Samuel_Tow

The Hero Corps Field Analyst from Twinshot's arc gives us a good example of this. He sends you to stop strangely powerful Hellions from summoning a demon, but then thinking you'd failed, he calls in the army. When you report back with a "mission complete," the Field Analyst has to sheepishly apologise to a COLONEL for calling in an entire army division as I understood it.

Why would a godlike being take down street gang? Because he could do it by himself in the span of an afternoon, whereas it would take contingents of police officers and junior heroes months to do it. I get the Tiered structure, but if I were godlike and my pursuit of the ultimate macguffin put me in the territory of a dangerous local gang... Yeah, I'll wipe them off the streets, sure. I have a few hours to spare. Just in the same way as I'll stop to save a lady from being mugged by level 1 Hellions even if I'm level 50.

More specifically, though, my example was merely about why a character can't do these things himself if he were strong enough.

Because we soloed them one at a time. In Task Forces and Trials, they show up all at the same time. As a villain, I have beaten up all of the Freedom Phalanx separately, including the Statesman. If all of them showed up at the same time, though, even as elite bosses, I couldn't beat them together. Facing the Surviving Eight at the same time would require eight of us so it's an even match. You actually ignore the meat of my posts in this thread. I don't want "me and my army against the overpowered foe," I want "them and their army against me." Lord Recluse has the right idea. At the end of Time After Time, he's a pushover. Those 20 boss-level Bane Spider Executioners he summons, not so much.

I get that there are singular "all heroes" level threats, but of those I can only ever see ONE existing at a time. Tyrant or the Hamidon or Rularuu, but only one at a time. The rest of the threats that require me to team up should require my enemies to team up, as well. If the Praetors are to be a raid-level threat, they THEY have to come prepared to raid us. Not 20 of us against one or two of them. That's 20 of us against Anti-Matter, Marauder, Neurron, Battle Maiden, Bobcat, Mother Mayhem, Malice, Infernal, Chimera, Black Swan, Siege and Nightstar all at the same time, with not-infrequent intervention from from the Olympians. THAT is a fight I could see being a big team event and I could never argue that I should be able to fight by myself. I can mop the floor with one of these guys by myself easy, but ALL of them? No chance in hell, I need help.

But, no. It's one overpowered boss against 20 player gnats.

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And the idea which keeps slipping through the cracks is I don't want to abolish large team content. I want alternatives to it. I have alternatives to Task Forces, but not to raids, because Raids start where story arcs end. Honestly, developers - you don't have to keep trying to make your story arc creation process more and more expensive. Give me a good story, wrap it around 20 defeat-all missions and I'll play it. That's essentially all World Wide Red is, and it's still my favourite story arc to play.

To be fair, TNA is anything BUT action, with Vince Ruso on board. They hired on Hulk Hogan and Rick Flair who were broken down even before they retired the last time. They brought back the ECW guys and had another one-night stand. They have a wrestler whose gimmick is that he's brain-damaged and acting like an idiot, and at one point they had a wrestler who proclaimed he was a descended god. Not to mention that one show which had around 6 minutes of wrestling out of a 2-hour show. There's a reason that last time I brought up TNA, it scared the living daylight out of someone here on these forums. The WWE and TNA aren't so much battling it out as the WWE is doing well and TNA is having "flaming ladders balanced on chairs on top of tables with a casket on top" matches. All the while acting like they're always shooting.

The problem with gimmicks in wrestling isn't the gimmicks themselves, it's that they ruin our suspension of disbelief that we're watching a legitimate sporting event with things at stake. When Randy Orton is making autistic faces and HHH is taping a midget to a skateboard or, hell, when Sergeant Slaughter is siding with the Iraqis during Operation Desert Storm, it makes the whole thing seem endlessly goofy and you can't take it seriously. So when the WCW invades the WWE and Shane McMahan threatens to steal the company until resident bad boy Steve Austin returns to kick his *** or, most lately, when CM Punk starts badmouthing Vince and company man John Cena and essentially trashing all the gimmicks and has his microphone cut so he can't embarrass the company... Those things earn the company much favour.

But here's the thing - as the nWo demonstrates, you can only rebel against gimmicks for a time before you have to return to using gimmicks. The WWE has their gimmicks until people get tired of them, then they rebel against them for a while, then we're right back "Last year, I showed too much emotion!" and John Cena acting like the last son of Krypton. Where the WWE succeed and TNA fail is that TNA are both constantly having gimmicks AND constantly acting like it's all real. Hulk Hogan is yelling about "putting ***** in seats" while at the same time Abyss is backstage, torturing people and Samoa Joe is being kidnapped by ninjas who drive a panel van ON TV.

