Samuel_Tow

So, essentially, Kathie Douglass is Mender Tesseract now? I get that she may be angry over the Seer programme, but I don't get how you turn into a sarcastic person when you weren't one before.

Read what I said again - customers shouldn't be put in a position of having to read the fine print and spot the catch in a document that's intended to inform. Well-written documentation should lead people to infer what it is the documentation is trying to say anyway. Badly-written documentation leads people to assume things that are functionally false, and which can only be proven false by very careful reading.

This isn't a legally-binding contract. There's no reason to rely on slight of hand and careful wording, because its point shouldn't be to mislead but to inform. It is at this crucial task that "you keep nearly everything you paid for" fails, because it's both so broad as to be meaningless and it leads people down the road of false assumptions.

Now, of course, people shouldn't assume. There's no reason info text can't be written more clearly. And it's not "nearly everything," at that. You don't keep the Architect, you don't keep Inventions, you don't keep the Market, you don't keep Incarnates, you don't keep Controllers and Masterminds, you don't keep the 12 slots per server. You can argue definitions and specifics, but this doesn't change the fact that that bit of text needs to be more clear about what it's saying.

That's the problem - it shouldn't be providing such a huge grey area specifically because it leads players to believe they're getting something they're not getting at all. Considering Paragon Studios aren't in the conman business, priority one when selling a product should be to let players know exactly what they'll be getting ahead of time specifically so you don't have people subscribing thinking they'll get one thing and getting another, instead.

I get that sometimes getting people excited over the cool stuff is more important than listing every minute detail, at least from a marketing standpoint, but this isn't the case here. For one, this isn't the place to try to get people excited, as people go there to learn what they'll have, not just to check out all the cool stuff. ESPECIALLY since that's a list of what people will KEEP, rather than what they'll get. For another, the next page over has a precise listing of what Premium players get to keep. There's no reason to be so vague as to be downright misleading.

Finally, there are better ways to say this. As I understand it, what Premium players get to keep is their Veteran Reward status, all the Boosters they've bought and all the character slots they've purchased. That's not even close to "everything" we've paid for, as it outright ignores large sections of both expansions, CoV for being basically "free" at this point and GR for not having all of its features attributed to its own purchase, now that THAT'S free for VIPs, as well.

Better wording is necessary there, and it needs to be done yesterday. It's a simple text change. That can't be that difficult to fix.

That's really all I need to see to realise that you are a GENIUS! That's brilliant, and I feel like such a square for not thinking of it, myself! I love it!

Paths is exactly what we need. They don't even have to be hard-locked like the Praetorian ones. Just let me know which contact is the next in the, say, Mad Scientist storyline and I will so go run missions for that one if I'm playing a mad scientist whether I'm forced to or not. Or if my mad scientist has a darker side of hatred and depravity, I can run the mad scientist content first, then run some from the "destroy all humans" branch until I get to the next contact tier.

"Nebulous villainy" is and has always been the problem: No-one knows what a villain is supposed to be, and so no arc can ever really assume what a villain is supposed to be, so they're all stabbing in the dark. Is this evil? No, how about this? Still no? Oh, how about this? Not this either? Well, err... How about this, then? Well I'm out of ideas.

By contrast, breaking villains down into more specific categories and writing stories for each seems like a much more orderly way to go about things. So my polite villain doesn't make sense to run the boorish thug storyline. "Well what the hell were you doing running a boorish thug storyline with a polite villain, dumabass!" would say the people, and they would be right. If I run the wrong story arc when there IS a right story arc and I KNOW what type of story arc it is would indeed be my mistake entirely.

Right now, no one story arc is written entirely appropriate to any one specific type of villain, and rather than being inclusive to all, that ends up having something to bother everybody. Breaking villains down into types the way Resistance and Loyalists of Praetoria are broken down would make things so much simpler and our choices so much more clear ahead of time.

Check my edit. I was wrong. That promise is in the official documentation on the site. That's a pretty big "oops" on their part.

