Samuel_Tow

There are far too many points I want to address for me to put in individual quotes, so I'll try to respond free-hand. If it seems I'm responding to you, I probably am

First of all, I want to clarify why I chose the word "respect" in the title. A lot of people have spoken about likeable villains, and I may have fallen into that trap myself, but I don't actually have to specifically like a villain in order to respect him. In fact, to borrow a concept from the Dragon Age 2 relationship duality, I can highly dislike a villain and still respect said villain. Someone at some point postulated that "it's better to be feared than loved," and this is precisely where a lot of respectable villains fall. No, they're not likeable, not at all. They want to destroy the world, enslave humanity, infect us all with the alien virus, but by strength of their "villainous virtues," we cannot help but respect these people.

In a recent vlog, the Spoony One talked about classic D&D mages who started out with just one spell, saying "When you saw a high-level mage, you RESPECTED him, because he went through the **** to get there." A lot of villains are not likeable people. They're actually very reprehensible people. However, at the same time, you look at the things they've done, you see the wonders they've achieved, you see the things they've built, you see the greatness, and you have to respect these people. You just have to.

When describing Al Capone, many people say that if the man had not turned to crime, he could probably been an amazingly successful businessman and probably changed the world. This is the kind of villain I cannot help but respect. Sure, he wants to kill me, sure he hates my guts, but when I look at the greatness he has achieved and think about how much that could have benefited the world if he weren't evil, I can't help but dream and wish. A villain can be great and powerful in a way that's completely separate from being evil

Now, there's also respecting a villain as a credible threat, respect through fear, as it were, but that only really works if the villain isn't actively stalking you through an abandoned house, axe in hand, determined to wear your face. When a villain is built up as a great but static threat, one that has to be provoked or slighted in order to turn on you, that is also a villain I can respect. Laugh if you will, but I feel Dragon Ball Z's Freeza is built up like this in a very big way. He's the guy who doesn't do anything right up until the end, but everyone knows - they KNOW - that if they upset that guy, he will kill them. No frills, no games, no jokes. He will simply kill them. A villain with enough power to be a credible threat, yet enough restraint to not attack anyone on sight, is a villain I can respect, in much the same way as I respect the propane tank in my kitchen, in much the same way I respect the power sockets all around my house. This is someone of great power that you simply do not upset.

Of course, there's also the truly likeable villains. Because they have awesome costumes, interesting quirks and cool powers, we just like these guys. In fact, a lot of these guys I like because I could see them being heroes if they weren't so completely evil, but you can sidestep the evil and still have a cool character left behind. The truly likeable villains are those who are likeable for reasons completely separate of their villainy. Yes, they're villains, but they'd be just as awesome without their evil streak, too

Here's where we cross over into "justifiable villains" territory. I've seen a few people talk about giving villains reasons and even excuses to be evil, and I do admit that this makes it easier to like said villains. However, it also has the downside of making it harder to take these people seriously as villains, or at least villains that don't piss me off. There are few things that upset me more than the "misunderstood hero" type villain, at least when it comes to narrative character archetypes, and that's mostly because it gives me emotional dissonance. I want to like these people because they're good, but I can't because they do evil things. I want to hate these people because they do evil things, but I can't because they're good. When you have a brainwashed/confused/fallen hero that you don't want to kill but rather save, the story just draaags until that plot thread is resolved. Well, either until it's resolved or I no longer give a crap about the character. That was, as a point of fact, the fate of Naruto's Sasuke. I'm sick of hearing about the *******. He's been the focal point of the plot for 300 episodes, and I just don't care about him or the show any more.

Now, of course, that's just me. I don't want to dis other people's misunderstood heroes or affable villains. Far from it. But when I make my own villains, I try to give them a solid grounding for their alignment, and that solid grounding usually takes the form of a conscious choice. Now, this doesn't mean mental illness or Saturday morning cartoon villain allergy to "goodness" so much as the character being presented with a choice and taking the evil option consciously. If a villain, for instance, is given the choice to lie to a person and manipulate him for his own ends, or otherwise tell him the truth and lose his support, then the villain will choose to manipulate. Why? Is it because he didn't understand the consequences? Is it because it's vital that he gain this person's help? No. The villain knew what would happen. He just didn't care about this person he's manipulating.

Similarly, I HAAATE using the "madness excuse." If a character is imported-guano-insane, then really anything he does can make sense, to the extent that nothing he does ever makes sense at all. Why does he kill people? Because the sky is blue and dicks are white. Why did he just set that cat on fire? Because wakka wakka wakka. Not giving a villain any logical reason to be evil is, in fact, the ultimate excuse - he's evil because he's insane.