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How this relates to City of Heroes, I'm honestly not sure I can articulate. Personally, I want nothing more than just running mission after mission after mission with storyline just explaining why I'm doing it and not interrupting my "flow." The newer mission where I'm constantly having to converse with inanimate objects, where bosses don't die but instead kneel down so I have to talk to them and I'm constantly having to escape a building under a timer as ambushes stream in and fighting in a tables ladders and chairs iron man cage match that's also a street fight with caskets... Suffice it to say that I don't really like those too much.

Some people complain that this is boring, but I don't see adding gimmicks to City of Heroes making it any less boring. If anything, I feel that it makes it boring AND ANNOYING. "Grind to 50 and make alts" is a perfectly valid playstyle if you actually enjoy making alts and levelling them up like I do. I really, REALLY don't need my experience "shaken up" in the slightest, because all that does is interrupt my flow while adding nothing to the experience. Is it honestly any less boring to fight a boss if he tries to flee and I can't stop him? No, of course not. Because then I can't actually fight him.

Because their higher base puts them at a higher absolute value even at their lower cap.

Ah, I definitely misunderstood you, then, and we do indeed agree.

The eponymous Samuel Tow is the perfect example. The way I wrote him is he has powers - speed, some degree of strength and an assortment of technological toys - but he's awesome because he's just that damn good at using all of those powers. That's as opposed to Sam's nemesis, Ezikiel Bane, who's awesome because he's a master manipulator and he just happens to have super powers in addition to that that I've very rarely written him as using.

Basically, I like to let my characters stand on their own, to the point where I've been known to play those "auto-fight" games like MyBrute provided I can make the character awesome enough (or actually have a say in character design). When Sam takes on a powerful foe, I want him to win. He's my Mary Sue that I simply don't use very often specifically for that reason. When Jun, my inexperienced teenage super hero, fights a tough foe, I can see her getting knocked down or knocked out. She's still learning. She'll be awesome one day, too, though

No-one is denying that, far from it. But that doesn't need to be the ONLY form of content. I get that the Justice League come together to stop cosmic catastrophes. What do they do when a cosmic catastrophe ISN'T threatening Earth right now? Isn't there something smaller, yet still requiring an amazing super hero to do? Possibly something that would require a whole team of weaker heroes, but that a big hero could attempt alone?

Large challenges and cosmic dangers are a given. I may not appreciate them, but they're an inexorable part of the MMO framework. I get that. What I and people like me are looking for is options to have encounters that challenge our characters personally and force them to do their own legwork without getting help. And I put precisely ZERO faith of anything ever coming out as a solo Incarnate path that ISN'T officially recognised as a side dish to the main course of raiding.

I think this is where we disagree. I, personally, take no particular pride in accomplishing tasks in-game as so few of them really have that much room for me to show skill. Far too many of them require planning, but once you know what to do, there's little need to improvise.

Besides, I see myself less as a player and more as a storyteller, and I'm all too happy to see my characters as powerful or weak themselves, without having to butt in on their achievement with my own skill. If I won because my character is awesome... That's awesome

I know, I know. I just hate the practice of intentionally misspelling names, even when famous comic books are doing it.

OK, let's play your game. Quote where I said this. Go on, I'll wait.

*edit*
Actually, I'll give you a hand. What I said was:

And also:

Now if you're referring to where I said:

then that's because I was responding to you saying:

What I was saying was not that I want ONLY story arcs, but rather that I don't want raid content. I'm sure you'll find ways to spin that into me worshipping the devil, though.

Putting you on ignore would be a mistake. Your spin is far too entertaining and fascinating to miss out on.

But why do they have to? You say that like it's an obvious fact, but it's only that way because some writers chose to write it that way. What's wrong with making our characters awesome enough to bring down a gang AND Misspelled Apocalypse in the same day?

How much do you want to bet that they don't? Name anything up to $20 and a PayPal account. I'm actually serious

The Incarnate storyline is the storyline of the Well of the Furies, which will only take notice of people once they hit level 50. The Praetorian side of things is just one small aspect of it. Pretty soon, I'm sure the Shadow Shard will enter into the picture, as will more of Ouroboros. But the Well is still central.

