Samuel_Tow

Wait, what? The only way to be villainous is to follow your leader blindly? Are you seriously saying what it sounds like you're saying?

The power arc is only a "rogue" path because City of Heroes decided to be anal about its degrees of villainy. It's not a hero's path, it's not good AND it has the benefit of being the most dignified storyline in probably the entire game, heroes and villains included. You end up crossing a lot of people, you end up putting a lot of people in danger, you end up killing a lot of people for your own ends.

Yes, Power characters end up helping people. So? Should "evil" be defined as "the opposite of good" where how villainous a character is is decided by what a very heroic character would do in any given situation and reverse-calculating what the opposite would be? Do no villains ever in fiction or real life end up inadvertently helping people? Are do no villains gain power and comfort by essentially tricking people into liking them and giving them stuff for free and granting them amazing power? Is that not precisely what Lex Luthor is?

Easy example: I'm a self-interested villain. I arrive in a small town where a vicious gang is oppressing the local people for protection money. I don't care about that one bit, until the gang leader comes to try and muscle money out of me. I pop his head off his shoulders like a Barbie doll and his gang scatters to the four winds. The whole town is happy and offers to give me supplies on the road ahead. Does that make all the mass graves I filled in in the previous town over any LESS evil?

We're back to the same old root problem - "evil" is badly misunderstood in this game. It's drawn up as the opposite of good, and if good is pleasant, then evil must therefore be unpleasant. Frankly, the entirety of Dr. Graves' storyline, excluding the very end of it (somewhat) is largely unpleasant. In many ways, it feels like someone took the Twinshot arc and made one that's diametrically the opposite, ignoring any of the subtleties of what makes a good villain, and the fact the heroes and villains are more alike than most people think.

Villains should not hail from Saturday morning cartoons where they cackle about how they will "Rul ze vorld!" and hissing like a vampire at a cross every time they accidentally do something even remotely good.

Yeah, I kind of had a similar idea here:

I think you and I are on to something quite interesting, I'd say. If we ever got customizable Granite Armour, that's precisely what I'll do to my one and only Stone Brute for his Granite Armour look, whether or not it's a full model swap. In fact, I think I can make the thing look BIGGER by using my own costumes, but there really isn't a point to doing that now. It doesn't matter when the power hides my character entirely.

No. BABs told us this straight to our faces several years ago and Tunnel Rat just confirmed this in pretty unambiguous terms, as well. Adding Painted Broadsword, Painted Broadsword Fire, Painted Broadsword Glow, Painted Broadsword Smoke, etc. all to the same linear list is not acceptable, is far too much work and is far too difficult to maintain if any changes need to be done to anything. Making multiple duplicates of every weapon is not a workable solution.

What Tunnel Rat suggested - at least what I infer she was implying - was to add an aura similar to Costume Auras in the form of a weapon held in the hand of a player model, keyed to only play when a weapon was drawn in a similar way that Combat Auras only play when a character in any of the many combat mode activation sequences. This has the upside of only needing a small selection of auras to be made, which would then apply to all weapons as well as keeping the lists from being cluttered. This also has the downside of this aura not matching most weapons very closely and possibly tying up our sole aura slot.

An additional solution which I suspect may be viable, but for which Standard Code Rant applies, would be to code weapons like Shields. If you've noticed, a shield is essentially a separate model linked to our character rig, but that model has its own mounting points for things like spikes, skulls, emblems, effects and so forth. Weapons should be able to be done the same way, so that a sword could have a single mounting point for an aura out of a list of auras made specifically for that sword. The upside of this would be that each weapon would have an aura that fits it and that would still not clutter the list or create multiple duplicates. The downside to this is that it requires a lot of work to make several auras per weapon, and it probably requires even more work to re-rig existing weapons to have mounting points for auras in the first place.

In either case, I'm optimistic about Tunnel Rat's "can do" attitude towards the problem and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my fears are just a combination of paranoia and my profound ignorance of the underlying systems.

See, the Television arc pissed me off even more than Dr. Graves the one and only time I ran it, and I think I know why. Two reasons:

1. I'm not American, and thus know next to nothing about American pop culture. I've seen a grand total of five episodes of the Simpsons, not a single one of Family guy, only the one South Park movie, I have not seen American idol, Big Brother or anything of the like, I only know Fox News in name, I haven't seen almost any original American commercials, I don't know what your newspaers, magazines and television shows say, I didn't learn there was anything to be said about Charlie Sheen until recently and I still don't know what that's all about, I know the name of Oprah Winfrey, but I don't know who she is or what she does, I've seen Mtv twice in my life back when they were still showing Daria and Beavis and Butthead and I was seven years old... Need I go on? I don't get American pop culture, so I don't get American pop culture references, so I can't appreciate what humour the Television arc might have and I'm only left with a lazy mind control plot that offends my senses.

