Samuel_Tow

Wait, when did I say that? All I said is I feel comic books can appeal to men AND women at the same time.

I'm not accusing you of sexism at all. I'm just saying that to speak about what appeals to "women" and what doesn't appeal to "women" requires one to assert that there is a set of tastes that all or at least most women share. The problem is I disagree with the idea of things which appeal to men vs. things that appeal to men, seeing it as a false dichotomy. As I said before, the "noise" among the tastes of both men and women is, I'd wager, far greater than the difference between the two sets of tastes.

If we're going to speak about tastes as though we have statistics, it would be better to separate people into more consistent subsections, such as background, age group or even specific fandom. If, for instance, you tell me that Twighlight fans are not going to appreciate WH40K Space Marine, or that Meg Ryan fans might not be fans of Cryss Abyss, then I could potentially agree with you. After all, people's tastes do often have their internal logic, at least to some degree, so it's possibly to guess at some tastes knowing others.

But to assert that there is any one thing which "appeals to women" and any one thing that "doesn't appeal to women" - and I'm talking about things that aren't universally appealing to people of any gender (like happiness) vs. things that are universally reviled by people of any gender (like torture) - just seems wrong to me. And I'm not crying sexism here. If anything, I'd call it harmless generalisation. On the whole, I'd honestly like to move away from trying to guess "what women want," as that one movie put it, simply because I don't think there IS any one thing that women want. It's a question what each woman - and each person in general - wants specifically.

Personally, I reject the whole notion of things that appeal to men vs. things that appeal to women, largely because that's a vicious circle. Society teaches young boys and girls what they're supposed to like and what they're supposed to be ashamed of, then they exhibit those learned likes and dislikes, forming the generalisations we speak of, which then further encourages people to produce content for those generalisations and feeding the loop right back into society.

I only ever want to group people by the conscious decisions they make, not by the physical characteristics they share. I want it to be acceptable for men to like "girly" stuff and I want it to be seen as less of a spectacle when women like "guy" stuff. We managed to accept girl gamers as a concept, even though games were seen as "guy stuff" for the longest time, and we really didn't have to change games all that much to do it. Why is it so unbelievable that women might actually like comic books as a concept without having to change them, other than just shooting for better writing and artwork?

It just looks goofy to me. To be quite honest, while I like the Hulk, a lot of what he does looks goofy to me in general. I know he's supposed to be just that super strong, but I simply don't like his style.

Oh, example! The animation for Punch from Super Strength is one I honestly really just hate. Luckily, with Power Customization, we got a replacement, and I use that on every Super Strength character I have.

The animation matters, it just doesn't matter AS MUCH as the visual effect. Direct physical attacks where you punch or kick your enemy or swing weapons at him, those are instances where animations really make or break the power. For "indirect" attacks, however, this is less important. The fact of the matter is that in a ground punch, you're not actually punching your enemy, you're punching the ground and creating a shockwave effect. It is this effect which hurts your enemies, and it is this effect that really matters.

It's a lot like Blast powersets. As far as I'm concerned, all Blast powersets could share the exact same animations, either between sets or between their own powers, and I'll still see them as vastly different if they had power effects that were distinct and impressive enough.

Sure, if we can come up with a way to attack the ground with your limbs that's sufficiently different from the three we already have, then why not? I'd go for it. I'm just saying I don't see a need to reanimating animations we already have.

This is what I disagree with. I get that men and women don't have the exact same tastes, even though I'd attribute that to peer pressure more than anything else. But you speak as if anything women like is necessarily and entirely opposed to what men like and as though it's impossible to create a story which appeals to both men and women without gutting it. That's simply not true.

First of all, "women" are not a monolithic whole that shares the exact same tests and sensibilities like a race of shared consciousness aliens. At least, no more so than one can define what "men" like. I dare say the differences in preference from person to person is far greater than the differences in preference between ALL women and ALL men. A person's tastes are not shaped by the type of genitalia said person was born with, not solely and only, and not even primarily. A person's tastes are shaped by that person's personality and that person's life experiences.

In fact, this fear of comic books being "ruined" by making them more appealing to women because women don't read comic books and would want something completely different is a lot like the belief that women don't play video games and to make video games appeal to women, they'd have to be My Little Pony Online or Hello Kitty Online, because women obviously don't like "male games." Yet here we are, playing an online game that is pretty much all about punching other people in the face and earning points for it... And we have an enormous female presence. Clearly, both the men and women who play City of Heroes like some of the same things. Right?

