Samuel_Tow

It simply needs a better interface, I believe. I'd borrow the classic server browser interface from practically any game that ever supported LAN play. Then let people either host their own games, thus making the host the "leader" when the Trial/TF started, or let people join games already hosted by others. As long as you give people a list of existing games with information given on who's hosting them and what settings he's hosting them with and let people pick, then I see no reason why the interface can't handle the task.

Inversely, if a person doesn't want to host his own team or bother looking through a list, THEN is when random game joining comes into play. Let the player pick some basic options, such as level bracket or task preferred, and then let the computer auto-assign said player to a team.

FPS games perfected this years ago. Last time I played TF2, I could random-join a server or look through a list of servers. If a server was full, I could let the game auto-retry to have me join there, then join another server and play in the meantime. As soon as a spot opened, I would be auto-disconnected from the server I was playing (with no warning) and logged into the one I had "queued" for. That's how the LFT queue should work. It shouldn't be a "queue" at all, but rather a game browser.

Sadly, I'm restricted (read: have restricted myself for reasons of taste) to just Brutes, Scrappers, Stalkers and Masterminds.

I like this. I like it a lot. I'll have to think about it some more to come up with something solid, but it's an interesting idea.

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Seriously, I wish we could put more stuff in the jar than just brains.

I think this has the most potential weirdness of them all, and I actually have an interesting idea for it. Let me dig back a bit and bring up an older character I made. Do you remember when I was posting pics of Stardiver in ever threat I could? Well, her general idea was that she is a sentient automaton made at the beginning of time, who siphons energy by diving into the hearts of active stars. When I created Stardiver, however, I also thought up another such automaton, designed later and engineered to feed on something completely different.

Enter Lighteater, a being powered by the crushing gravity of black holes. I haven't done much fiction for Lighteated because I didn't have a costume or the inclination to bother, but this gives me an idea.

Suppose for a moment that there's something unusual inside the glass case, but it's not a miniature city. It is, instead, a gravitational singularity which powers the automaton. This singularity is contained the tank and recharged from the intense gravity near the event horizon of a genuine black hole. This is both the automaton's power source, and its primary tool. By channelling the singularity's enormous force, this automaton could bend space, granting it the ability of instant travel.

That's definitely enough of an "out there" concept to run with for the empty jarhead. It's strong enough on its own even without the jar (I could fake that with helmets), so it's definitely a go. I'm not sure if I want this to be a male or a female character, but I'll have to see how that goes. Now I just need a costume and powers for it

*edit*
I should note that the original bit of inspiration the "bottled city of Kandor" idea gave me was to steal from Men in Black and put AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE inside the jar. I just wish we could make the glass opaque.

Hmm... So, something like Dilli, the living balloon. Not a bad idea. Interesting...

Also, I kind of want to make at least two characters - one with an empty jar and one with a brain in a jar.

No, this one is on victory, but that you saw another one similar is reason enough for me to not want to make and use one. It was an easy concept, but it turns out everybody had the same idea. In fact, there's something else I might want to post

*edit*
Also, I am SO stealing "jarhead"

Thing is, this was about five minutes of forethought, and I don't think that he's all that impressive, headless gimmick notwithstanding. The story is weird but ultimately dull, he's not cute or charming and I feel he's a waste of a Think Tank, especially in light of what I've seen other people do with the piece.

So, with this in mind, I'm donating the character to anyone who needs it. The name, the story, the costume or any pieces thereof are out for grabs, or should be soon. Not that I expect anyone would want this mess, but hey, if you know how to salvage it, go right ahead. I just don't think I can do enough with it.

You mean the game where you can't form teams unless you're a Premium subscriber?

A lot of the City of Heroes villains are actually more tragic than reprehensible. The Circle of Thorns, in particular, are transformed into what they are less out of malice and more because of fear, desperation and the monstrous tragedy that destroyed their people. Personally, I find this to be one of the few games that can (or at least could) strike a good balance between tragic and reprehensible villains, making you want to understand your enemies, but never really making not want to stop them. In newer content, the onus is more on hating everybody than understanding everybody like it used to be, but the point stands.

Not that I disagree with you, mind you. It's just something I wanted to say

It's more a question of what "villainous" constitutes. Some people seem to want to come out feeling dirty and disgusted at what they've done, while others want to do evil AND have fun AND feel great at the end of the day. Westing Phipps is decidedly the former, and I can't say I'm thrilled with that.

The Twinshot story is a bit... Simple. Especially the end. It goes like this: 1) There's a traitor 2) Twinshot has been acting OBVIOUSLY suspicious so 3) Twinshot is the traitor! Sadly, anyone even remotely genre savvy will tell you that, no 3) Twinshot is OBVIOUSLY a red herring. But to make her a good enough red herring, the writers had us jumping to conclusions because that's how you tell a red herring angle in a non-interactive medium. If you can't make the player buy the swerve, then make the CHARACTER buy it, instead. It goes hand-in-hand with the "kiddo" thing.

