Samuel_Tow

I didn't actually see the Ustream. I'm going off what VK quoted. My apologies to both of you if I misunderstood.

I really don't think the quote was ambiguous. "...meant to make you just want to murder Mother Mayhem..." Is pretty clear and "...meant to be a cliffhanger..." suggests the effect was intended. I don't think think the writers write stories with the intent of making me hate them as people. I would assume such an effect is entirely unintentional and more due to my surly nature and hatred of cliffhangers. I fully believe the intent was for me to hate the villains, not the people who wrote the story, as ended up happening when I played through it.

That's odd. It had almost the exact same effect on me, only I wanted to murder whoever wrote the story and decided to leave it on a cliffhanger for another six ******* months, if not more.

That aside, that's actually all good news. It hints at some interesting lore developments, it demonstrates the team's interest in lore (at least lore since they were hired...) and it feels like there's more stuff out there that we haven't seen that I kind of wish we could. More done with Weaver One would be pretty interesting. More done with Crey would be even better. These guys are supposed to be a shady evil corporation with amazing PR. It's been a while since they've been that.

Pity about Hero Corps, though. "Heroes for hire" or not, it's an interesting idea, at least. I'd say it's worth expanding on it, but...

Clumsy though it may be, I'm willing to give them that. Comic books do clusterhug crossover events where everybody dies a lot, and this game being inspired by comic books, it was a matter of time before this particular bad story entered into it. I personally hate it, but I know it's popular so, hey - let the game have that. Sure, it could have accounted for solo players with only a slight re-write, but then Praetorian Earth has been so knee-capped of late I'm willing to give them that. Praetoria is "crossover content." Fine.

I'm more interested to see whether the "solo Incarnate path" will be an actual acknowledgement of the solo playstyle or a publicity stunt with people still "expected" to run raids. In other words, does the studio have the balls to give people a choice and let raids stand on their own merits, or will they still make them mandatory for decent progress? We'll see, but I'm not hopeful. Not given the system's history.

I still hope to be wrong, though.

Personally, I'm against pointless shock deaths in general. I'm not motivated to care when I see people who haven't been established get killed, I'm motivated to feel the author couldn't think of a better way to make his story darker. Let's kick a puppy, that always works. Movies like 2012 are especially bad about this. At least in Independence Day, we had people we cared about to build suspense. But 2012 just destroys cities for the sake of seeing cities be destroyed and people getting killed. It's collateral damage for the sake of collateral damage.

Basically, grabbing a supporting character and killing her in a demeaning fashion is just cheap writing. It demeans the character even though she could have been interesting to get to know, and all it achieves is a cheap grab for attention in a story that could have been written to give the same motivation in a more interesting way.

These are stories people are getting charged for. These are stories I'm supposed to see as a perk of my subscription. I want to see them actually written well, not just lavished with pretty custom maps and gimmick mechanics. Having the gall to kill a named character is not an example of good writing. It is a crutch. And it's a particularly mean-spirited crutch.

"Who will die, among the people we actually care about?" is a terrible angle to sell a story on. Just having a character death as a selling point is exploitative enough. This just pushes it over the edge.

Alexis isn't the one the tag line is referring to. That's what rubs many people the wrong way. "Who will die?" Well, Alexis just did. "Oh, um... She didn't matter. I mean who will die that's actually important and we care about him?" But Alexis just died! "Yeah, and a lot more people are going to die in the coming stories. They're not important. We're going to kill a SIGNATURE character. That's what matters. Everyone else is just meat."

One of the reasons people are upset at her death is because the "Who will die?" slogan doesn't apply to her. She got killed for no reason other than to set up the scene for the famous people to die in. That's just using her and tossing her in the trash if ever I've seen it.

Here's a hint - next time you tout an arc's selling point as someone dying, make sure you don't kill other people, because then we have to explain why they weren't important enough to count.