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Actually... Let's go back to peer pressure. When I was younger, about the age when kids play with toys, I actually preferred to play with Barbie dolls over action figures, and for one simple reason - Barbie dolls were very high quality, very well articulated and very well engineered. Action figures, by contrast, were cheap plastic casts with shoddy painting and stiff, awkward joings. And they broke a lot. A Barbie doll at the time was simply a superior product with greater functionality. But a Barbie was a "girl's toy," so it was wrong of me to want one, and this was told to me by my friends, my parents and quite literally everybody. I didn't even like the "Barbie" aesthetic anyway, I just wanted a more mobile toy, but boys were expected to be dumb and play by slamming their toys together, whereas girls were expected to pose them, so I got garbage to play with. Feh!

Similarly, I got a few cool Lego sets when I was a kid, but nothing really big as those things were expensive and you don't spend huge money on toys where I come from. Your kids basically play with whatever's left from their older siblings. Well, over the last couple of years I realised that, being an adult, I no longer had to have Lego sets given to me as presents, so I went out and bought the ones I'd always wanted. So far, I've spent close to $300 on Lego sets. The last I acquired (as a present, no less ) is a smaller scale Millennium Falcon which cost $150 on its own.

Peer pressure would tell me this is stupid. I'm no longer a child, so why am I buying toys for myself? Why did I pay the equivalent of $50 to buy Nerf Maverick toy gun? Why did I pay $120 for Lego's Space Police III Galactic Enforcer? Why, indeed, have I sunk probably close to $1500 into City of Heroes over the last five years? To people who try to apply peer pressure on me, that's money out the window. I've had to argue with people and I've had to fight to justify my right to spend my money however I god damn please, paying for things other people find "silly."

All of this is to say that "girls" and "women" don't like any one single thing unless we buy into what peer pressure says they should like. You don't have to make a product "girly" in order for it to appeal to women and you very much CAN make a product which appeals to both men and women without disillusioning either side. Hell, W.I.T.C.H. is pretty much a girl's show entirely, but because it's actually GOOD and well-written, it's still one of my all-time favourites, certainly a lot more so than A.T.O.M., which seems to have been written for mindless boys and is just hollow on the inside.

I like to see that as a good thing. We're always pushing the writers to try new and interesting things and up their game instead of relying on storytelling clichés. Sometimes it works (Praetorian Earth), sometimes it doesn't (First Ward), but it's still a benefit to the game. Unwittingly, Cryptic Studios created a game which put players in direct competition with the game's actual developers, and that's one reason we've pushed the team so hard.

While I think they've done well for the most part, I still want to criticise them for avoiding actually interesting stories and characters in favour of gimmicks and funky mission design. When I said they need to treat their good characters with more respect, I meant it. Recently, the game's storytelling has made it a point to take a dump on all established signature characters, I suppose in an attempt to make player characters feel more important (and then taken a dump on those, too) so that it's really turned into a world of losers and wimps. Everyone is tragic, everyone is in danger of dying, everyone is flawed, and there's just no respect left for the characters the story really SHOULD respect. When there are no respectable villains to compete with and no respectable heroes to measure against but the overpowered god mode sues which we can't really match anyway, it's that much harder to care.

And I WANT to care. I WANT to care about the storyline, I WANT to care about the characters... I want to care about this game's fictional world, but it seems like the writing stuff themselves don't care. "Old stuff is old," so previous writers' characters are killed off or ignored in favour of a Neuron style of development, always introducing new characters and plot points and then killing them or forgetting them just as quickly. I want to care, but I don't get the impression that the writers want me to care, or that they care about their own creations, at all. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but it's becoming pretty obvious they don't RESPECT their own creations.

Honestly, I never liked the Hollows or the story it told. Even back in I2 when everyone and their grandma was hailing it as the new standard of quality for how stories and missions should be made, I still saw it as garbage writing. It's not really a "story," just a collection of unconnected events punctuated by a milestone when contacts get bored of wasting my time. Flux, for instance, gives me a bunch of meaningless missions, then goes "Oh, by the way, I know where Frostfire is!" and at the time he brings it up... I don't know who Frostfire is to begin with. "Oh, he's the leader of the Outcasts!" He is? Then how come he's barely level 10, but when I take him down and move onto Steel Canyon, I see outcasts with powers greater than his extending all the way to level 20? Who's their current leader? How can I "bust" the outcasts in the level range before they originally even existed?

