Samuel_Tow

I probably worded the questions poorly, in the sense that they were less questions and more suggestions

I would really like to see the Bats aura trigger only when I enter combat, because my vampire dude is supposed to have an aura of glamour around him to make him not be TOO obvious, and constant bats are, really, too obvious. However, when in combat, I do very much want to see lots of bats flying about, making a mess.

As for the Think Tank - I believe it's big enough to handle all existing character heads, at least at their default size, with any of them leaving the bowl. It might even be capable of handling some of the existing hairs and face details.

That said, one thing I noticed about the fish bowl helmet is it follows the shoulders, so when the character bends down into his combat pose, the fish bowl tilts forward, meaning that if it had a head inside it, that head would be staring in to the floor, as there isn't enough room inside for the head to really tilt much. The brain doesn't tilt inside the jar, either, but for a brain that's more acceptable.

Wanna' bet? The Fireman Helmet never made it to either New or Featured.

In a perfect world, people like you would have no power to deprive me of what I want in my catch-all game. So far, this game's world has been pretty perfect.

That's because it simply has a very high-resolution texture, about twice that of all the others. I've been saying this for years - you don't need future tech from space to make good faces. Just make their lines sharper by making their textures higher-resolution.

Hence, the Ouroboros explanation of "We had seen a timeline when these meteors landed in Atlas Park, instead." I have no problem with the timeline shifting from right under me and changing both the past things I've done (in the game) and the future reactions those things entail. So long as the timeline remains consisted WITHIN ITSELF, then it being consistent from one day to the next of real time isn't important.

Let me put it this way: Say I start a character in Galaxy City and this brands said character as having started in the "less popular" zone, thus making contacts occasionally referring to me as avoiding crowds. Years later, Galaxy City gets destroyed. My character still started there, but this "tag" now changes to my character being a Galaxy City survivor, which contacts reference, instead. Things have changed, my past has been re-written, but the timeline remains consistent within itself.

A full ret-con is bad, but it's still better than internal contradiction. Once you start changing events along the timeline, then good writing infers that you'd either write them so they don't contradict, or rewrite all contradicting entries so they are no longer contradictory.

Please understand that I mean no disrespect when I say this:

Your #2 is irrelevant, because you're talking about a player's meta-game experience as part of that player's memory. A character's history can easily be ret-conned, because that character's memory of in-game events is whatever the game says it is. If the game up and said "Your villain did not escape from the Zig on an Arachnos helicopter, he was buried under rubble in Galaxy City" then that's what happened. There is, of course, the balance between player concept and the story railroad, but the game is and should be free to ret-con at the very least its own in-game events.

Your #3 is also irrelevant, because players experiencing content which has been removed or altered are locked into their grandfather content until it is finished. This is why all of the original Mercy Island, Galaxy City and Atlas Park contacts were retained - if you had missions for them, you can at least finish them. A character caught in flux is errant to the timeline, but this is a temporary state. Once said character emerges from that state of flux, he is once more consistent with the storyline because his past deeds are ret-conned to be consistent with his future deeds.

This problem of inconsistent timelines exists only if you introduce the player's own knowledge of events, which is immune to ret-cons and re-writes. However, character knowledge can and should be tweaked where necessary. Even if it comes out of the blue.

Care to elaborate on that? At what point is it impossible, short of simply not knowing your own plot, to not contradict established stories, or to fix the stories you contradict? Surely the 5th Column to Council both job is better that current state of complete jumble we have now.

The problem with the Shadow Shard TFs isn't that they lack instance maps - they have enough random cave interiors to last 20 missions easily. The problem is that they ran out of PLOT. In fact, I'd be willing to wager a small sum that the Shadow Shard was conceived only as a basic framework idea without really writing too much "story bible" about it, with the intent to figure it out when it came time to add more stuff.

Well, that's one problem. The other problem is that, as per Jack's CoH dis interview, him and Matt designed the 40-50 game to last as long as the 1-40 game, which meant they had to add a LOOOT of padding. As with Unai Kemen's "To Run a Thousand Missions, Plot be Damned" arc, much of the Shadow Shard suffers for its padding. Why stop Crey by shutting down their base when you can shut down three bases in the Shadow Shard and run three 50-Rularuu hunts before each and then shut down another base in Paragon City? Why clear one instance when you can clear three and find nothing in the first two? Why find a whole verse when you can find pieces of it in five different instances one after the other?