Which is patently not true. This needs to be taken out of the official documentation before Freedom goes Live proper. "Everything you already purchased" is just a horrible choice of phrase that ends up being far broader than the deal actually includes, and is just not true. This has to go. Fast.

I do, yes, and I've been using it almost exclusively since I got it, even when I'm close to an actual Market. It's much more convenient to me to do my Market work next to a vendor to whom I can dump what's left than it is to travel around town, speaking purely as a player before concept enters into it.

As for Star, this does present a very good idea. I can have her float above a hilltop off in Eden and do her shopping from afar, and just show up to drop stuff off and pick stuff up, which wouldn't need much more than some form of identification, which I assume she'd have.

If I end up having to, I will, but I don't think it's necessary. I'm trying to work as much as I can within the existing system, and so long as I have the choice, picking the contacts who I don't have to ignore the briefings of seems like the easier option.

All the people frothing at the mouth over missing acid grenades might disagree with your assessment there The cornerstone here, though, is that Star isn't "forced" to interact with contacts so much as they're a source of information. They're useful for what they offer, but not for the small talk or bonding.

Possibly, but I'm not really trying to prove anything And maybe this is just me talking based on my own personality, but I have to say there's a difference between "interacting" with people and "communicating" with people. Just by the nature of my job, I very often have to deal with people I don't like and don't want to speak with, so I've learned to simply keep my distance from people if I don't really like them. If you've ever spoken with a person who meets you with a "What do you want?" and then dead silence, that's more or less what I mean. You can tell when someone you're speaking with doesn't really speak with you, and so will do and say the least possible.

That's how I see Stardiver. She doesn't like interacting with people, but is willing to do the tiniest bit of it in order to get what she needs. Anything that can be done by just showing up, giving things, taking things and leaving to read her briefings out in the field by herself. I'm less trying to exclude things I can't do than I am trying to figure out how to be able to do the most stuff without stepping out of character, and that's where these "excuses" come in. I'm trying to figure out how I can have Star run contact missions without breaking character, and it seems like picking the right contacts, only ever visiting them in person and cutting interaction down to as short a time as possible will be possible to explain away.

Good point. Influence itself is kind of a weird idea in general, and many people interpret it in many different ways. Is it money? Some kind of IOU? A stipend from the city? Am I doing favours for the city? Influence is where I'd really have to think sideways, but I think it can be done. Picture the following:

Through her small selection of friends, Star has had a "Hero ID" issued to her. She didn't do it in person, her friends just took her specs to City Hall, pulled some strings and legalised her activities. As such, she has an account with all the registered stores in the city, and that account gets credited every time she does something that the city benefits from, a form of quid pro quo stipend. Whenever she needs any kind of "shop" services, she can just enter the store, flash her ID card and the employees essentially let her rummage around the parts bin or use the equipment in the back, then charge her account on the way out based on what's missing from their inventory or what the records on their tech show. She doesn't really have to speak with anyone so long as employees just keep out of her way.

When I say "reclusive" and "shy," I don't mean to say Star is afraid of being around people, but more so that she just doesn't want to communicate with them ever and doesn't want to interact with them unless strictly necessary. Think Star Trek's Borg - you can invade their ship, but so long as you don't shoot at them, they'll ignore you. That's kind of what I mean. That's actually the original concept that intrigued me about her. Picture the following:

You see this tiny, female-looking alien walk out of a store and then sit around outside basking in the sun, apparently. You don't know who she is or what she's doing. Your friend elbows you in the ribs and says "That's so and so. She doesn't speak with anybody. Go chat her up!" So you go to her and talk at her and she completely ignores you. You keep talking at at one point she just turns around and walks away. She's kind of like a stray - just sort of there. You don't know who she is, what she is or what she's doing there, but she never seems to bother anyone and she does help protect the city, so you just leave her alone.