Now, granted, I suspect the Hollows was intended to be something like a level 20-30 zone that got scaled down because of the "Kings Row bottleneck" as it was known as the time, so a lot of the critters were WAY too strong and a lot of stories feel like they should take place much later. Learning about Oranbega, busting the Outcasts and the Trolls and so forth. I get why things are as they are, but the zone has no real story or backstory to it. Characters are introduced only to disappear the next mission over, and the only consistent "storyline" is that of Sam Wincott through his diaries, which I can't even ******* see the ending of because I've never, ever, not once, not a single time run the Caverns of Transcendence.

I'd actually go as far as to ask where you're getting this much more interesting depiction of FrostFire from, because all I've ever been able to gather from the Hollows "storyline" has been "FrostFire is the leader of the Outcasts. Kill his ***!" Same with Atta, actually. Who is he? How did he become the Trolls' leader? Why is "Grendel's Gulch" relevant? What is his story? I didn't know the Trolls even HAD a leader until Talshak the Mystic told me he had divined where Atta was.

The Hollows, Striga and Croatoa are actually by FAR my least favourite zones for storyline content. Their "arcs" are disjointed, packed with filler and ultimately unfinished, because they all end on a TF, and of those the only one I've run is Ernesto Hess'. Characters exist in them, but the narrative fails to show them any respect or give them any characterisation. Even Hess himself I don't know much about. And who the devil is Maestro? All I know is I fought Emperor Ming the Merciless at the end of the Hess TF.

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I get that we as players enjoy a narrative which strokes our egos and paints us as better than our peers and stronger than our enemies. I get that. But we need good peers and strong enemies for this to matter. Moreover, it is us who should be made better and stronger, not our peers and enemies worse and weaker. If the game respects its own villains, then beating them is that much more satisfying.

Or they may run the risk of making them MORE appealing. Personally, I'd enjoy comic books, comic book movies and comic book cartoons more if they featured more strong, lead female characters without making me worry they'd get humiliated, murdered in a horrible fashion or "need a man." That's one reason why over half of my own City of Heroes characters are female - that's just more interesting to me.

More generally, I didn't really assume what you meant in your specific comment. I'm sure you meant well. There is, however, this tendency among the male fans of pretty much anything to put their "machismo" on the line for their fandom and then see women getting into it as a challenge. Most men also seem to have no real concept of what women actually want and like, defaulting to age-old unfair stereotypes, assuming for something to appeal to girls, it would have to feature pink unicorns, colourful rainbows and lots of cute guys. This is as much a mistake as assuming that for something to appeal to men, it must feature guns, monster trucks and breasts.

Arguing against change - any change in any way whatsoever - for the fear of it making things worse is counter-productive. There's a reason we don't play as many point-and-click adventures these days, there's a reason we have relatively fewer exploitation movies. Tastes change, genres evolve and new ideas are introduced. Obviously, not all of them are good, but being trapped in time as the world evolves around you is a tantamount to absolute doom.

Easy example - most "gamers" who reminisce about old games with fondness and nostalgia talk about the likes of Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog and even Gauntlet, from time to time. They harken back to the "good old days" of aimless side-scrollers and horrible shooters in the vein of Doom. Me, I'm a child of the 90s. Super Mario was more than old news by the time I could read and I only really played Gauntlet once when I was about 5 years old, and it was an old game even then. I grew up on the likes of Tomb Raider (2, not the original), the original Diablo. Before that, at the very earliest of my memories, lie games like Captain Comic, the oldest Prince of Persia and Test Drive 2. Those are the games I reminisce about and, quite frankly, I hold no interest for the accepted "classic" games. I've tried Contra and hated it, I've tried Super Mario and HAAAATED it, I've tried a lot of the old "classics" years after they were no longer relevant, and hated all of them.

I'm not a fan of comic books per se. I find them to be a bit sexist, a lot depressing and far too convoluted. I would never have so much as cared about their respective characters if it weren't for the 90s Fox Spider-Man and X-Men cartoons, or the Batman, Super Man JLA cartoons, and those are... Not exactly true to the comic books, put it like that.

Everything changes. Whether it's for the better or for the worst isn't always clear, but to insist that any genre should never change is, in my opinion, absurd. Comic books have already changed greatly from the golden age to the silver age to the dork age to these days. And frankly... The Golden Age was REALLY stupid, at least looking at it from where I'm sitting.

This kind of bothers me, to be honest. For some reason, whenever guys talk about what "appeals to girls," they always think about things they'd be ashamed to associated to, which in turn is really not what girls generally find appealing.