Personally, I don't want my villains' evil to be based in madness or excuse, but rather to originate from the villains, themselves. These are simply not good people, but they are still at least tangentially realistic people. One is selfish, another is callous, another still is greedy and so forth. They all have their character flaws that drive them to make the "wrong" choices, but they still have A character to speak of. Which is where we step into motivations.

Much as I hate giving villains excuses for being evil, I still try whenever I can to give them at least a reason for, and a reason that can be explained and believed. A villain who's evil because he's evil is only interesting once, and that's been done many times already. Beyond that, we need to know why this person made the evil choices he did. What does he want? What does he hope to achieve? What kind of backstory conspired to teach him the life lessons which led him to this decision? If I had lived his life, might I possibly agree with him? One of the tricks to making a good villain is to give him a motivation that people can understand, and perhaps even agree with if they hypothetically let go of their moral qualms.

If I weren't a good person... Could I be like that villain? The answer, at least for me, is usually "yes," because most villains I make originate in the different unthinkable urges I've felt throughout my life. And, really, unless you're a saint, I'm sure you've felt some of those, too. You've felt greedy, you've felt arrogant, you've wanted to hit people, you've wanted revenge and so forth. Most of us choose to be good people and ignore these urges, but because these villains are not good people, they act on them. That kind of villain is one I can actually sympathise with. And if I can also respect this villain, then he becomes awesome!

Having said all this, yes, I do take my villains and heroes and characters in general pretty seriously. I don't roleplay them, no, but at the same time I can't and don't want to feel disconnected from them. Every hero and villain I make is based on something I feel, and if I lose this, I lose the character at all. I've tried writing for characters by just going through the motions, and it simply never works. When there's no emotion in the story, there's no motivation to read or play. I can force myself to read and play when I'm not motivated, of course, but the result is gameplay that's not fun and writing that ends up being garbage. If I can't feel the emotion a story is supposed to convey by virtue of distancing myself from it, then the story becomes uninteresting to participate in.

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Somewhat separate of the conceptual discussion is the notion of PvP and developing our heroes and villains through competition between them. This is an argument I've heard before, and I flatout reject. A good hero needs a good villain just as much as a good villain needs a good hero, but there's no need for both of these to be player characters. In fact, there's no express need for EITHER to be a player character, but for the sake of a game, we need to be playing someone.

My point is that I've heard people lament how difficult it is to roleplay a villain fighting heroes when PvP zones are dead, and I simply don't buy it. A player hero has tons of NPC villains to fight, and a player villain has ever more NPC heroes to fight. While one might argue that the PvE content has a set storyline that is not conducive to forwarding a character's own story, but at least it has a setting. PvP in most games doesn't even have that. And, really, the game's written story doesn't HAVE to get in the way of our own personal journeys. Personally, I feel that the City of Heroes world should be written less as a linear or even branching tree narrative and more like a setting with interactive story elements within which our characters can participate for their own reasons and motivations.

Wow... That was an amazing album. Thank you, David I think my favourite ones by FAR were your renditions of environments, specifically ones that take on either a whole scene or a map layout. It's to the point where I can't really pick favourites - I like ALL of them. I can't even nit-pick, for Pete's sake! You really have a talent for making amazing environments.

And, yes, I would definitely like to see more.

Originally, I wanted to phrase this as a question, something along the lines of "So we want to respect our villains or hate them?" but I quickly realised there's just no way in hell I can be objective on the matter, so doing this would have been disingenuous. In fact, the more I planned it out, the more it turned into a soliloquy, so take it for what it's worth.

I want a villain I can respect. This might seem like not much news, but it's a compilation of quite literally seven years of effort in trying to figure out what kind of villain I want to play as, fight against and watch movies about.

Some time ago, someone (I think it was the Uber Guy) exposited that he wanted a villain he could hate. In fact, a villain we loved to hate was what made a good villain. This concerned me, because I thought I agreed, yet I still disagreed about the "goodness" of the villain in question. A villain I hate - and I mean really, truly hate in the "kick the puppy" sense - is a villain I ultimately don't want to see. This is the villain I hate, this is the villain I want to see dead, this is the villain that, if I had my way, I'd end on the spot. But, of course, I can't or the story would be too short, so I have to sit and watch narrative about this villain I hate... And it bugs me. In real life, such villains do exist and there isn't much we can do about it, but in fiction that doesn't quite work. If I don't like a villain - if I hate him - then I don't like the story he's in. And while I can't just ignore real life and its horrors, I very much CAN just walk away from a story.