I couldn't really see it, but the way you're describing it sounds pretty cool. That's more or less how I would have imagined a "mega ground punch" power anyway. Sure, I guess we could do a jump to Macho Man Elbow Drop and have that be the strike against the ground which causes the shockwave, but that's kind of my point - this power works with pretty much any ground-attacking animation that's at least somewhat forceful. Stomp, punch, double axe handle, Hulk Hogan leg drop, it works with all of these.

In fact, if we DO get a "ground punch" Judgement power, I'd want it to be customizable with all of those animations. Even if it has its own brand new one, I still want to be able to customize it to use Foot Stomp, Ground Punch and Tremor

Like I said - faith in an author has burned me in the past. I watched Naruto for four, five years maybe, waded through 300-something episodes, all hoping that women in the show would stop being worthless and useless, but nope. It's only getting worse. I'm not making that mistake again. I'm not putting up with a story that's tanking in the vein hope that it will get better. It never does.

But, no, I don't worry about this happening to men because... It generally doesn't. Sure, it might, occasionally, in the same sense that I might get struck by lighting within the next five minutes. I mean, I'm using a computer that's hooked up to the power grid. It could happen. But it probably won't.

Not so with female protagonists. EVERY time I see a game or story build up a female character as capable, popular or likeable, I always fear it's so destroying her very soon thereafter will be that much more "shocking." And you know what? I'm almost always right. When a story shows me a competent man, it's usually so I can be impressed by his competence. When a story shows me a competent woman, it's usually so she can fail and suffer for it down the line. That's been my experience, at least. Hell, I applaud stories that don't do this, but those are somewhat rare. For instance, much as it's stupid, Heavy Metal 2000 at least avoided humiliating its female protagonist. She may be a male fantasy fanservice character, but at least she doesn't get put on a fridge and she gets to kick *** right into the credits. That counts for a lot.

And I'm really not against killing characters per se, not even female ones. In fact, one of the most powerful scenes I've seen comes from an otherwise HORRIBLE anime called Divergence Eve, where a female character previously established to be likeable, pretty and nice gets quite literally eaten alive (in surprisingly un-graphic but very disturbing fashion). This is scene, however, added to the story because that story earned it, and because it built toward the finale, and because it was handled well. Sure, the rest of the series sucked ***, but that one moment is what made it memorable to me. Because it was done right. And you'll actually probably see that in every music video compilation of that series (blood dripping over an open eye, a hand smearing blood over a happy photo) because it's pretty much the strongest that ****** show ever got.

However, that's an exception to the rule. When I start seeing strong, confident, competent female characters starring in their own stories, not overshadowed by men and not built up only to be brought down in a horrible fashion and when I start seeing this in any meaningful number, THEN I might stop being so weary. For now, I stick with experience.

Yeah, and that's pretty much where I stopped reading. That art style and that plot pretty much killed whatever interest I had with the comic. Even naked super Benjamin Franklin couldn't do enough to make me see past that damn depressing issue. That's one more site scratched off my bookmarks.

Sadly, I simply haven't seen or read enough about these villains to know. I appreciate the articles on them, but reading about a villain on an encyclopaedia isn't really the same as actually experiencing a story about said villain.

What I've seen of the Joker (from Arkham Asylum) wasn't very respectful, to be honest. He has his moments, but he spends so much time being goofy it acts against his menace and just ends up making him silly. I get that that's the point, but it doesn't work for me.

Mystique I've only seen from the 90s X-Men Cartoons, and I found her to be an interesting villain until they started exploring the "rogue's mother" angle, whereupon she became winy and never recovered. So did Rogue, for that matter. The only Fox cartoon that did drama well was Spider-Man, and even that had its fumbles. Most of what sunk Mystique for me, though, is she never did anything. She messed with people to little effect, occasionally pulled out a completely ineffectual gun and got slapped around a lot. And was mostly a henchman... Henchwoman, whatever.