But that's the catch right there. If you have a guarantee that every time you may up and decide to log in, a group will be available to take you in at your own convenience, then that is where melee characters get overshadowed by support. However, the catch is that this is a very big IF. If you can snag a group, support shines but melee still works. If you CAN'T get a group or just don't feel like teaming at the time, however, support drags while melee doesn't really suffer much.

Simply put, not having a team is guaranteed. Having a team isn't always. What that means is a good experience with melee is guaranteed, but with support this is not always the case. That's what makes melee characters more popular - they're just easier to pick up and go.

I've yet to see evidence to suggest this, though. It seems like it will just let Praetoria go to hell, not necessarily cross over to Earth.

But even if we accepted that this is the case... Are we really telling THAT story again? Heroes and villains must band together to fight a common enemy. We did this in the War Zone, we did this in Ourobors, we did this in Cimerora, we did this in the Incarnate Trials... Are we seriously doing this in First Ward, too?

See, I get that there isn't a true "villain" path through First Ward. It's the old "hero path that's depressing" approach to moral ambiguity. I get that. Technical limitations and all that. But I'm just tired of the "greater threat" theme. It's not bad in its own right. Hell, it's actually pretty good. I'm just tired of EVERYTHING being a greater threat and of villains constantly being roped in to save the world and sideline their own interests.

Johnny, you're starting to turn into a broken record. I respect your tenacity to keep bringing up your concerns for the AT, but you're derailing threads that have nothing to do with this in the process.

Bad example.

A radio station is a pipe. You turn the tap and get whatever's flowing at the moment, then it swirls down the drain. An MMO is a box of toys. You dig around in it until you find the toy you want to play with it and then put it back in the box. The toy never ages, it never breaks and it never goes away even when other people put other toys in the box.

In other words, if you don't like the new stuff, no-one is forcing you to play with it. I don't like Incrnates. Not one bit. I hate the very structure that holds the thing together. So I don't play iCrap and Raid Grind. The things I wanted to play still exist, my characters are still here and they still play like they used to. I've lost nothing, save for the opportunity for new stuff, but that sort of thing eventually sorts itself out.

Adding things you don't like to the game hurts you in no way, shape or form unless you want to go out and say that how other people dress their characters detracts from your experience. I sincerely hope you don't want to make that ill-advised argument.

No, I mean that Cerulean - a supporting character - is given more screen time and a deeper, more well-defined motivation than the entire story's chief antagonist. The reason people feel that the story "kind of ends" is a direct result of this. When your villain is weak and forgettable (and to make War Witch forgettable is quite a feat), then defeating that villain does not feel like a worthy milestone or a worthy climax. Some woman shows up, I kill her, the end?

The story needed a much stronger antagonist established much earlier on and involved with it much more closely. It needed someone we care to defeat and it needed a reason to care about defeating them. And, no, "First Ward goes to hell" is not a good enough reason when I can just leave. And with the Gumbo completely forgotten by the end, my one reason to care is off-panel. Essentially, Circe's defeat is a non-event. It's supposed to be cinematic and climactic and exciting but it's just "meh" because we've barely seen the antagonist.

I disagree. The launch-day story arcs don't have very good narrative in them, I'll give you that much, but they have Rick Dakan's enormous body of content and living, breathing world to draw upon to tie themselves together into a single, cohesive fictional universe that makes sense both in-story and between the different stories. Yes, the Library of Souls on its own is a pretty basic story, but it builds on an enemy group which has been established over the past 30 levels, which has gone from being seen as a cult to being seen as something strange to being revealed for what it really is. And many others tie into this group's backstory, such as the Banished Pantheon.

The Circle of Thorns are Oranbegans whose history ties back to Ermeeth and Hequat, whose story then ties back to Tielekku, who ties with Lughebu, who then ties with the Banished Patheon. In another branch, this whole thing ties into the ancient Mu and their descendants. The lost tie into the Rikti, who tie in with Nemesis, who then ties into a whole bunch of other things.

First Ward ties in with... Not much. We see Noble Savage and Katie Douglass, yes, but they've been retconned into completely different characters, and there's little else to tie this to Praetoria other than about one mention of Praetor Tillman. There's Diabolique in there, yes, but she has never been established, and last I heard about her in the 45-50 Maria Jenkins arcs, she was a ghost without a will of her own who served as Tyrant's herald.