In other words, she's less the "I live in a cave away from society" recluse and more the "I refuse to acknowledge your presence" type of social recluse. OK, so maybe not precisely "mute," but "uncommunicative." And, yeah, maybe a classic anime Emo protagonist, but we'll see how that goes

Aaah! OK, I found it. I'm staying white, though. I prefer Forum Cartel to VIP

Anything launch of anything ever doubles as a beta/stress test. After 21 Issues, I'm not sure why people insist it's ever been otherwise, or indeed that it can ever BE otherwise.

Time for backstory: Err... Of the game, I mean.

Long ago before the game even went Live and possibly before it even went into Beta, "contacts" didn't exist. Instead, players were supposed to get missions from so-called "Mission Terminals." There's talk of this being abandoned from a very old pre-release E3 video Jack did way back in 2004 or 2003. I assume this is what the Info Kiosks were originally intended to be. The reason so many of our old contacts are interchangeable no-personality stand-ins is, no doubt, that their original stories started out as Mission Terminal missions which didn't really HAVE a person to give personality to.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Well, if you treat contacts as just basic sources of information, then it more or less makes sense why someone who doesn't like people but needs information would be seeking them out. Obviously, this only works for old contacts hero-side, but it is a start. If you need further reason why reclusive people would seek out other people, I direct your attention to the Incarnate Trials where people who hate their fellow man are nevertheless driven to seek help by circumstances, and you can tell their reluctance from their actions and words.

In short, if contact dialogue is written loosely enough, having a shy character interact with them can be said to make sense. At the end of the day, you have to remember what "contacts" actually are in practical terms - they're people who can provide information that you contact. It shouldn't be that big a stretch if I pick the right contacts.

That's a good point and something I hadn't thought of. As a general thing, I really dislike the need to train from signature NPCs because it assumes they know how to muse my powers better than I do. If they were a training ground or a research facility that just provided the means for me to advance my powers without necessarily TELLING me how to advance them, that might be better, but contacts training me is just... Ugh!

This is a part I'm probably going to have to fudge. In general, Star has access to ABSURD levels of power, but I can't start her at level 50, so we need an excuse for why she's not that powerful right from the start. Well, when Stardiver dives into the core of a star to forge and recharge, she exists the star "overheated," meaning that her internal batteries are working hard just to contain the heat and energy she's acquired. In order to regain her full power, Star needs to bleed an enormous amount of heat into her environment, which is why she looks for planets on which to do it, what with the vacuum of space being so poor at conducting heat. As she cools down, she grows stronger as her mechanics return to full power, hence why she wouldn't necessarily need trainers in concept.

All of that said, your suggestion of Luminary is a good idea, and she's located in a central hub zone where I usually go to sell before levelling up anyway. I'm sure I can come up with a reason on why Star needs to speak with luminary before becoming stronger, possibly as a means to provide some kind of powerful heat sink so that Star doesn't damage people or buildings when she vents her internal heat. Yeah, let's go with that.

SOs in themselves are kind of out of character in the way they're described. They always have been - how many cybernetic eyes would my character really need to implant into her face when she doesn't have a face or eyes and instead just has a negative space fold inside her helmet? One of Star's defining characteristics is that she technically doesn't consume any supplies and doesn't need any form of support. You can't afford to need established services when your status quo includes roaming outer space in search for the right kind of star where life may not exist for light years around.

I can, however, probably fudge this somehow as Star making use of the Cook's Electronics monitoring equipment to recalibrate her own settings, as it's not that common for her to find a sentient race with sufficient scanning equipment to give her an external reading of her own emissions. I can also probably treat Tech enhancements less as gadgets and implants and more in the same way Training enhancements are interpreted - as knowledge of how to do things better. As she runs a series of scans, she learns how to optimise her movements.

Considering I only ever really use store-bought SOs and sell all my drops, this should be easy enough to fudge, easier still when she has to move onto Mark IV. I might end up having to leave the Rikti War Zone to seek out Mark IV and Luminary, but again - that's a small price to pay, and between mission teleporter and Ouro portal, that shouldn't be a problem.