Boba Fett is... A fad. I don't get what people see in him. He had like a 10-second scene in... What was it, Empire Strikes back? Return of the Jedi? He had almost no screen time, I don't think he said anything and someone decapitated him. Or do I remember wrong? I know he became an inexplicable "expanded universe" favourite, but I've never had any interest in the Star Wars expanded universe, so making all the clones be clones of him was just... A "huh?" moment. Not awesome, not terrible, just "Oh, OK. So that's who these guys are. I guess." I don't remember him doing anything awesome or being awesome. He had a jet pack, but that's about it. Well, and a helmet that the Silencer from Crusader ripped off, and ironically, Crusader: No Regret's Silencer is a much more respectable character, I'd say

Frankenstein's Monster really depends on the interpretation. The original monster really doesn't impress me, mostly because the original book and movie are more a cautionary tale against the evils of science than a proper "good vs. evil" story, hence I'm not sure if the monster counts as a villain or if Dr. Frankenstein himself does. He's shown up around fiction since, and ironically enough I think the one I like the most has been Frankenstein's monster from Hellsing, the live action movie. There, the monster manages to be played as a tragic but still heroic figure, probably the only truly good person in that whole damn movie, and he does get to swing on a wire across a crumbling stone bridge so that's something Sadly, the monster is less a character and more a McGuffin on legs in that movie, but when it does get to do anything, I can respect the idea, at least.

The rest I simply don't know enough about to comment.

Yes, they can. Ancillaries, added to the game as far back as I2, did it perfectly, and I'm amazed how the development team has refused to repeat that success a single time since. Every new pool has been tied to "something" in the storyline. Well, here's the thing - I didn't pick an Epic AT because I wasn't interested in being part of the ongoing storyline. I picked a generic AT and I'm looking for more like my Ancillary power pool.

More to point, you're ignoring what I actually said: "You can't really explain around Incarnate powers other than simply rejecting the written fiction." What you're doing is simply rejecting written fiction. The fiction tells you that the Well of the Furies grants you the ability to summon the essence of a Praetorian, but you interject and say "No, narrator, you're wrong. I reject your reality and substitute my own. I summon my own power because I've fought them so much. It's not the well at all."

The problem with rejecting fiction is then there simply are no rules and I can claim anything I want. I can claim that this is all a dream and the Statesman is actually a woman. I can claim this is a post-apocalyptic Earth and everyone just forgot. I can claim that my character could finger-flick the planet out of existence, but he, uh... Just doesn't want to... Right now. Maybe later. I can "pretend" any damn thing I want, but by rejecting established canon and substituting my whims, I make established canon meaningless not just in that instance, but I make it meaningless as a general thing.

I'm not a fan of being railroaded by existing storylines, but simply dismissing existing storylines out of hand is even worse.

Ignoring the fact that you need to buy the pistol(s) with currency earnable only from the Trials, yes, that's precisely what I'm saying. I have precisely ZERO need of this gun on any character that got to 50 before it was introduced. Aside from being a signature piece that I might value if I valued Maelstrom (I don't), it's really not "better" than any of the existing pistols, so the only possible need I'll ever have for that thing is a level 1 character just starting out to whom I can self-mail the recipe.

This is in the same vein as the auras and costume change emotes that are gated behind the Incarnate system but aren't actually Incarnate powers. My use for them on my Incarnates is limited. I have no dual pistol ones, for instance, with my Thugs Mastermind being level 36 or thereabout last I checked.

You describe Maelstrom's pistols as an unlock with a recipe added for convenience, which is not how Matt Miller described it. He described it as a costume drop recipe with an unlock for convenience. As such, it should be judged the same as existing costume piece recipes, like the Jet Boots or the Fairy Wings, and on THAT scale, it simply doesn't compare.

However you spin it, the fact remains that Malestrom's pistols are a way to get more people to run Incarnate Trials for the gun who may not have wanted to run them for the Well of the Furies storyline or the powers. And that's precisely what I don't want costumes - even signature ones - to be used for.