When Orange County Choppers decided to make a bike for a biker woman, Paul Jr. spent probably a day not knowing what to do, tossing around ideas like painting it pink, fabricating hearts on it and other nonsense like this. Now, he didn't do any of that - he was just stumped for ideas, but that's what guys think when they think about what appeals to girls. What they finally ended up making was a largely green and black bike with a scale pattern, sort of like a viper bike. After speaking with the woman for a while, they discovered she had a fascination with snakes. The end result was a bike that the lady really liked, and the guys were very impressed with, as well. They didn't have to produce a bike they hated or that wasn't a "chopper" in order for it to appeal to a woman.

The reason I say this is to insist that comic books very much CAN "appeal to girls" without appealing any less to guys. Comic books (and really, most media) don't need to become worse for one gender to be better for the other. They need to simply become BETTER in order to appeal to BOTH genders. Men and women are not different species of creatures. They can enjoy many of the same things, especially when those things are of a high quality.

Obviously, when comic books are sexist, women won't enjoy them. How could they? But then, I'm of the opinion that men should be so gung-ho about seeking sexist comic books, either. As far as I'm concerned, they don't have to change to appeal to both genders. They need to improve.

You can only attack the ground so many ways. You can stomp it or punch it, and only in a handful of ways. Double fist, single fist, single stomp, hop-and-stomp, none of this really matters, as neither is "better" than the other. What would define a "super ground punch" would be the visual effects, the sound and the camera shale, as well as the power stats, obviously. That's why Reichsman's Foot Stomp is so much better than what we get in Super Strength and why Romulus' Nictus Stomp, while not as good, is still better than ours.

To be honest, I'm really not interested in the Hulk's "squat-and-punch," and I'm not saying that to be a dick. I just don't like that stance as a visual. Whenever possible, I prefer to not have my characters squat. If they need to duck or lower their centre of gravity, I prefer this to be with a wider stance of the feet or by kneeling to one knee. In this sense, I would vastly prefer a single-fist ground punch because this allows the character's fist to reach the ground without needing to squat. It means the character can use a straight arm and shoulder rotation to gain reach without having to lower the torso, and it means the character's legs can stand far apart for the duration without looking goofy.

Sure, I'd appreciate something with a hop and a punch, kind of like Leaping Attack (but less sluggish) or like Whirling Hands, but really - there ain't much left for them to make that won't be just a repeat of existing animations. And much as I like new animations, making new ones that are a lot like the old ones seems like a waste.

*edit*
And, personally, I'd prefer an AoE. I prefer to think of punching the ground causing an explosion shockwave which hurts people, as opposed to somehow sending destruction forward through the ground in a way that defies my suspension of disbelief. The latter just makes it seem like it's the ground hurting people, rather than your punch.

I love those rooms, myself. City of Heroes instances have always lacked verticality to any great extent, mostly taking place on either flat terrain or at best a terraced terrain. Sheer drops, multiple stacking platforms and long bridges are always much appreciated. Interesting terrain is appreciated in general. Few things grow old faster than the level, flat ground and huge empty corridors of Praetorian labs.

I'm not saying such a change is necessary, merely pointing out that if it happened, I wouldn't complain.

My desire is to never see costumes gated ever at all, that much is true, and this is something I can't change any more than that I like salty foods. I do understand that signature pieces are treated differently, however. For years, the team has outright refused to enable those for players, so for them to enable these costumes at all, I can see them having to be gated in some way. I don't like costume gating, but I understand it for signature pieces.

Why I highly dislike in THIS case is that the costume piece has been turned into rare loot and transformed into a hook to get people to run raids. Whether or not costume gating is acceptable is sideways of HOW they get gated, and in this case, Maelstrom's Pistols are gated so as to encourage raid grind. Even when I accept costume gating a being logical, I still object to it being turned into loot and turned into a grind.

Objectively speaking, what reason is there to make this a rare drop instead of a guaranteed drop, at least for one person who doesn't have it, and what reason is there to make people have to earn it twice? What, more specifically, aside from serving as bait to goad people into rerunning the new raid over and over again? THAT is what I object against.

Gating signature pieces kind of goes with the territory. I don't like it, but I accept it. Turning them into a loot grind, on the other hand, I cannot accept.

Then you have somehow managed to ignore the dozens upon dozens of missions where you attack someone with those same powers, he slumps down and is then arrested, questioned and subsequently escapes to fight you again. Without even turning my brain on, I can name Moment doing this off the top of my head. Castillo, Nocturne and Sands do this multiple times.