The problem with the Shadow Shard TFs is that they don't have enough plot for the length they were projected to have, which produces complete crap like Dr. Quaterfield's TF. Here, have a read of a part of the souvenir:

Do you see the kind of blatant padding and pointless time-wasting? If Quaterfield really had enough plot for 22 missions, this wouldn't be needed, but his entire TF consists of precisely 3 plot points - 1. Crey have a portal to the Shard, 2. The Soldiers of Rularuu try to use it to get to Paragon City and 3. Shut down the portal! Everything else is just so much salad dressing and padding. It's taking a task and repeating it four times, the padding the space between every two tasks with large-scale hunts. Even Faatim the Kind's TF, which I believe is by far the most interesting in the Shard, is still padded to hell and back, and is essentially one giant case of chasing the Dragon Balls to collect the whole verse, all so that Faatim will trust you.

Here's an incomplete list of missions that do nothing but pad:

1. "I don't trust you, so do this padding task first."
2. "So you found nothing in that building? OK, lets try this one."
3. "Good, good. Not just three more to go."
4. "OK, so this had nothing to do with with the plot. What a waste of time!"
5. "But first you must secure a boat with which to travel to Paragon City."
6. "The item wasn't there? OK, time for plan B."

And so on. Any mission which wastes my time without advancing the plot in a way that not having done it to begin with would have made not a lick of difference is padding, and padding is simply not necessary.

The reason I like World Wide Red is it's 24 missions long and yet I don't recall a single mission of padding.

That's not an Architect mission, it's one of Vincent Ross missions. Specifically, the mission to infiltrate a Midnight Squad building. Each floor has multiple portals. One leads to the next floor and all the others dump you in a room with about 30 Spectral Demon lieutenants scaled at +1 to the mission. It was a clever idea, but it's also fairly easy to just check ParagonWiki for the solution.

In my opinion, dialogue trees are something that the game is simultaneously using WAY too much and not using nearly enough. That dichotomy comes from the fact that dialogue trees are never complex or branching enough to be meaningful, and usually end up constituting little more than a multi-page text screen.

However, if done right, dialogue trees could probably carry entire missions on their own. Remember once upon a time when those "choose your own adventure" books used to be all the rage? Well, those were entire "games" comprised of nothing more than combination of choice trees and event triggers. In fact, I remember reading one where even the combat was handled purely by choosing options.

A strong, variable dialogue tree could take as much writing, planning and work as an entire mission, but I feel having that would be worth it.

I believe the solution is to approach things with greater care and not contradict yourself. And when you DO change something in the lower levels, then trace changes up the level ranges so later content doesn't contradict earlier content. It's more work, obviously but... Well, that's just quality being quality.

No-one is saying that content progression should never change or that events should never be added to the lower levels that have effects later down the line. What I'm saying is that when something is changed, it should either be change so it doesn't contradict the timeline, or to the timeline should be changed to accommodate it. Moreover, a timeline SHOULD exist. Not necessarily stretching from 2002 to 2011, but still having SOME form of staggered information delivery and at least a few surprises.

If we take the view that at this stage in the game everyone knows everything and we should have no more mysteries and no more surprises, all we'll accomplish is turn what used to be an interesting world into a parody of itself.

Isn't that a console exclusive? At any rate, I haven't played it. If we're talking about examples, though, let's go with Half-Life. 1 or 2, either works. The episodes a little less so.

That's precisely what the problem is. Ambushes, in and of themselves, are not a bad mechanic. They're as legitimate as patrols. However, they seem to be just about the only mechanic the developers consistently use in practically EVERY new mission they make, and not only are too many ambushes too hard to deal with, the system itself begins to drag when it's overused.

I bring you back to Longbow: They are not a bad enemy group. They have distinctive costumes, a storyline which ties them to the Freedom corps and they have good writing, generally. Then you get to Nerva Archipelago and you have to fight Longbow for 10 level straight. And then you never want to see Longbow again. A slice of cake is tasty. A whole cake for every meal of every day for a year is disgusting.