Because we're very nice people, most likely. Also, because the wider the appeal of a commercial piece of entertainment, the more money it brings in. As a fan, I'm not ashamed to say that I want the businesses whose entertainment I enjoy to see great revenue and grow and prosper. And, yes, this includes Paragon Studios. I may be cross at some of their decisions, but I vote with my money and I do wish them much success in the future. My entertainment depends on it

That's actually something that bugs me as well. Big time. It bugged me (to a slightly lesser extent) when that was done for Patron powers, in that we had to kowtow to the Arachnos Patrons so that they'd grant us their powers, but you could explain around those, somewhat. You can't really explain around Incarnate powers other than simply rejecting the written fiction.

One of the things I REALLY hate about comic books is the concept of "depowering" people. Many comic book characters start out as ordinary humans who are given powers which aren't fully integrated with their bodies, such that these powers can be taken from them. Superman needs red sunlight to be super powerful, so he gets drained if he's without it, like in Superman at Earth's End, and Kryptonite out-and-out takes his powers away and then proceeds to kill him. Well, when he's not lifting islands made of the stuff into space. I really, REALLY hate characters who lose a fight because they lost their powers. It always feels like cheating, and not like the bad guys are cheating so much as like the writer is cheating.

That's why Incarnate powers bug me - they're not ours. The well owns them. Yeah, the point of the "slow path" is that we gain power without being controlled... If you believe Ramiel, but even then, who's to say the well can't just pull the plug while I'm aiming Giant Chin Judgement at Marauder? Is that even addressed anywhere? Either way, I don't like the concept of borrowed power. It makes the Statesman look like a chump and it makes me feel like the only reason I'm better than him is because he sucks. Say what you will about Jack Emmert's baby, but beating him because he's depowered just isn't as satisfying.

I wrote two - one hero and one villain. They have around 20 playthroughs each, though, so I haven't messed with them in a while. I hope they're not broken...

One is "The PDA That Knew" and it's my attempt to write a villain arc without a contact, depicting the villain making his own decisions, though how well that came off is in the eye of the beholder.

The other is "The Greater Evil" and it's my attempt to write a heroic arc that's both exciting and still a mystery out of the existing City of Heroes canon.

I believe both of them are levels 45-50, but I'm not sure what their ArcIDs are, as I don't have the game running at the moment. I did fix them both after the Architect censors filter broke, but I can't say if other bugs haven't been introduced. If you want to give them a shot, feel free

Of course we can't deny such existence. That would be foolish. But it strikes me as avoiding the subject to just say "Well, men and women are different and like different things and that's that." which is what I see in a lot of these discussions. I've never enjoyed just stating that "women like X, men like Y" without actually stopping to think which parts they like and why they like them. This is obviously different for different people, but treating it as a black box only makes the problem worse.

Obviously, I'm not a genius. Obviously, I can't know why people feel the way they feel. But what I really want to emphasise here is that people would benefit if they questioned why they like the things they like. It's easy to say "Well, I like guy stuff because I'm a guy" without actually specifying what "guy stuff" is, which of those things you like and why you like them.

My point in bringing this up over and over again is to foster understanding. Even if we assume that, at some fundamental unchangeable level, men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Fine, let's roll with that. Even then, if we could pinpoint where that difference lay, we could still produce content that appealed more to everybody.

How this reflects on comic books is that if comic book writers actually took the time to figure out what part of their writing was alienating female readers (per chance that's a trend), then they may find it's a part that male readers aren't all that interested in anyway. Blindly dumping more women in comic books in the vein hope of garnering female readers is as silly as putting pink unicorns in them. It's just random stereotyping. But that's not to say there isn't a way for comic book writing to be cleaned up so that it still appeals to men as it always has, but appeals to women more, as well.

What "men" want and what "women" want are questions that cannot be answered, but as men and women, we can answer those at least for ourselves. And that's the point at the base of all this - if we care to answer these things, we might just end up helping produce more widely-appreciated entertainment.