Unless the narrative explicitly cites a kill, then it's not a kill. Not unless you want it to be.

Moreover, I like defeat all missions. I'm being perfectly honest here that if all missions in the game were made into defeat alls, I'd appreciate the change.

This flabbergasted me, as well. We already have all the animations in the game and striking the ground really really hard is a comic book classic. I could have sworn that would be next whenever we got more powers, but we turned out to get... Weird things, instead. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like weird things, but I'd prefer it if we covered our basics first.

A developer in a post somewhere explained this was designed for the "more natural" characters, but I honestly don't see it. I'd honestly have expected to see a "physical Judgement" power before anything else, and by "physical" I mean one that doesn't require the use of weird energies, teleportation or magic. A ground punch, a foot stomp, a Tremor clone and more would have been my first guess.

Really odd choice of powers there.

Chaos D1 does very fair reviews on his MMO Grinder and never goes into a game looking to hate it. In fact, other than I think Maple Story, he has not had a truly negative review of an MMO yet, and I believe we're looking forward to Episode 10 so far. Personally, if ever I wanted anyone to review this game, Chaos D1 would be it. The guy knows his way around an MMO and is capable of judging a game objectively even if it contains elements that rub him the wrong way.

I've already voted for City of Heroes. Not only that, I also suggested it to Chaos before the game was even on his list of suggestions, but it took some time for it to actually go F2P, since he doesn't seem to want to review subscription-only games.

I'd like to see City of Heroes get its shot on the MMO Grinder. I'm certainly more interested in seeing that over the other two choices.

That's not what I said, however, nor is it what I meant, were we to read between the lines. In general, tying rewards to a system when said rewards have nothing in the slightest to do with the system is a form of gating. Running Trials to get Incarnate powers I get. There's a storyline reason for it and there's even a game design reason for it. I don't like the tasks, but the rewards make sense for said tasks.

Yes, I get that Maelstrom's pistol is tied to Maelstrom himself, but it's not stronger than the pistols we use, therefore it is just a souvenir. We've defeated Maelstrom many times before. In fact, I met him in a 10-15 mission and kicked his *** right quick. He didn't drop a gun for me to pick up then. If we go by what "makes sense," then Maelstrom's pistols should be obtainable from Maelstrom every time he shows up, yet they aren't. They are only obtainable if you defeat him in that one specific task which just happens to require people to be goaded into it.

I'm also not sure if you're entirely objective by rejecting my viewpoint so completely while simultaneously neglecting the very real, very likely possibility that certain rewards ARE indeed added for no reason other than to "encourage" people to run Incarnate Trials for the terrible fear that if enough stop doing them, the whole house of cards comes crashing down.

Furthermore, this form of gating is not new. Wing and Boot recipes have existed since the Inventions system was introduced, and while I could be wrong, I'm pretty sure someone with a red name explained that those were seen as incentive to use the, or at least "get into" the Inventions and Market systems. As I see it, it's a very obvious "carrot on a stick," a reward designed not because it makes sense for the task, but specifically to "encourage" people who have no interest in the task to run it anyway, thus providing enough population density to the people who do want it.

I'm sure you'll recall pre-I13 suggestions to put even stronger PvE rewards in PvP zones so as to increase traffic and, by some inference, enhance the PvP experience. Then as now, I pointed out that this does not bring more players to PvP with in the zones, but rather serves only to bring in people interested in AVOIDING PvP in there. In much the same way, adding rewards strongly divergent from the core elements of certain content only serves to bring in people who are not interested in the content, but are interested only in the reward.

Put another way: You can get me to run team content against my will, but I will complain the entire time I'm doing it.

That's good enough for me Thank you, David.

And again, thank you for that. I really don't want to come off like trying to meddle in the development process. I'm just trying to make sure guys are aiming for as big a target as possible and not excluding anything wherever possible.

Specifically, please ask whoever is in charge of texturing new costume pieces to avoid putting tints on their base textures and to avoid making said textures too dark or too washed-out. It only serves to limit our use of the costume piece.

Welcome to 2004 and the "Capes at 20" thread. Interestingly enough, Jack Emmert "joked" with the community that this was a dead horse shortly after I2, somewhere in 2004. It's 2011 now, and it's still not dead, so I guess the joke's on him.