2. There's room for a much, much, MUCH more interesting story with the Television than dropping in references about a man watching TV with a clown, which I assume is a reference to the Simpsons. In one of the arcs, you can see the image distort, break up into static and appear as though there is another image and voice hidden beneath the picture you are seeing. As though some kind of tangible cosmic intellect is hijacking the airwaves and hiding in our boradcasts, arranging pixels and frequencies of sound to fool our minds into seeing and hearing things that aren't actually what's on the screen. For just a moment, I felt like a genuine fictional story with an actual plot was going to be told. And then it just ended. No mystery, no resolution, no reason. Just a trite "TV. IS. WEIRD!" rhetoric as if straight from a moral guardian's mouth about "One Nation Controlled By The Media," which I honestly find offensive to my intelligence (the story AND the song in the link).

All in all, the Television is the perfect storm of things I hate in an arc. It's offensive to my character's intelligence by having him mind-controlled, used, abused and discarded with no gain whatsoever and thinking like an abuse victim, it trades narrative for pop culture references I'm never going to get, and it trades a potentially interesting, mysterious plot for the most basic, most generic kind of unnecessary life lesson. To be honest, this is probably my least favourite arc IN THE ENTIRE GAME, with Dr. Graves being a VERY close second and Westin Phipps a close third.

Thanks, I needed that

I interpreted it completely the other way, myself. I asked before assuming I was right, of course, but the way I figured was thusly: Account unlocks are things unlocked for the entire account in the same way account-wide badges are applied to every character you create, account-wide costume pieces from Boosters apply to every character you create and so forth. Character unlocks are not unlocked for the whole character, but only the specific character you're playing, like the Roman gear, the Rularuu weapons, all game-earnable badges and so forth. These are things that are unique only to the character who claims them.

Granted, I was used to "claiming" these things by performing in-game actions rather than directly claiming things off mail, but account-wide unlocks worked as I'd have expected them.

That, and all my veteran rewards appeared to have migrated to my Account Items while my Character Items were populated exclusively by enhancement unslotters, enhancement boosters and other things which are pretty clearly single-use consumables lest the Paragon Market be driven pointless, so at least for someone with rewards in both sections, it was easy to infer based on what rewards were in which section.

I'm just angry that my Email is now perpetually red.

Leather panties? How did I miss that?!? I'm off to try it!

*edit*
Or I would be, if the servers were up...

I'd have been happier if Scirocco wore shoes, but that's besides the point.

Personally, if I had a choice, I'd choose to work with Kalinda or Mathew Burke. I have very little interest in Arachnos and even less interest in Longbow and no interest at all in their struggle for power. If I had the option to fight Snakes and rob banks instead of being dragged into yet another Arachnos vs. Longbow struggle, I would definitely choose that. Hell, Moongoose was and is my favourite low-level contact. But we can't have instances in the low-level content, so...

As for Graves, I'm not playing that arc again. Ever. Even if just for the hideous dialogue trees. I will not have words put in my mouth without being given a choice in what they are, and if it means avoiding new content, then so be it.

Err... That's precisely the kind of arc I like the most in this game, and always have I like playing City of Heroes, and City of Heroes is beating up dudes in instanced missions. All the fiddly mechanics introduced to complicate and hamper this just take away from my gameplay and interrupt my state of flow.

This is complete nonsense an a narrow-minded misreading of what a roleplaying game is. It's polarly opposite, but no more reasoned than the allusion that a role playing game is a game where you play a role, and "Tank" is a role.

Please forgive my insolence, but your argument is simply hollow. "Roleplaying" constitutes more than speaking in ye olde Englishe and acting stupid. Roleplaying can be something as simple as giving your character a backstory and keeping said character's backstory consistent through his actions in the game. My own Mage-Killer Po, for instance, hates mages, so when given the choice, she will take missions against the Circle of Thorns and Banished Pantheon over missions against the Council and the Freakshow.

Roleplaying with other people is completely and utterly immaterial and unnecessary in this case, because what matters is the character, not the player. City of Heroes is not the right game to identify yourself with your character and try to act the part, because this doesn't contribute anything to the game, at least to people who don't enjoy BEING their characters so much as WATCHING their characters. You discount story because players don't talk funny, yet story is just as important to the experience of a game as it is to the experience of a movie or a book.

I play this game not as a means to insert my head into my screen. I play it as necessity to the purpose of watching it play out before me. I want to experience the story, not participate in the story, and I want to see the action, not be in the action. I'm perfectly happy sitting back in my swivel chair, a good two feet away from anything happening on the screen, and let the game entertain me from afar.