I don't know. Darth Maul was never a complex villain, but at least what he did, he did well. His whole point was to look and act menacing and represent pretty much the only threat in that movie that the jedi couldn't just overpower or cheat past, and as such he's actually a very effective villain. I respect him for his foreboding feel and I like him because he didn't make an *** of himself at any point in the movie, unlike most other characters.

I think what works for Darth Maul is he never speaks. For one, that's very effective at building a threatening villain, especially as someone who you simply can't bargain with. For another, when a character doesn't speak, this eliminates SO MANY opportunities for said character to embarrass himself. I mean, how many people would have Jar Jar if he simply never spoke a word?

Well, I've never really claimed to be that deep of a person, so shallow reasons to respect bad guys work just as well I don't really mean "respect" in its most serious meaning, but I use the word "respect" over "like" because we're really not supposed to like villains, and I really don't enjoy villains I'm supposed to like as villains. We're supposed to dislike our villains clearly and decidedly, but have reasons to want to see them come back again and again even though we don't actually "like" them. Hence, respect.

A while before, someone mentioned a character punching a giant robot with his bare hands while his head was on fire. I can respect that. It may be shallow, but I can respect that. In fact, I want to see more of it That's really what it comes down to - these are bad, bad people, I don't like them and I want to see them lose... Yet I still want to see them survive to show up again later in the story. Because even though I dislike the character... There are still certain aspects about him that I want to see again. I don't like the villain, but I respect him as a good villain.

On the one hand, you're right. Names on a blackboard aren't respectable unless we know them. On the other hand, such backstory is highly susceptible to making a character much more embarrassing than if we hadn't known.

I'll reach for the easy example - is Darth Vader honestly a better villain now that we know he was a whiny emo kid before he donned his helmet and screamed the meme-tasting "NOOOOOOOO!!!"? Well... Not to me, no. Darth Vader of Episodes 4, 5 and 6 was a tragic, but still cool, threatening and respectable villain. Anakin Skywalker of Episodes 1, 2 and 3 is a brat that I just want to slap upside the head. Medichlorians?

More generally, the backstories of respectable villains need to be handles with great care so as not to make them whiny as kids and so as not to ruin their threat. After all, that villain with the doomsday device suddenly seems a lot harder to take seriously when you learn he used to wet the bed, right? If we're going to be exploring these people's backstories, then they need to be handled in those with even more respect than in their present stories.

Overall, when I learn of a persistent villain's past, I want to leave amazed and afraid that if that's what he was in the past, then the present can only get worse and he's clearly holding back now. Or at least something to that effect, anyway.

Does anyone actually have a video of that? I've never seen it.

That's actually a pretty interesting approach. There's a preconception in Western cultures that men are supposed to be masculine and women feminine, and those who explore the side they supposed to reject are seen as weird. Divorcing concepts of taste from that kind of loaded terminology is actually not a bad idea. In fact, if I had to go ahead and use my own terms, I'd use the "physical" vs. the "psychological."

Guns, explosions, fast cars, sexy people - those are all primarily physical, even if they have the potential to be more. By contrast, drama, romance, mystery, discovery - those are all primarily psychological. Once you see things in this manner, it's actually very quickly apparent that both the physical and the psychological are almost always intermixed, just to different degrees. A movie about overmuscled men and fighting can still focus on drama and self-discovery, as with the movie "The Wrestler," whereas a movie about mystery, spirituality and philosophy can still have a heavy physical focus, such as the Matrix.

In the end, I firmly believe that most people would benefit by embracing both concepts, even if not to equal degrees.

That may well be, but I'd be interested to know WHY that is. What I refuse to accept is that women, by virtue of biology and nothing else, are inherently more drawn to these novels than men are. I'm not contesting that they are. I'm sure you know what you're talking about. What I'm contesting is whether this is inherent in "being a woman" more so than an instance of upbringing, culture, peer pressure and so on. In essence, is it something hardcoded in women by rule of birth, or is it something that can be chosen.