There are plenty of "elite status" symbols, not least of which being character titles and their colours, as well as name titles. As the many jerks who run around as "Helper!" and "Help Meee!" just because it changes their name colour will attest, that's a popular option for showing off. There are also the powers themselves. Anyone using a Judgement power or summoning a Lore pet is obvious as an Incarnate.

The reason I don't want costumes to be loot is... Well, I hate loot as a concept, but beyond that... The reason is you end up putting weight on a costume piece that it doesn't really deserve. For the longest time, the only way to have a witch hat (an ugly witch hat that looked like a flower) was to run a specific TF. The Witch Hat is, therefore, more laborious to get than other costume pieces, but does that make it better? Well... It does and it doesn't. If you just want to show off, it is, but it still looks ugly.

My point is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and, more than anything else, depends on what a character concept requires. For instance, if I want to make a medieval Eurpean knight, I can, because the Medieval set is and has always been free. If I want to make a samurai, however, I have to wait... Years? I forget what Tier of Paragon Reward the Samurai Armour is in. If I want to make a Roman soldier, it's free, but the character has to be something else until level 35, and then I have to run a Task Force on top of that. Is a samurai more expensive? Is a Roman soldier more "elite?" Does medieval Europe just suck? No, not really. No to all three. There's no reason why a samurai set or a Roman set would cost more than a medieval one other than random whim.

Locking costume pieces behind unlocks is a bad idea because costume pieces cannot be graded from best to worst. No, not even based on their age or level of detailing. Since Going Rogue, we've gotten a lot of very cool shoulder pieces, and one could postulate that they are "better" than what came before them, but that's not necessarily the case. All the clockwork shoulders are just plain old bad, the IDF shoulders are barely even there, and my all-time favourite set remains, to this day, the Medieval ones. I just like their shape, I like their size and I like that they're not reflective. Never was a fan of the new reflective tech, to be honest. It looks too much like glass.

What you get is "status" pieces that aren't really all that good. You can either wear a piece which clashes with your costume but demonstrates your "status," at which point I'll probably laugh at you on my side of the screen, or you can wear a "status" piece that happens complement your costume, at which point I will be far more impressed at your ability to put together a cool costume than your willingness to waste hundreds of hours of your life (which isn't something to brag about in the first place). If a costume piece makes my costume better, then it makes my costume better whether the piece is locked or not. In fact, the harder a piece is to unlock, the less likely I am to care about it, because it's worth less the more it costs, ESPECIALLY when its value to my costume is minimal at best.

Take the Ascension set, for example. It's not a bad set by any stretch, but neither is it all that interesting. The boots and gloves are kind of cool, but the rest is "meh." And it's all "bah" because I can't have it until level 50, by which point I've already settled on my character's look and no longer care.

The bottom line is that there are plenty of ways to be elitist if that's your intent, and there's nothing wrong with that. Hell, that's pretty much the only reason badges exist. Costume items aren't that.

On the contrary, there is a very solid reason - it makes people grind more Trials. It's a time sink, pure and simple. It's designed to push solo-mostly players like me who like costume design into running Trials many times over.

It's not going to work.

That's precisely the kind of thinking which utterly ruins Morality and Alignment missions for me - "what villains want is horrible." It doesn't have to be. Sure, some do, but those almost always end up being two-dimensional cartoon characters. Or Dr. Evil, I guess. However, just as presenting villains as people with only sins and no virtues is a fallacy (they'd be too incompetent to be a threat), so is presenting villains as only wanting evil and never good is one, as well.

Let me put it this way - at their core, villains are still just people. They're not good people, no, but they're still people, and people want to be happy. Ultimately, a villain does evil not because he wants or likes evil, but because that's what he believes must be done in order for him to achieve his goals - goals he sees as good. Just like any person, a villain wants to be happy. It's just that he needs to kill a lot of people to achieve what he needs for happiness. Just like any person, a villain wants to help the people he cares about. It's just that he doesn't give a crap about anyone who's not on that list. Just like any person, a villain wants to be successful. It's just that his chosen occupation is very bad news for very many people.

This actually does also apply to aliens, monsters, robots and pretty much all characters who aren't specifically and intentionally built on malice. Everyone wants something, and that something is most often to be happy, in whatever way that works for the specific character in question. To demonise a villain as just a malicious psychopath is to turn what could potentially be a good, believable, respectable villain into a newspaper caricature.