And if that's what you believe, then that is a very narrow definition of what roleplay is. By that definition, City of Heroes isn't a role-playing game, nor is any game ever made to the best of my knowledge, nor would such a game ever be in the slightest remote sense interesting. What you're describing is theatre, not a game, and there's a reason I took up gaming and not performance arts.

I think the Praetorian Power arc is probably the closest to this we've ever seen in this game, even if that too assumes I want publicity. A lot of it comes down to the moral choice arcs, I think. There's that word again: Choice.

On the one hand, you have the inexplicably Resistance choice, which is basically "Woah, I'm in trouble here, and I need help to save myself from the Loyalists!" which, really, is a reasonable thing to do. How long CAN you live a lie before your sins catch up to you? On the other hand, there is the POWER choice, which is basically "I'm in trouble? Bah! No-one controls me! The Loyalists want to use me? I would like to see them try!" and that's also a reasonable thing to think, if you were just that confident in your own abilities.

It's that "To hell with your realism! I'm too cool for that!" line of thinking which is sorely missing from both Villain-side AND the end of the Power arc where you have to essentially kiss up to Tyrant as your final moral choice. Even if I shied away from using my own work as examples of how villains can exist within the City of Heroes fictional world without being someone's lackey, I can still point to the Power arcs and go "Like that! More please!" We know this is doable, we know this is awesome, so why couldn't we have had more arcs like that on the actual villain-side?

That's a very good way of putting it. The new introduction missions tend to assume that my character is a blank slate which didn't really exist prior to getting caught in that building collapse in Galaxy City, and that I will be building this character up from events that happen to him/her over the course of said character's adventures. Speaking from the perspective of a less customizable, less story-driven RPG, I can see how this might be a safe bet. After all, most Fantasy ones tend to start with you being a peaceful farmer, your village getting murdered and "What kind of hero will you be?"

This has never been the case for me. Ever. At no point have I made a "blank slate" character in City of Heroes who made it past level 10 without being deleted to make room for a much more interesting character with a long, complex backstory. Even if we ignore my whims, it was my impression that even traditional P&P RPG characters came with baggage and backstory. In fact, playing your typical aD&D story, such as Icewind Dale, the game would attempt to auto-generate backstory for my characters, describing their past adventures in vague detail, and explaining why they all ended up in the same tavern at the same time to form their party.

For me, making a blank slate character is functionally impossible due to the process by which I create them. For me, inspiration tends to come from other media. I'll find a character concept that someone else has done that I really like and remember it. I'll roll it around in my head for a few weeks until I have an idea for who this character is, how he came to be, what adventures he lived through and why I think he's cool enough to make. Only once I have a complete, fleshed-out, whole character with backstory, motivation, personality and actual character will I ever consider making said character. In essence, none of my characters will set foot in City of Heroes until they've actually had a lifetime of adventure. Even when they're not direct transplants of old stories I've written, they're still transplants of other complete stories I made up just for said character specifically.

"But Sam" I can hear people saying "you can't expect your eldritch god come to earth to have the power to juggle planets from level one!" Of course not. That's why every character I make has explicit reasons for why his amazing power is limited at the start of the story, even if he had it in full control at the end of his origin story. The reasons vary, but they're usually convincing. A few random examples for no real reason:

Inna is supposed to have as close to "absolute power" as I've ever depicted. She doesn't however, because said power is scattered across the infinite cosmos and it will take a very, very long time before she can reabsorb it.

Stardiver is an indestructible, enormously powerful ancient automaton who feeds on the energy at the cores of stars. So why isn't she enormously powerful now? Well, she recharged from the sun recently, and it takes her a very long time to "cool down" before her systems can resume operating at peak capacity.

Mother Haggan: The woman in question. She never had amazing power to begin with, she was just a very smart, very amoral scientist. It wasn't until she was picked up by the Order that she gained the ability to implant real cybernetics into her body and operate the facilities needed to develop more. It will take time before she can make herself stronger and possible smarter.

I'm not a god-mongering Mary Sue, believe it or not. I'm just fine with my power being limited in the low levels. Hell, seeing that level 40 Storm Elemental at level 16 was actually genuinely very cool (though a unique description for the thing would have been cool). It's not power level that bothers me, it's the game writing my characters for me that I really don't like. And that's precisely what Dr. Graves' arc does - it writes my character for me as something I didn't intend to write.

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On the whole, I don't agree that story arcs can't be written to not assume who we are as characters and still be good. So long as the arc asks me to do things that make sense from a logical or rational standpoint, assuming we're using the logic and rationale of evil, then that's enough motivation to drive the plot without having to write out my dialogue in ellipsis-laden text. I don't need to be told why I want to do something - that should be up to me to decide. I don't need to be told how I react to something - that should be up to me to decide. I don't need to be told what I said - that, too, should be up to me to decide.

