drive the plot and not a smidgen more. And I don't like that.

Take the bum in the sewers who talks about "A land called America," for instance. Nothing ever comes of this, and it's never mentioned again. Even War Dog, who is positively psychopathic with his love of history, doesn't actually get into said history to explore the old America before the coming of Cole. All I know about it is the world went to hell and all the governments capitulated to one guy who could save them. The end. You'd think there'd be more people left who remember the past. You'd think old politics, factions and ideologies could play a part. Nope. Everything from the old days is rolled into one monolithic concept or another.

The Tsoo, the Family and all the other organised crime are just rolled up into the Syndicate seamlessly and uniformly. You get a gang war between the various Syndicate factions - Octavian vs. Wu Yin and so forth - but none of them trace back to any ancestry or legacy conflicts. It's just the old guard vs. the new guard. You'd think such a schism could occur along traditional fracture lines, like Tub Chi Tan and Wu Yin representing the more mystically-inclined, honour-drived Eastern crime syndicate legacy, with Octavian representing the pragmatic, greedy, utilitarian Western organised crime mob, but that's not how it is. The ideology is there, but the history isn't, because the Syndicate is just one monolithic entity. You don't HAVE different factions in it like you really should.

Or how about the Carnival of Light? I get that they're an amalgamy of all the old magical factions, like the old Carnival, the old Midnighters, the old Legacy Chain and suchforth. OK, that's not a bad idea, and unlike the Syndicate, they actually do depict different lineages of Carnival Troops. But why, then, does the Schism occur between white masks and black masks, where both Light and War field a cross-section of all available troops? You'd think the schism would have fractured the group along faction lines, such as the former Midnighters feeling betrayed when the player becomes allied with Master Midnight and breaking away from the Carnival of Light to form the Carnival of War, while the former Carnival mistresses remain loyal to Vanessa, and the former Legacy Chain warriors are torn apart in the schism, leaving them fighting on both sides. You'd think, and it would have taken less artwork to depict even, but that wasn't acted upon.

What I'm saying is that Praetoria could have used a lot more plot and history, even if much of it was never actually really used, just mentioned and explained. What I'm saying is that what happens in Praetoria should have been based on the socio-political environment and ingrained history of the world, rather than based on the whims of the narrative. The whole point of writing a persistent world is so you can then draw from it to form stories which feel organic and also limit yourself to it, such that stories have some sense of levity in that they obey rules, rather than "whatever I can come up with on the spot."

The big problem that I see is just how much short gameplay and frugal marketing have usurped storytelling in this game. There was a time when a story arc was expected to stretch to 10, 15, even 20 missions, doling out storyline piece by piece, with time and opportunity to develop leads, establish characters, foreshadow future events and generally with enough elbow room to tell a story. These days, a story arc is lucky if it gets three missions, and even more lucky if all three are real missions, as opposed to one being a gimmick "go in, speak with one guy, go out" deal. A Task Force has to be as short as possible - an hour at best - and a Trial has to be even shorter than this. Everything's faster, everything's smaller, everything's much more fragmented and there just isn't enough room for a story to be told.

I'm more than convinced it's nigh-on impossible to tell a good story in just three missions. There simply isn't enough room for it, especially when you have to contend with the overhead of having actual gameplay in the arc. And if you DO try to tell a story in few missions, you end up with Twinshot, which has so much narrative, character development and exposition that all gameplay is butted off the arc and you're left with what amounts to an interactive book. Or, like... A Bishujo game, but without the pretty girls.

I don't have a problem with City of Heroes gameplay being rushed. It's just a fast-paced game for an MMO. But I DO have a problem with the story being rushed along with it, especially solo-doable story arcs. There's no need for a story arc I can break down between multiple days to rush to tell me a story like I'll run out of attention span any minute now. Make it long. Make it 20 missions. Make it meandering and complex if you have to. I'm not going anywhere, because I'm here for the long haul. I'd rather see one long good story than ten small crappy ones.

I don't know if it's time, money or what it is, but ever since CoV, story arcs have shrunk down significantly, and in so doing they lost their ability to truly explore their own ideas and truly develop their own settings. And that's a cryin' shame.

Man, the artwork in that comic book is bizarre. Why does the Dark Watcher have a Sergeant Slaughter chin? Why is Naked Positron so big and muscular and resembling a skin-draped Bastion? Why is Levantera's hair incapable of being on both sides of her head in the same panel? That the hell is wrong with Lady Grey's face?

You do have a point, though. A lot of the game's stories try to do the "skip the first act" approach to storytelling, where we skip all the build-up and character development and hop right into the action. And while there is no real problem in using this approach on face value, you still have to put in backstory and character development SOMEWHERE, and the more recent storylines simply don't. The SSAs are actually TERRIBLE at this. While playing through SSA3 and seeing Alexis die, I felt almost compelled to do Spoony's "Who the hell is Serge!?!" because we've not established Alexis, we've not developed Alexis, we've only just barely introduced her. We need someone to kill who's important. Hmm... Oh, there was this woman who's important, do you remember her? No? Well, she's important. Just trust me, she is. So this woman, she dies. Are you sad yet?

You'd think with a series of these arcs, they'd be able to weave a consistent, large-story narrative, but no. Each SSA is its own out-of-context sound bite. And that's just not a good way to tell stories. And it's a cryin' shame, because it doesn't have to be this way. The point of having a large persistent world is so that you can draw from it without having to establish, develop and explain characters IN your own story. If you've built your world well enough, you can simply draw on it, because these characters and events have been established, developed and explained in the world already, and you can just use them.

Nemesis gear shows up, but the player has no idea who or what that is. "Nemesis. THE Nemesis. The villain who almost took over the US with poison gas in the 80s. Man, it's a good thing the Freedom Phalanx managed to stop him, but it was a close call!" That's all the introduction the Nemesis gets when he's used for the first time, and it's all the introduction he needs because he is an integral part of the city's history, and when it comes time to face his troops directly, he is explored in more detail then, but that's all the way in the next level range. That's why a persistent, pre-planned world is a good thing. That's how it helps. It introduces your players to the characters you want to use so they don't end up asking "Who is this and why should I care?"