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Like I said - I'm aware that this is an esoteric concept to the mechanics of the system. Long as I'm going to defy the rules in one way, I might as well go whole hog and do all the things I always wanted but never thought I could, right?

There is, I've seen it around the various appropriate sites. However, having played other bishujo games with satanism in them and actually having watched Bible Black, Origins, Revival and New Testament, large portions of which I had to skip... Yeah, I'd imagine said game would take a very strong stomach. Not recommended.

Perish the thought! You know, I've tried our competition. I've lasted no more than a day in either one, and the central reason for this has always been the same - I don't like comic books, and those games are too much like exactly the things I hate in comic books. Hell, Champions had me fight a "Mr. Zombie." I think that's one of the last things I did in that game, and that's not a coincidence. Truth be told, when I was actually trying to decide whether I wanted to buy the game, one of my biggest dilemmas was "I like games, but I hate comic books. Is this one really for me?"

Turns out City of Heroes is all-inclusive, and it's a good game DESPITE being inspired by comic books, as evidenced by having a fan who not only doesn't read the things, but doesn't actually like them, either. From the word go, City of Heroes has been described as a game inspired by comic books, but not necessarily constituting a comic book simulator, and that's pretty much the whole reason I'm still here.

City of Heroes is more a game about the outer limits of my own imagination than it is about any one specific genre or framework, that's why I'm still here seven years later, never really wanted to go anywhere else. If I wanted to experience a comic book, there are other games that do that better. I'm not playing those games, and I wouldn't play those games if you paid me. I'm playing this one. Just as I don't want City of Heroes to be more like WoW or EQ, so I don't want it to be more like Champions or DC. We need to stop trying to define City of Heroes by what it tries to emulate and realise that Cryptic and Paragon have created something wholly unique in and of itself, and I dare say something that I don't think anyone has ever made before. That, to my eyes, is what City of Heroes "should be."

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Somewhat sideways of the above, I'm not saying that a good game with a crappy story is as good as a good game with a good story. That's never the case, because it takes good gameplay AND a good story to make a game great. However, I've played shoddy games with good story, and I can only ever play those once. I would love, for instance, to go back and rerun the old Soul Reaver games, but they're TERRIBLE in term of actual gameplay. Maybe Defiance is about so-so by ripping off Devil May Cry, but the other two are just painful.

There are ways to integrate story in a game that doesn't infringe on good gameplay. Again I cite First Ward and its Apparitions. Fight one of these things and that encounter will tell you more than any wall of text or conversation ever could. Fight a few of them and you'll have a complete story told better than text ever could. Moreover, I found myself playing through First Ward last night and greatly enjoying the story when I realised... There's a crapton of gameplay in this story AS WELL as a really good narrative! I love it! Having gone through content-lite arcs like Graves and half of Praetoria, this was a very welcome change of pace - I get to play the game AND experience the story without one interfering with the other. How cool is that?

Yikes, that's an angle I hadn't thought about. Why, indeed, ARE we in the Rogue Isles? I thought the point of putting villains off in their own separate city (aside from PvP, which could easily have been cured by instancing) was so that it would make sense for villains to run rampant and not be constantly harried by police and heroes, thus presenting a fair counterpart to the hero game. But then how are the Isles different when my villains in the Isles are under even MORE control than the villains hero-side are? Even people as relatively weak as Frostfire and Atta have more agency, and they show up around level 10-15.

And it honestly just doesn't need to be like this. I freely admit that writing arcs for villains is hard, but it's even harder when you don't want them to feel good about themselves. Maybe I'm just a demanding git, I don't deny that, but it feels to me like the game could do so much more to make villains feel good about being evil and about screwing over everybody that it simply almost never does.