Are you being intentionally dense just to mess with me?

99% of the game doesn't feature Incarnate powers and, as I mentioned, THAT is also something I want to have a shot at. It's post-50 character progression. Your argument would be valid if you said 99% of the game's content doesn't take place in TFs, so if I don't want to do them, I don't have to. And this is true. I can get to 50 without running a single TF. Can I get my Judgement, Lore and so on slots without running Incarnate Trials? Specifically, before I grow old and die?

The problem is you keep finding new ways to twist my words, and if you keep doing that you're going make me stop taking you seriously.

Woah. Dude!

Realising I play the game for the same reason Tenzhi does reminds me of something I've been meaning to say for a while. Every so often, people describe this or that piece of content as "epic" and we get to argue what "epic" means, and whether it's like the epics of old talking about large-scale warfare or whether it's some kind of 90s jargon. So let me swap to something that IS 90s jargon: "Awesome."

Forget "epic." I don't want my game to be "epic." That's not a concern. What I want my game to be is awesome, both as an adjective and a noun. What's awesome is obviously subjective, but to me it's being able to accomplish something I'm not supposed to be able to do. The bad guy drops a building on me, I just walk out of the rubble. The bad guy sends his armies against me, but I fight a whole war by myself. The bad guy sends me to the dimension of no return, I fight my way back. Because I'm awesome. I want my game to be awesome. I want my character to be awesome. That's just as far as that goes.

Epic I can take or leave. It's not important. Awesome is where it's at.

*edit*
Where's 90s Kid when you need him?

Yes, I'm aware, but this argument - especially phrased like this - needs to stop being made. Even if you proceeded to support solo options, you started out with supporting one of the WORST arguments about MMOs ever made.

This very phenomenon is one reason I have found it increasingly hard to take fantasy MMOs seriously. Single player fantasy games at least have the common decency to portray my character the saviour of everything and all around badass who will live on in people's songs and legends. By contrast, Fantasy MMOs are still stuck in the EQ days, when you were just another peasant in a world full of nobodies, someone who just tried to make ends meet and occasionally acquire that cool toy he was eyeing out. You come from nowhere, you go nowhere and you do nothing of any real noteworthiness that thousands of other people haven't done before.

Granted, not ALL fantasy MMOs are like this, but to my eyes, most of them are less about honour and glory, adventure and action and more about being a medieval simulator if Medieval Europe had dragons living in it. They don't let you be THE hero, just a face in the crowd even when you're by yourself.

Comic books in general and City of Heroes in particular are different. Even if you take large-ish groups like the Avengers and the Justice League, they're still comprised of accomplished heroes in their own right that we wouldn't mind seeing as the stars of their own books. Many super heroes are cool because of who they are and what they can do, as opposed to because of the world they exist in.

To give you an apt comparison, playing City of Heroes is like playing as Batman patrolling the streets of Gotham City, occasionally having to team up with Superman and Captain Marvel to take out a descended god. Playing your typical fantasy MMO is like playing a beat cop patrolling the streets of Gotham City, occasionally called upon to serve riot duty during a named villain's rampage, and probably getting your spine backhanded in half because you got too close.

That's really the sad truth of it. The Incarnate system is a self-perpetuating phenomenon - it will sustain itself as long as there is a certain critical number of people interested in it. If enough people stop raiding, there won't be enough people left to support those still wanting to raid and the system will stop. And once it stops, it's VERY hard to get it going again.

Think back to a few years ago and the big Hamidon fiasco of the 50% multi-aspect enhancements. People were farming the crap out of the thing, until the enhancement values were slashed, and then the Recluse and Statesman TFs showed up to give the same enhancements, but without needing 100 people to do it. Raiding pretty much died on most servers and those who still wanted to raid simply couldn't, because even Bill Z Bubba couldn't solo the Hamidon.

I understand the desire to keep people on the threadmill, but I still want something else to do, at least for myself. I'm not going to raid come hell or high water so I'm not contributing to the raid system's critical mass, but I'd still like a shot at the storyline and the powers.

No, I don't. Not in the slightest. What I want is story arcs.

No, I don't. Clearly, raid content is very popular and therefore good for the game. I want to leave raid content alone for the people who enjoy it. I want non-Raid content IN ADDITION to the raid content.