That's how I see it, more or less. These days, I dump any costume recipe I get which I can't use on the Market for 1 inf specifically so people who want it can "cheat" the system more easily. Whenever I need a specific kill count badge to unlock a specific weapon, I'll solicit the help of a friend of mine or, if it comes to that, a ask complete strangers over global channels, and possibly make friends in the process. If someone asks me to help, I will drop what I'm doing and help out immediately.

As of right now, I'm doing what I can to trivialise the unlocking process for costume pieces both for myself and for others. If I could ELIMINATE it at the cost of, say, $10, then I would do so in a heartbeat. This game has more than enough things to earn and achieve. Cosmetics doesn't need to be among them.

I'm offering to literally and unironically put my money where my mouth is. Whether I'm wrong, biassed or psychotic, what difference does it make. You can't change that simple fact - I would pay full Booster Pack price for JUST the Rularuu weapons. I'm not saying this as a threat. I'm saying this as a simple fact. If and when the option becomes available, I will buy it.

Any character assassination beyond that is irrelevant.

As of right now, I have 40 Reward Tokens in total, 2 unspent. I don't know how many badges I have for them as I don't know when I stop getting any, but at least my tokens are all there... I think. They were 38 when Freedom launched, I think.

You know... I never thought about that. It's possible. That WAS my first purchase. I keep wanting to say I was at 36 reward points when Freedom launched, but I have 40 total now, 2 unused and exactly the same Paragon Rewards picked as when Freedom launched. I completely forgot we can get Reward Points from Paragon Point purchases, too. It's likely that's what those are from and I'm waiting for my actual monthly points to arrive. And when they do, I'll stockpile those, too because - like I said - the "consumable" rewards are badly uninteresting to me. As far as I'm aware, they're not applied to every character on my account but only on the one who uses them, and I don't want anything which works like this.

I agree completely. In fact, I suggested as much way back when. Leave in "Peter," just don't list him as a Malta member. Just say he's some obscure rich guy that we don't know who he is or who he's working for, and it's possible he's working for himself. Then suddenly a Zeus Class Titan shows up, but it's called "Strange Robot" and its faction is listed as ???. When you return to Roy Cooling, he instead says "Wait, what? You fought a giant robot? And then it self-destructed, destroying all evidence of where it came from? I have no idea who could have sent it, but I'll try to find out." Then your souvenir say that Roy led an investigation, but the trail was cold, as if someone systematically removed all evidence. Oh, and Peter? Yeah, he swallowed a poison capsule on his way to prison, so he can't tell us anything now, either.

You can involve the Malta Group in such a way that anyone who's already aware of them can guess what's going on, but that a player who's never seen them will have no idea. That's how you craft a good mystery.

For instance, the first time I ever saw a Nemesis soldier in my life was at the end of the second Sky Raider mission. All of a sudden, I round a corner and there's this red-con lieutenant who looks like nothing I've ever seen, he's called "Strange Soldier" and he's listed as... "Nemesis?" What's a Nemesis? Like... An enemy? So I check his bio and it talks about how these guys can use their long rifles both as rifles and as spears and I'm thinking COOL! I wonder who he is. Then, two levels later, I'm sent to Founders' Falls and I see these guys running about and I think "Oh! Oh, so that's who that guy was! He's one of THESE! Um... Who are these guys? Well, no-one really tells me, people just sort of acknowledge they exist. I mean, I remember my contact talked about "THE Nemesis, the archvillain who almost took over the United States in the 50s," but that's all ancient history to me. Are these his soldiers? Then 5 levels later, Arton Sampson sends me on a long chain of events to figure just that out - who IS this Nemesis all of those soldiers are talking about? Is this actually the same historical figure I heard about? That would be... Bad! And it is! And it's a good mystery.

That's how I'd love to see Malta introduced. Sprinkle them througout the lower-level missions, like a spawn shows up with a gunslinger in it, but as soon as you approach the Gunslinger bolts and you can't attack him and he has no description. Do that a few times, give no explanation so that when the player finally learns who Malta are, they can think back and go "Oh, so THAT'S what this was all about!"

Malta are supposed to be a mystery. They need to be treated like one. You can't have Roy Cooling just casually go "Oh, I can talk about Malta all day, but we don't have the time."

I suggest you learn to read, then, because that's not what I said, nor what you quoted. At no point did I suggest that Twinshot's arc was mandatory. In fact, that's not in the slightest what I was talking about.