Frankly - and I apologise for saying this again - the way you describe the tastes of women (and by biological extension, of all people) scares me a little bit. You postulate that these novels are popular among women, but were I born a woman, would I like it? Obviously, I have a choice to deny my biology, but would I be facing the biological compulsion to find this kind of novel compelling to begin with? How much of that can be changed, and how much of that is "written" for us, is my choice? Because when people suggest what men or women or children or people of a specific descent want, it makes me feel that this suggest, if by unintentional implication, that people's choices are not their own.

The reason I make such a fuss about this is that I prefer to see people, their mentalities and their personalities as largely independent of what they were born as. In essence, I prefer to see the mind as independent of the body, even if that's not entirely true in terms of physiology. So when you suggest that these novels are more popular with women than they are with men, I am compelled to ask what it is that's common among all women of all cultures, all races, all descents and all upbringings that makes "women" more likely to appreciate them than men?

When anyone describes what men like or what women like, it makes me feel like men in general and women in general are being robbed of their personal choice and lumped into a common whole, forced to be exceptions if they don't conform to the statistical expectation. Having lived my life pretty much entirely as the exception, this is actually concerning to me as a basic concept.

And again - I'm not accusing you of sexism, unfairness or anything of the sort. I'm trying to discuss a concept that I'm hoping we can discuss without turning it into personal attacks. That's not my intention. What I say is just my perspective, not an accusation.

This is a problem, though. It may be a problem for just me and a few other people, but above all else in a story, I want closure. Not just an "end," but specifically closure. I want to know that the story's plot was worth retelling, I want to know that something was achieved, and I want to know that all the nasty stuff was worth it in the end. A good story does have pain and unpleasantness, I won't deny that, but it should balance those against sufficient closure to make it all worthwhile.

I don't really mind leaving open plot hooks in ongoing stories. Far from it. However, I do want the plot to end with a sense of closure before it's shelved. I don't want it to just sort of stop in the middle of a sentence when the writer leaves and the new writer doesn't feel like finishing the same story. In fact, this is something many amateur writers fall victim to as they start out - they begin many stories, excited about the possibilities, but realise how long it will take to finish them, get distracted by new inspiration, start working on new stories and the old one just stop. Sadly, half of a good story is no story at all, and that's a problem.

I don't really mean "weakened" in the literal sense, like how Hequat is weakened when we fight her, hence why we can take on a god. I mean more... Disrespected, so to speak. For instance, one of the big things many of us wanted to do way back in the Jack Emmert era was become at least about equal to the Statesman, way back when the only place he showed up in-game was in Tyrant's cave, where he spawned as a level 54 Archvillain. Yes, that's what he was classed as. Many of us asked to be as awesome as he was one day. Lo and behold, I19 rolls around and we are suddenly as awesome as the Statesman... Because he's revealed to be a sad, tragic hero wrought with weakness whose power is not his own and whose will is barely even there. The Statesman had to be brought to his knees as a way for us to measure up to him, and that doesn't make this feel more like an accomplishment as it makes it feel like the game just lowered the bar all of a sudden.

Remember how people asked for Circle of Thorns costumes, but in order to give them to us, the art team essentially changed their costumes to something completely different? That's sort of what I mean.

Speaking of matching up against respected characters, Time After Time does it so much better. Our villains travel to the future and take on Lord Recluse at the time of his ultimate triumph, at the peak of his powers and with legions of soldiers by his side. We defy the will of Arachnos, we break Recluse's scheme, we strike out on our own, and even Recluse himself eventually has to admit that we are not to be messed with. The trick is that the villain is put over very strong, we are just put over even stronger. That, to me, is respect. Even though he loses, even though he ends up failing completely, I can still respect Recluse for how close he got, and defeating a villain I can respect is just that much sweeter.