Dean/Leonard got it just right - contacts work for me and don't give me any lip, I work for myself, someone interferes and messes everything up and in the end I'm mad as hell and I can't take it any more so I take on everybody, put everyone to shame and kick some serious ***. Sure, we all lost, but Protean lost WORSE, and at the end of the day I'm still the one calling the shots. Why can't we have more arcs like this one? It's not like Dean/Leonard are end game contacts. It's a 20-30 arc, for Pete's sake!

Nor can I yours. You read barely anything I wrote let alone anything anyone else wrote and you chose to insult me instead. Rather than demean myself repeating what I've already said in some vein attempt at discussion with you when that's clearly not why you came here, busy as you are with character assassination, I'll merely state the following:

The Dr. Graves arc should assume so much about my villain when it has no way of knowing what I'll write, and it should offer more choice in its dialogue trees.

If that's what you got out of my post, then we really missed each other by a mile. I don't mind story content and I definitely don't mind walls of text. I'd PREFER walls of text, as a point of fact, to the constant irritating need to insert conversations in every missions every couple of spawns and conversations with every objective I meet. I'm not even against comic book content as such, even if I don't particularly care for it.

What I AM against, however, is treating City of Heroes like a comic book instead of a game. If I wanted to read comic books, I'd read comic books. If Melissa believes City of Heroes is a comic book in the shape of an MMO, she is wrong, though it would certainly explain the nightmare that some of the more recent arcs have turned out to be.

The basic fact is that any game designer has one task that reigns more important than all the others combined - to make a good game. Irrespective of what genre the game is or what it's inspired by, if it's not a good game, it has failed. If you want to have a good game with a good story, first you need A GOOD GAME. This is vital and central to anything else the game has going for it, because if the game is good, then it can support that good story in question. It can support a mediocre story, too. If the game isn't good, by contrast, then no story is going to save it in the long run.

There are ways to integrate story into gameplay in non-obtrusive way. For instance, the First Ward Apparitions are able to possess people. Instead of being told about this in text, Apparition instead show up as easily-killed people with glowing eyes. When these people are killed, Apparitions spawn from their bodies. Without reading a single line of text or being exposed to a single comic book page, I quite literally knew all I needed to know about the Apparitions from nothing more complex than facing one. As a point of fact, their text description told me LESS than actually meeting them in-game did.

Movies have a rule - show, don't tell. Games have a similar one - do, don't show. Stories in games are best received by their players when they are integrated into the actual gameplay or, failing that, when they don't hamper and interrupt said gameplay. Including comic books at zone loading is hugely disruptive. If comic books HAVE to be included with these stories, then the game's current method of distributing them is sufficient, and he arc does a pretty good job of delivering its story without necessarily spending a lot of time talking about it. In fact, I'd appreciate that arc even more if it didn't throw as many fast-changing text boxes at me faster than I can read them.

In a nutshell: Story in games is not bad, if it's done so that it doesn't take away from the actual game.

That's what I'm saying. Alistor's introduction is basically him saying the word "power" in quotes and waiting for me to start running a TF for him. The arc is pretty good, and the motivation - if you ignore some rather jarring aspects of it - is decent. But there needs to be a reason why I want to bother in the first place, other than "I as a meta-game player paid for this, directly or through my subscription."

Villains in general need to have a bit more complex of a motivation than "power" in quotes. It can still come down to power in the end, that's not my beef, but geez, guys! Hide it a little! Put a little meat on the bones. Give me a reason other than "because it's there." I know you can do better than this.

That's certainly an option, but I like to consider it a last resort. I'm pretty sure that if I just plan ahead, I could avoid all the conversations in the game by just picking the right arcs, especially hero-side. Not all of them, mind you, but most.

Yeah, that's possible. It's probably what I'll have to end up doing where it's unavoidable, such as with Mender Ramiel (I'd rather converse than run Incarnate Trials... Ugh!), but I find it more interesting just how far I can go on just explaining things away as things OTHER than communication. When a contact asks Star what she found in that abandoned lab, she doesn't explain, she just hands him over the thingy. Since I won't be using the phone, that should be an option a lot of the time. If She has to get a contact's confession, like with Jimmy the Preacher, for instance, there are always recording devices, so when the contact asks what Jimmy said, Star doesn't explain, she hands him a recording.