What I said was I wan to run the old low-level content when I'm low level. NOT doing the old low-level content and grinding to level 5 is not running the old low-level content. I want to run missions for the old FBSA contacts. What does Twinshot have to do with that?

Please, next time you try to put words in my mouth, do have the decency to provide a quote where I said these things. That way, you don't embarrass yourself quite so much.

No, I don't put dialogues into my Architect arcs because... I can't. Last I checked, players aren't given the tools to create dialogue trees. And what does that have to do with farming or powerlevelling? I'm saying I want to play the game, not read endless text boxes and run through mission after mission of no enemies. City of Heroes is not the right game to have empty instances of nothing but talking. It's not very good at it.

Besides, Launch content never had a problem with giving me missions full of stuff to do AND presenting me with a persistent world and a consistent storyline. Why do new missions have to use gimmicks all the time to achieve a lesser effect?

Have you actually played the arc somewhere within the last seven years? Because it's nothing of the sort. Not a single mission in World Wide Red ends with "We accomplished nothing!" There is even a mission which a mole specifically gives you to waste your time and distract you, and even out of that mission you leave with clues to Malta's greater plan.

"Your Princess is in another castle!" is a storyline where most actions generate no consequence and could easily be skipped and the story would move forward just the same. Unai Kemen's "To Save a Thousand Worlds" is a good example - you have to search through probably 16 "wrong" dimensions until you find the right ones, and the act would suffer nothing if you simply went to the right dimension straight away.

World Wide Red is different. Each mission generates leads which advance the plot. Each mission produces clues which contribute to the greater understanding of the overall scheme. Each mission matters.

If you read the clues and briefings, of course.

And I'm not saying that off-hand. I've run this arc many times, and quite recently, as well. I SPECIFICALLY looked for pointless missions that wasted my time, and there were none. Not a single mission failed to advance the plot, and by quite a bit. Can some of those missions be combined? Probably, but it would be at the expense of making the story worse off for it. World Wide Red is a HUGE story comprised of at least three different parts that interact with each other in a multitude of ways, and it simply takes time to fully explore the situation and give enough substance to both the background world AND the current action.

World Wide Red is a feature-length movie. SSA1 and 2 are 20-minute self-contained episodes.

Except World Wide Red, if you take the time to play through it without skipping content, is roughly 90% doing things and only around 10% reading text. Each mission has a briefing, a debriefing and a couple of clues, but each mission is also around half an hour long with mostly fighting stuff involved.

It actually ASTOUNDS me that people keep insisting that older content is all boring reading when over half of my time spent "playing" through new content is spent reading briefings, captions, NPC dialogue, captions, clues, conversations, more captions, more NPC dialogue and more dialogue "trees." I've done more reading just playing through one of Twinshot's arcs than the whole of World wide Red combined, and that's three missions and about 15 enemy spawns between them. If that.

I like the old stories because they're gameplay with a story added to provide a reason for it. Almost all new verbose storylines that begrudgingly let you play on occasion.

Let me put it this way - after I've read my briefing, I want to kill a lot of things before I have to read more text. And when I read more text, I'd like to spend a lot of time killing stuff before I have to read text again. World Wide Red is a perfect combination of both. It gives me A TON of narrative, then gives me half an hour of gameplay before it bugs me with narrative again.

This concerns me greatly, because the replacement content is not as good as the content it replaces, at least in my eyes. It has fewer missions, less fighting, more gimmicks, more ambushes and more dialogue vectors. At least with Atlas Park, I can skip most of it, but if Kings Row, Steel Canyon and Skyway City lose their arcs and have them replaces with only three or four contacts, each with three or four missions, each with a mandatory dialogue somewhere in it, then that will be a HUGE step down from what we have now.

And that's a BAD thing. It was a bad thing in I6 and it's a bad thing now. Moreover, with the introduction of contacts like Ashley McKnight, Dean McArthur, Darryn Wayde and so forth, this is no longer the case. Now that the Find Contact feature actually works, we can even snag once ulockable contacts like Veluta Lunata without needing a badge for it.

How City of Villains handled it was BAD. Sure, hit level 5 and run a Mayhem mission if you want to. I have no problem with that. My problem is... What if I DON'T want to? Well, right now, CoV has a choice - Veluta Lunata or whoever the Find Contact interface pics for me. CoH-side, it's only David Wincott.