It occurs to me that a good story with a good villain should keep me coming back, it should make me want to see more. What this means is that villains, evil and everything associated with those should either be counter-balanced by something, or that those themselves should be somehow appealing, without at the same time catering to psychopathic tendencies in otherwise normal people. Hence the idea of the "villain with redeeming qualities."

Now, when I say "redeeming qualities," I'm not talking about aspects of the villain that make him less evil or less a villain. In fact, far from it. I don't mean "Oh, he kills people, but it's OK because they're mostly bad people." so much as "Oh, he kills people but DAMN he looks hot in tight leather pants!" or "Sure, he's an evil demon who steals souls but he has a really cool, really big sword." We hate villains for the evils they do, but the tick to having a villain we want to see come back from the dead and show up in the sequel, I've found, is making this villain such that we secretly want to like him. If the forbidden fruit is the sweetest, then a villain we're really not supposed to like, but is very cool nonetheless has to be a good villain, right?

But why don't utterly hateful villains work for me when it works for so many others? This question kept me up for a few nights, but I think I have an answer. It comes down to the fact that I approach this game less as a de facto player and more as a writer and storyteller. When you approach a game like a player, it's pretty easy to see the villains as unambiguous bad guys and gameplay itself as an obstacle. For a player competing for a game, it's easy to see the game's developers themselves as the enemy. They're the ones who impede your progress, their characters are the ones who attack you, their villains are the ones you have to defeat, they are the people who keep you from beating the game. It breeds an "us vs. them" (or rather, "me vs. game") mentality that makes it very easy to like your own characters and hate the game's villains.

When I approach the game as a storyteller, however, I find myself in the position of having to play both the heroes AND the villains. And when I say I play my villains, I don't mean I just create them and leave them to serve as antagonists - I actually play through their stories, guide them through their struggles shape them up through the events they experience. What this means is I spend a lot of time with these villains and a lot of effort on working them up to the prime time. If I DON'T like these villains that I make, it would be impossible to play them. Now, granted, it's easy to push through a tough spot or just run a story I don't like for the sake of the reward, but that's just once or twice. Eventually, I have to run into something I like, or I simply won't bother. I can do things I don't like, but only as an exception from the norm, where the norm is something I do like.

The fact of the matter is that while I want villains to be evil and detestable, I also need them to be likeable in some way, and it is this balancing act which, at least in my opinion, leads to a good villain. Because, to me, a good villain is one I want to fight against, but also one I secretly, when no-one is looking, kind of want to see win. In fact, the point in a story where the good guy becomes purely good and the bad guy purely bad, the point where I only like the good guy and only hate the bad guy... That should be the END. When all the cards are on the table, when all is said and done, when all morality has been explored, all we have left is a pure, genuine, final confrontation to put an end to it all. Because once all resolve has been steeled... There is simply very little else the story can deliver except padding.

But, hey, that's just me. Do YOU want to respect the villains you play and fight?

I still want an answer as to what "sales" refers to. Are we counting the Paragon Market? Are we counting the PlayNC Marker before that? Are we talking just box sales? Are we counting VIP subscriptions? Are these numbers representative of ALL of the game's revenue?

I looked for an answer in this thread, but all I saw was "it doesn't matter," which I don't agree with.

Well, since we have "wrestling" in the title and I happened to be going through the Spoony One's old TNA recaps (and rants), I figured I might quote him in something I feel is somewhat relevant to the subject of gimmicks, which is what the thread was originally about. This is the Spoony One, talking about the Vince Ruso approach to booking from one of his v-logs:

It seems odd to put a major publish on a Thursday, since that essentially means you're working the weekend, and no-one wants to do that. The reason they do this on a Tuesday most usually is because you can come early on a Tuesday, having done the prep work on Monday and you have the whole rest of the week ahead for things to go wrong and fixes to be made before you hit Friday afternoon.

With this in mind, I expect to see the dog and the hat. Why six hours? I can't say. Remember they did multiple 12-hour maintenance windows soon after launching I21 without actually putting a patch out on any of them? I'm thinking it's like that.

Thanks

There has been official comment that Trial Bosses do scale to the number of people in the actual Trial, as do other aspects of the trial beyond spawn sizes. Unfortunately, I can't tell you what scales in what way since my lack of interest in raids means I completely forgot what the post I'm referring to said or where to find it.