The problem most people have when it comes to constructing a good villain seems to be that society has conditioned us to "bad" people as objects, rather than real people, to see them as icons of what they represent, rather than persons with their own dreams and aspirations. To try to understand them, some believe, would be to try to excuse them, and their acts are inexcusable. And while that works for an expendable antagonist we're not intended to want to play as, it's an utter failure for a character we're not just intended but also expected to play as. That's the whole point to City of Villains.

Villains DO evil things, yes. That's what makes them villains. But they don't have to WANT evil things.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I know this is a nightmare to write for, but I think City of Heroes' greatest curse is also its greatest blessing - it is a game which inspires us to create, rather than just use what we're given. It inspires us to make our own characters, imagine our own stories and, eventually, become much more attached to what we create than what the game's own writers have to offer. I know it's hard to write for this, but it's also a VERY strong hook once you've become attached.

That said, I do believe the signature characters and storylines can be good, and can present us with good, respectable villains. For instance, I am endlessly impressed with the Nemesis and how he's written. Sure, some people find him to be a Mary Sue, but to me, that's kind of why it works - he is the ONLY one that the story treats like this, and that's why the Nemesis is awesome. The game's narrative allows him to get away with nonsense that no-one else can get away with. He can have a Shadow Shard base, he can have psychic robots, he can have a mind control railroad, he can have a weather machine, he can have his hand in every storyline the game has to offer. For anyone else in the game, this would be a stretch and a failure. Not for Nemesis. For him, this works, because he's awesome

More broadly speaking, the game's own writing is a source of inspiration, if nothing else. It has good villains in it. Many good ones, in fact, though most of those hail back to the pre-I1 days when they were less hammy. Many of the original stories are written with great respect for their antagonists, and it shows. Sure, not everyone likes them, but they're there. At worst, they just provide a decent story. At best, they provide the inspiration to create villains of our own. Ghost Widow, for instance, has made me explore ideas of existence after death and write several villains to take advantage of the concept. What's more, her mix of loyalty, resentment and tragedy serve to give her enough depth to earn my respect just on that point alone.

The are good villains in the game. Whether we as players appreciate them or not, I wish the game's actual writers would show them a bit more appreciation.

To this, I want to add another aspect: Storyline progression. Most level-based games tie their storyline progression to their level progression, and City of Heroes does this to a very large extent. Early-level characters have access to only a fraction of the game's content, but are unable to see the results of having run this content. To advance the timeline and gain access to content which "happens later," the player must level up. Later level content, by and large, assumes that earlier level content happened, whether it was the player who did it or not, therefore later level content is follows from earlier level such. While content itself is not a form of level progression, it is tied to level progression nevertheless.

There is no content tied to either Inventions or Hamidon enhancements. They are a system of non-linear upgrades with no real story wrapped around them. You don't need to have at least five purples equipped in order to participate in a story arc, yet you DO need to have at least an Alpha Boost equipped in order to not be useless on a Tin Mage or Apex TF. And that's not just a case of needing to be strong enough. You are quite literally penalised by being delevelled four levels down if you don't have one.

Incarnate progress doesn't just have level-progression-like elements, it also gates the "continuation" of the 1-50 storyline. Praetoria has been built up as a major threat and an invasion from there as the de facto apocalypse. Many storylines build up to this direct clash with the Praetorians, yet its resolution only takes part deep into the Incarnate system.

I know this is kind of buried in the thread, but I had to address it:

Drop-obtainable costume pieces is not a system that needs to be fleshed out. It's a system that needs to die in a fire and all the costume pieces it's restricting released into the general pool. Or at the very least put on the Paragon Market.

Costumes as loot is the WORST idea this game can implement, considering one of its primary selling points is that costumes ARE NOT loot.

That's true, I agree, even if there are exceptions. What I'm more concerned is how these villains are treated by the narrative more than anything else. If it's MY narrative, in the sense that I wrote it, then I simply do what I can to rob villains of their excuses. That doesn't mean they can't make excuses, just that their excuses don't work as justifications.

To give you an example, someone who kills people at random because he turns into a werewolf and loses control of himself can be forgiven. Sure, it's not "OK," but this is a redeemable character. If he can be cured of his werewolfism, taught to control the urges or simply locked up during a full moon, he can become a hero easily.

To give you another example, someone who kills people because they get in his way of becoming rich, powerful and influential really can't be forgiven. Even if everyone in the world lost a brain lobe and just gave him all the money, power and influence he needed, he'd still be a callous ******* who wouldn't think twice about killing people who got in his way. In fact, giving him these things would make him MORE likely to kill, not less.