That's not what I said. I said these powers are overkill in 1-50 content, not in "non-raid" content. It's not just entirely possible but actually very doable to create new story arcs which feature stronger and/or more enemies, as well as other challenges which require Incarnate power to defeat. "Must have 24 people to ride" is just one such approach and, to be honest, it's a very lazy approach. Throw enough players at anything and it's beatable.

1-50 content is balanced around having the powers available from 1 to 50. Going back to doing it with +3 Incarnate powers is, obviously, overkill. It's like getting to level 50 and then going back to beat up level 30 enemies. Yes, it's ridiculously easy and, yes, it's not very rewarding, but this doesn't mean that 30-50 story arcs cannot exist.

At no point have they said they have "plans" for solo Incarnate content. All they've ever said is they're aware people want it. They're also aware that people want improvements to SG bases, PvP and Stalkers. The last I hear is they announced that they were going to make an announcement about solo Incarnate content at the player summit, and judging from general regard towards the issue, I expect announcement to be "We are now definitely working on this, but we have no ETA and it probably won't be in the next few Issues." Just like the last five times.

It's not good enough because there isn't anything concrete, unless you want to specifically read promises where none have been made. I remember people in I19 Beta getting on my case for being "impatient," fully convinced that solo content was actually part of I19 and they just hadn't announced it yet. We're a year down the line and it hasn't happened, and the most I've heard about it is "Yes, we know about it." Like Bigfoot and Nessie, I'll believe it when I see it.

Why am I not surprised that someone with your name would be fluent in Star Control?

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Dr. Graves' arc is insulting, and I feel dumber for having played it. Whoever wrote that arc needs to be reminded he can't write in my description field.

Twinshot's arc is tolerable. Too many nonsense-jabbering idiots in it, however, and the Field Analyst mission sends you to Croatoa. The twist at the end is just horrible. Your "least likely suspect" has to actually have a part in the story prior to being revealed (and "existing" does not count), and your red herring can't be so obviously framed by the narrative itself that it's obvious she's a red herring.

Both of these arcs would be somewhat decent if they were made into drawn comic book stories with author-created protagonists. As player-runnable missions, they make too many assumptions.

Obviously. Bur like I said, "power level" doesn't give a sense of power. Relative level does. And if my enemies are always at the same relative level of power to mine even after I've attained so much more power, then I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels trying to catch up. And if all of a sudden my enemies become SO powerful that I need other people to defeat them when I didn't before, I've feel like I've gotten weaker, comparatively speaking.

It doesn't matter if I'm impervious to bullets and strong enough stop a train if my enemy punches like a howitzer and can stop an ocean liner with his teeth.

Because I don't own a console or a TV to play it on?

Oh, wait, no. I see what you mean. Why not play a single player game, right? Of course, how stupid of me, I'll go do just that right now!

*edit*
Wait, where do I buy the single player version of City of Heroes, again? I couldn't find it in the PlayNC store.

Do you mean:

Because I have a sneaking suspicion that news will be "We have heard your requests and now realise you want this. We will look into ways to provide this to you. For real this time.

If there's anything more specific than that, I will shave my beard.

That's really the cornerstone problem, in my eyes: The belief that the more "serious" the end game is, the bigger the teams have to be, and if you're not on a 25-man raid, then you aren't "epic" enough. While to some this might seem as simple threat escalation, to me it quite literally feels like my threats are outlevelling me. Once upon a time I was able to complete my own missions, but now that I have godlike power, all of my enemies were given godlike power times two.

Contrary to what Dragon Ball Z might teach us, the feeling of power is not expressed in "power levels." Your power level may be over nine thousand, causing Vegeta to crush his scouter, but fat lot of good that does you when Freeza's power level starts at 500 000? I don't need to see big numbers float around to tell me I'm awesome. I need to see myself doing awesome things like being big threats by myself and being independent. By seeing myself be significant.

The bigger the number of people a task requires, the bigger the difference is between the sum of their powers and what the task actually requires, thus the more insignificant I, as a cog in the machine, feel in the grand scheme of this. It's pretty much a proven fact that modern warfare brought about the death of the epic hero. When armies of millions oppose armies of millions and generals command without seeing battle, there is very little room for one man to make a big difference. You don't have your Achilles, you don't have your Hercules. You couldn't. There's no room for "heroes" when modern warfare requires obedience, cooperation and a large functioning infrastructure.

Raiding is essentially modern warfare. It's organised, tiered warfare where no one man is as important as keeping the war machine active, where no one man's contribution is vital, because it requires the contribution of many. It requires finding satisfaction in fulfilling your given role, which is a kind of satisfaction that is completely alien to me.