The First Ward storyline is reasonably well told, but it's pulled completely out of an ***, and that hurts it greatly. It's good, but it has no legs, because it has no history, it has no future, it has no depth and it has no breadth. It's a slice of the world invented specifically as a container for these stories. Nothing from the greater world of Praetoria affects First Ward (save for a few small exceptions) and nothing from First Ward affects anything else. The zone SHOULD have a grand history of its fall, decline and corruption, but this is only ever glossed over. A good City of Heroes arc would explore this past, but such doesn't happen. Tillman's Asylum exists there, but aside from "It's there!" there's very little plot surrounding it. We break into it a couple of times, but it doesn't amount to much.

And I still don't know what that vortex in the sky was, why Circe wanted to control the Apparitions or why she stole Blind Indian Guy's spirit sight if the Apparitions aren't even spirits.

A good story is rooted in a larger world. It doesn't have to explain this world, but it should at least act like that world exist and like the story is referencing it, even if it's referencing fiction that was never written about. First Ward's storyline just suffers from an extreme case of tunnel vision: I see only the plot line and nothing else. I have no peripheral vision. I do not see the broader world within which this story takes place.

Rick Dakan and team did a marvellous job setting up a living, believable world for the game to draw inspiration from, but the writers seem to have forsaken all of his work and are making stuff up as they go.

It was added when SK transcended into SSK. What this means is that these days, you will almost always be either SKd up or EXd down on every team you join, even if it's just a level or two. Denying Exemplars their experience in a system which more or less forces us to exemplar every time we team would have simply keelhauled teaming altogether.

Technically speaking, none of the ATs specifically and expressly NEED a team to solo. The Evil Geko and others went on a small crusade to prove that Trapdoor was soloable by anything ever, and to their credit, they proved that much. The problem comes in two parts, however:

1. Yes, you do know the AT. I suspect you're a pretty good player, in fact. But the thing is... If you're not a good player, non-melee characters are VERY unforgiving. I recall trying to play Blasters, and while it proved very doable if I knew what I was doing, just a simple slip of the mind could cause instant disaster.

2. Melee bring a degree of comfort that non-melee rarely have. As a melee character, you have great tolerance for error and inaction. Sure, you can get yourself killed, but only if you make a whole series of silly mistakes, and you can usually see it 30 seconds or more ahead of time, which is PLENTY of warning to take action. As non-melee, and especially as a Blaster, mistake-caused death is usually pretty instant. By the time you realise something has gone wrong, you're already dead. And, yes, I do realise that some controllers are capable of just perma-holding entire spawns and being safe, but this comes at the cost of expediency.

Basically, melee characters are easy to play, fast to progress and easy to learn. They're not more popular because they're "better" or "stronger" but merely because they're easier to work with. A good Blaster can blow a Scrapper out of the water in terms of damage and even eight Scrappers couldn't dent some AVs without buffs and debuffs. But it's just much easier to pick up and play a Scrapper even if you've never played one before than it is to play a Blaster or a Dominator.

Of course, the flip side is that some of the melee ATs are SO easy to play that some people see them as simplistic, boring and repetitive, but they still end up being the most popular by a comfortable margin. That's not to dis non-melee ATs, but more to say that this is what I hope the future of MMOs holds - self-sufficient characters capable in their own right for whom team contribution comes IN ADDITION to their self-sufficiency, not INSTEAD of it.

That's what I mean - melee don't NEED other people, so you know that every time you log one in, you can play come hell or high water. "Squishies" can often do better, but they're dependent on who's available to do what at the time. In essence, I can play melee all the time or squishies some of the time, and that makes for lopsided popularity.

That said, Masterminds are the AT I feel needs the most love. Especially a new primary. I'd LOOOVE to see some Storm Troopers or Space Soldiers or anything futuristic that isn't pure robots.

But that just reduces her character to a two-dimensional carbon copy of CERULEAN from the same zone. Pure revenge as a motive behind a whole story, especially when your antagonist only appears in the story about 3/4 of the way, has to be handled with much care and great skill, and Circe the Sorceress is handled with about as much care as a man carrying five stacks of pottery down a steep flight of stairs while chugging rubbing alcohol with one hand. Basically, the simpler the story is, the better the storytelling has to be to make it interesting, as opposed to "My mother didn't hug me, so now I want to destroy the world!"

The funny thing is... Cerulean's anger and lust for revenge against Master D&D Nerd Parody is handled much better than Circe the Sorceress', because we spend so much more time with him and get to witness the bitter anger that he hides behind his cool exterior. Circe just shows up and goes "Hello. My name is Sorceress Serene. You killed my father. Prepare to die." There's something there, yes, but it's only mentioned in passing by a character who I just can't take seriously.

I mean, honestly, can ANYONE take Serene seriously? War Witch looks cool because despite her fetish gear, she still has an air of dignity and a great deal of self control. Circe has a constant scowling grin, a hairdo like she stuck a fork in a light socket and a "chin stripe," and she acts like Master Midnight Jr. Her pain doesn't come off as a genuine emotion, but much more so like the tantrum of a spoiled brat. A good protagonist really shouldn't spend so much time whining.