I'm curious to see how much of the game can be explained way by handing evidence directly to the contacts as opposed to explaining anything to them. With picking the right contacts, of course. The more I think about this, more I want to go all the way against the grain just to try what it's like

That's the point - ideally, that's precisely what I DON'T want to occur between my character and any of the NPCs. The whole point of this thought experiment is to theorise a character who CANNOT and WILL NOT communicate. I can fudge communication this way or that way and arrive at someone who can't actually speak, but for all intents and purposes might a well speak.

That's... Boring, honestly. Call me crazy, but I have 50 of these. It doesn't matter of Star speaks, writes, thinks or gestures to other people - as long as she's communicating, she's communicating and I don't want that. It's far more interesting to operate from the baseline that she CAN'T communicate with people in any way beyond a very rudimentary yes/no response and try to extrapolate what I'd need to do to be consistent with the character concept from there.

I'm not looking to take a hard-to-realise concept and make it easier, because it's that difficulty that makes it so interesting. I choose to make Stardiver as I have not because it is easy, but because it is hard, to steal a line from JFK

Why not? If parody is all you can see such a concept as, then this is precisely the kind of thing I'd take seriously and run with. That's what makes characters in this game so interesting - taking the road less travelled. Or, in this case, the road SO MUCH travelled that there are hardly any good ideas left. So, finding one that's both good and left should be an interesting ride.

If I think back to all the characters I've made, I don't recall a single one of them starting as anything BUT a horrible, dumb, absurd idea that I nevertheless ran with and made my own. That's part of my creative process and part of what drives me. I could make something that's easy to justify and write about, but that just doesn't do anything for me. Eh, I have the most fun when I dare to be stupid. Sometimes my characters end up so stupid they rewind the counter and end up being awesome, and sometimes they end up just plain stupid. You win some, you lose some, but I'd rather try something stupid and fail than try something certain and succeed.

That's what makes life interesting

*edit*
Actually, the Carnie prisoners in the First War brig gave me a great line to describe this: "That makes NO sense... I love it!" Words to live by

Tradition, stubbornness, that's where all my characters are. Truth be told, it would have been only Victory, but I ran out of slots there back when we had only 12. Right now, I've used up two full screens of both servers plus about half the way down the third on both. I was contemplating expanding to a third server recently, thinking of maybe one of the EU ones, but then Paragon Studios went and added a fourth page of character slots, so that's killed my ideas for expansion.

Basically, no real reason, and believe me - that's the hardest reasoning to argue with. I've been on there for, what... Six, seven years now? It would take something major to shift me, short of running out of slots.

Sadly, I only play on Victory and Pinnacle, and I only have the name reserved on Victory as of right now, so a trip to Infinity just can't happen. I would if I could, though

I mentioned it elsewhere as something I was planning to do during Maintenance. And it does require patience because it's a very slow, plodding movie heavy with exposition and philosophy. Once I've seen and understood it, it becomes harder and harder to sit through on subsequent views as I know what it's talking about yet it spends so long talking about it anyway.

Call me weird, but I just love unusual ideas. The first time I designed a character who'd lost her arm crashing-landing from space, I thought that was one of the more interesting things I've done. You know, to have someone with a whole, fully-functioning prosthetic arm? The first time I designed a character who was dead as a defining characteristic, I thought that was pretty cool, too. Or the one made entirely out of sentient organic goo with no internal organs whatsoever. Or the alien bug queen from space who gave birth to an entire race of incredibly aggressive, world-devouring insects.

Anything that's unusual and presents a novel experience - even if that novel experience would be a bad thing in real life - immediately catches my eye. That's why I have almost no basic humans in costume among my characters. They're all aliens, robots, animals, dead or otherwise unusual. The weirder the better, I say