Neither of which I actually said, by the way.

I don't expect to enjoy everything. I never expected to enjoy Incarnates, and - surprise surprise - I didn't. That's fine. There's no way to change raiding to make me like it any more than there is a way to cook chili to the tastes of a man who hates spicy foods. I don't expect them to. When I say "Incarnate content," however, I don't mean "raids." I mean any content which advances the Incarnate storyline and allows me to progress through the Incarnate power trees. SOLO Incarnate content, then, is what I'm referring to. It's very possible to create content that is both Incarnate and something I like. They just didn't do it and, frankly, I don't ever expect to see it. Promises have been made, but then promises have been made about a lot of things, many of which never happened.

Secondly, I never claimed I need "this stuff" to participate, by which I presume you mean "in the Incarnate system." I'm well aware that I don't need T4s of everything. As a point of fact, I don't need T1 of anything, because none of the game that I actually enjoy is designed to expect Incarnate powers. When those were being added to the game, I postulated that sooner or later they would make us too strong for the base game and we would NEED more content to progress through it, more content which would deliberately require us to attain these powers before attempting it in much the same way as we're required to attain level 50 before attempting Mender Ramiel's arc.

I don't "need" any of "this stuff." I want it. Sadly, to get it, I need to raid, and since I'm going to raid over my dead body, that just means I'll never have it. You may call this disingenuous, but this doesn't change the fact that I want my Incarnate powers without having to raid, because I irrevocably hate raiding. And that's not going to happen.

Speaking of awesome - and it kills me to do this - but I want to recite a specific scene from A.T.O.M.. To give you a basic idea of the show, it centres around a group of five teenagers, each with various unique skills, each of them largely realistic, aside from team leader Axel Manning, who practices a martial art referred to as "Jo Lan" which is essentially blue energy melee and pretty much a straight-up super power. Throughout the series, everyone gets their moment to shine, but at the end of the day, it always seems to come down to Axel to face the final moment of truth.

The specific scene in question is actually pretty simple. Resident villain Alexander Pain uses a super power of his own to blast the whole team away, apparently defeating them all. The camera then pans to show everyone down on the ground, hurt, knocked out, with clothes all ripped up. Everyone, except for Axel, who, while still hurt, is also still standing. Apparently, he used his "martial art" to somehow block the energy blast, taking damage but surviving much better than his team-mates. I forget how the episode ends (the show sucked and it's been a while since I saw it), but it's essentially him against the villain and backup for quite a while before his team-mates come to.

That, more or less, is what I see as epic. Less what happens when you have a whole team to back you up, but rather what happens when you DON'T. Maybe that's just me having never been a fan of team sports, maybe that's me having never held any real desire to "belong," but 20 people swarming a single enemy doesn't serve to make those people come off strong and respectable. It serves to make the enemy come off strong and the people come off weak.

That's a question so loaded as to be disingenuous. No, I shouldn't. There's more game to play, more "stuff" to earn, more ways to progress my character. But only if I want to play Trials. Let me put it this way: Imagine that after level 30, you could no longer team with anyone. The Team function simply didn't work past level 30 and you had to solo all the way to 50. Now suppose you just hit 30 with your team-built Defender and realised this. You have a choice - respec into a solo build or start over. But you want to play on teams, that's what's fun in the game for you.

You complain that you can't team and I tell you "Well, you reached level 30 and you don't want to solo. Isn't it time you started over?" No! Of course not. It's not time you started over because there's more game for you to play, it's simply restricted behind a playstyle which you don't enjoy and wasn't required up to 30 anyway.

I want to take part in the Praetorian war, I want to pursue the Well of the Furies storyline, I want to find out the truth behind Mender Silos, the Coming Storm, Ramiel, Prometheus and so forth. I want my Sword/Fire Scrapper to have that huge kill-all fire AoE, I want my Bots Mastermind to have that powerful team buff barrier. There's stuff in there that I want, I just don't fancy doing 24-man Trial after 24-man Trial. In fact, I wouldn't fancy it even if it required a whole stream of nothing but two-man simu-click missions, which is essentially what this boils down to.

Let Raids exist, it's clear they're not going anywhere. But as long as more story content and more character progression exists, I want an alternate path.