In terms of narrative, forgiveable villains are those who can be redeemed and become heroes by changing physical attributes about them while unforgivable villains are those for whom a personality rewrite or epiphany therapy is required to make them into heroes, at which point they essentially become entirely different characters.

I still feel it's more a matter of writing than it is of reading. I've experienced enough of other people's stories to be able to spot what an author is trying to say through context, and some authors treat their villains with more respect than others. If an author goes out of his way to present his villain as both reprehensible yet still respectable, that will carry through in the reading. Certainly, it won't carry through for everyone and it won't read the same for those it does, but by and large it still will.

A villain is rarely describe in exposition outside of character biographies and shoddy stories. A villain is much more commonly described by example, through showing the evil deeds that they do. If the narrative makes it a point to describe the horror and terror this villain causes while downplaying his villainous virtues, then this narrative does not treat the villain with respect. On the contrary, the narrative wants you to disrespect the villain, such that when you finally come face to face with him, you'll want to insult him to his face per chance you can't punch him outright.

If, by contrast, a narrative respects a villain, it will give you more of a balance between the reprehensible things he does and the cooler things that make him awesome. Sometimes, respectful narrative will even downplay the villain's horror, having it happen off-screen, emphasising instead his positive attributes. If done poorly, this can undermine the villain's evil and his threat, but if done properly, this creates a villain we want to kill, but whom we can still admire.

Dr. Doom is always a good example. Specific writers aside, he's pretty much always an unambiguous bad guy. He kills people, threatens cities, bargains with homicidal aliens and more, so we know this is not a very good person. But at the same time, we can still admire his genius, we can still admire his achievements and we can still admire his tenacity. This is a villain that the narrative respects, and because the narrative respects him, we as the audience are in turn compelled to respect him, as well. This doesn't always work, obviously, but it still works more often than not.

Ultimately, everything comes down to how each individual reader parses a story's writing, that much I can't deny. But how the story is written can have a major influence on how it's read by most people, at least.

I'm much in the same category. This is costume recipes all over again, complete with extreme rarity. We all saw how popular THOSE were, but I guess the siren's call of making costume pieces into rare loot is too strong for any developer to resist.

So BABs makes a thread about new pistol models before Dual Pistols is released, leaves, no-one ever looks at the thread, we continually request new custom pistols, and a year and a half after the fact... We get an extremely rare pistol drop from a specific raid. And it's not even all that good.

Did I fall over backwards into 2009 or something?

An amoral villain is just a villain with a different type of motivation. Since amoral villains are rarely justifiable outside of amoral reasoning (he kills people because he doesn't care about them, but I didn't care about them either, so it's OK), I don't have a problem with it. In fact, it's a pretty good angle, if handled with care.

My drive was more to separate a villain's motivation from the qualities that serve to make that villain respectable, in a sense I sought to balance the villain's vices against his "villainous virtues." A villain that I literally CANNOT hate, therefore, is a bad villain in a storytelling sense, but then so is a villain I can't respect. A villain needs to be bad either through amorality, extremism or assoleism, but that needs to be balanced against reasons to respect this villain through genius, tenacity or audacity.

In essence, I want a villain I can respect first and know he's evil second, as opposed to a villain who's evil first and hateful second.

Now, as for whether an amoral character always has to be a villain, that's a subject of debate and a matter of presentation. That's really not the point here, however. I've accepted that villains need to be bad people lest I just make them on hero-side. It's a question of how to handle the unpleasant sides of this badness, and the answer seems to be two-pronged:

1. For incidental characters, make them hateful, then kill them off.
2. For persistent characters, make them respectable so people don't change the channel every time they show up.

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Something of a tangent, something occurred to me today: I spoke about how it's easy, as a player or a viewer, to see the game, the movie, the story as the obstacle and its creators as the enemy, therefore making it easy to hate repugnant villains. I also spoke about how difficult this is when you're the creator and the story is your own.

This isn't necessarily the case, as multiple people have helped me realise. This, really, is only true for important, persistent characters that we have to live with. Incidental, fleeting character very much CAN be treated as the enemy. I have, in fact, done this in my own stories. When I've needed accidental villains only important as plot devices, I've made them very, very bad. And then I've killed them in very, very gruesome ways. A the writer of the story, I hated these people, and as the writer of the story, I conspired to kill them, and no-one ever missed them. Because they were bad people.

That's why the abovementioned two-pronged solution works. If a villain will be prominent and recurring, he needs to be respectable. If he's going to be incidental... Meh, who cares?