Allow me to be that person, then. What you see at character selection is not random. It's one of the pre-existing "costume sets" from the top-most category. The idea behind putting one of those on the character, near as I can tell, is to serve as a subtle inspiration for new players who come into the game and haven't the foggiest idea about what they wanted to make. Starting them out with a "blank" isn't always a good idea, because this is no help whatsoever, and looking through the old "Rate My Champion" category on the Champions Online site revealed that a good third of all the entries were the base blue models, sometimes with a piece or two added.

Giving people a starting idea to work off of is a help with no downsides. Unless your character design includes any of the default "blank" pieces, you lose nothing for having a costume set put on the character. Just work off of that. In fact, when remaking a character, I'll often hit the Random button about 20 times just so that I'm not working off a blank base, which is dreadfully boring and largely uninspiring.

I'm not nearly as confident as you are. Not when you have a system built, essentially, on invisible numbers rewards and designed around repeating the same two, four, six tasks over and over and over again. This from a team which banned people for making Architect arcs where they did essentially the same thing. You can't go out of your way to tell people to not use the word "farm" in their Architect arcs and then turn around and make a system that, for all intents and purposes, is farming for merits.

I'm glad you have fun. More power to you. I still don't think that's what the system was designed to deliver. MMO end game raid grind never is. It's a threadmill to keep people from running out of things to do, and since there are a finite number of things to do, then the threadmill has to have an infinite completion time while still looking like it might have an end at some point.

"The end" is not a stopping point. It's the end. The term "stopping point" refers to a point in the game where players might feel like shutting the game down for the night because they've achieved a milestone and they won't achieve one for a long time after that. The system has no such stopping points because it's all random drop based. What if you get that very rare component you need on the very next Trial? It's entirely possible. It generates motivation to grind, but that motivation is not enjoyment, but rather a Skinner box conditioned response. At least, that's what it's designed to teach and invoke.

As for "the end," T4 is intentionally designed to be a complete waste of time. Up until T3, the system is a grind, but it's within the realms of just slow gameplay. T4, on the other hand, is intended to waste your time for not that much benefit because people aren't supposed to get to the end, just close enough to see it from the bottom of a gorge. If you DO want to get to it, then the game will simply cross its arms and say "You still want it? Fine. Have a nice life." T3 is meant to make you believe you could get to the end, while T4 is meant to waste your time. And if you do get to T4, then there really isn't much more the game can offer and many other ways for it to intentionally slow you down.

Would that I could, but there is no "other stuff" which offers progression towards the Incarnate system. The "other stuff" I could do is essentially passing time, and when given the choice, I'll play a character who can make progress vs. one who can't. And before you cite random Incarnate Shard drops as a meaningful progression path, Black Scorpion himself said it in now unambiguous terms that the random Shard drop mechanic was never intended to be a meaningful, self-contained progression path. It was always and only ever intended to provide a small supplement towards the gain received from running Trials, essentially the consolation price for Incarnates who wanted a break.

Here's the thing - I DO NOT WANT to run Trials. Ever. I have not the slightest desire to be a face in the crowd of 20-something people, beating on a Mary Sue for half an hour, feeling like a complete gnat. That's not "epic," that's "humiliating." I've never been interested in "belonging" or being "part of something greater," and right up until level 50, the game is all too happy to step back and let me play it my way. Then suddenly post level 50, that's no longer an option. Well, no option, no play. If you enjoy ridiculously huge teams, then I'm happy for you. I don't, and no amount of bait is going to change my mind.

There is an extreme case of disconnect here between what different people feel is epic. Some seem to believe that 20 people being curb-stomped by a single NPC whose only claim to fame is having his model size increased by 50% is somehow epic when you finally beat it on the 10th try, but to me, that's nothing short of humiliating, especially when those are NPCs that I've beaten hands-down many times before. To quote Woody Allen from AntZ: "It makes me feel... Insignificant." I get that to some that's the point - you ARE insignificant, which is why it's so "awesome" for the insignificant to beat the big names.

Personally, I didn't come to a game called "City of Heroes" to be weak, insufficient and insignificant. I didn't come here to receive a humbling experience. I came here because there are few games out there as good for the ego as City of Heroes. Because this game lets me take my own creation and be the most awesome in my own little world. ... ... Right up until I try to do anything to do with Incarnates.

I'll make things really simple: I don't want to have to band with 20 other people to take down one NPC. I want the NPCs to have to band together 20 strong just to take on me. Occasionally, this happens, but it's not very common.