The game's narrative should focus on events - actions and consequences, as Maros puts it - and let US decide why we choose to do what we're told to do, how we react to it and how we go about it. The last thing I want is the game role-playing for me.

Pretty much, yes. Our forums have, believe it or not, a wealth of proper, even great English if one were picky about who to learn from and who to ignore. I don't want to go badmouthing other forums, but in this one, the learning is there for the taking. It really depends on whether you're looking to pick out the best examples of English from the cleanest speakers, or whether you're looking to save a keystroke off every word, coherency be damned. I chose eloquence over expedience, and I think I made the right choice

No, not really. I recall browsing through pre-release I21 screenshots at one point and marvelling at the new powers and graphics until I came upon this coin thing over Marauder's head and my first reaction was somewhat akin to that of a cartoon housewife seeing a mouse on the floor "Eeek! Help! Get it away! Ooh! Get it away! Get this monstrosity away from me!" Having seen them in-game for real, my opinion has not changed by much. If anything, I hate them even more now because I've had to watch them for longer.

That's not my argument, Scotty. That's what the forum populace always pulls out when one complains about the tutorial or the coins. "Well, today's gamers are dumb, so you have to catch their attention!" or alternately "Wow has things like this and people can't see past their noses, so City of Heroes should have it, too!" If those are the actual governing arguments behind adding spinning coins, then they do little more than demonstrate a profound disrespect for prospective new players, finding it necessary to jiggle keys in front of their faces lest they become distracted by other game.

I find the coins to be a hideous, horrible abomination and would like to disable them on my screen. This doesn't mean I hate the idea of the coins themselves or the people who like to keep them on. I wished for the same thing when contacts grew auras under their feet in olden times. If you or anyone else like the spinning coins, more power to you. But I'd like to disable them on my screen just the same.

You're in a building that "Marcus" gets sucker-punched into and brings down on top of you both.

Setting up my settings is always the first thing I do in every game I play, especially a brand new one. It's difficult to tell which button will be comfortable where until you actually get into the game, it's hard to judge how much what graphics settings will lag on your system, it's hard to judge what you want certain options to be.

And even now that I've set up default option files for everything, the game STILL loads the wrong window colours and STILL loads the wrong chat settings, so I have to go into options and fix them for every new character I make. And, thanks to some bug, now I also have to fix my window colours every time I restart the client.

That, or something like it, may well be what I end up doing. I think I'll just run with Operative Whatshisface until I hit level five, then ship off to Port Oaks and find work there. Get away from the new content as quickly as possible, as it were.

You know what's funny, though? At the end of Graves' third arc, I told him "This has been a massive waste of my time!" and he said "Has it really? You got a lot more powerful and now you have a patron." Yes, I got a lot more powerful, but no thanks to your shoddy missions devoid of any action and thus devoid of any XP. I got strong doing OTHER stuff, like Veluta Lunata's missions, which brought me three times the experience all three of Graves' arcs combined. And yes, I got an Archnos patron... That I never wanted in the first place. That I have argued AGAINST having since I7 rolled around and told me I had to have a Patron to have a Patron Pool.

I honestly thought we'd gotten past the whole "brownie points with the Spiders" and "good := Longbow, evil := Arachnos" nonsense and the game was heading in a bold new direction. But now. It's the same kowtowing to Recluse and his circus and the same old eagerness to serve Arachnos. You know "How to fix villain-side?" Not like that!

When I read about the new starting content villain-side, people had me convinced that it's far more self-serving than the old one, that I could kill a lot of my contacts and be my own villain. That's precisely what I was told - repeatedly - in the "fix red-side" thread. And yet it's the same old trudge. I've been able to kill a grand total of ONE contact that didn't even bother me all that much and I've had be Arachnos' monkey because big ole Scirocco effectively bullied me into it with threats of violence and implications that if I don't, he'll actually war shoes instead of running around in his pantihose.

I may not be crawling through literal caves hunting literal Snakes for Arachnos, but I'm still crawling through caves hunting snakes for Arachnos. As let-downs go, this one was massive.

I'm completely the opposite. I ran the old Tutorials on all three sides for absolutely all characters I ever made, aside from the one or two I was forced to make IMMEDIATELY in order to show their costumes to friends. The new Tutorial, by contrast, I ran once on Beta with a hero, once on Live with a villain, and I never want to see it again, because it has nothing in it that I'm interested in. It has no meaningful fights, it has no meaningful missions, it doesn't teach me anything I might have forgotten. It just wastes my time.

Call me odd, but I'd rather spend 15 minutes doing something I enjoy than 5 minutes doing something I hate.

I agree

Please don't take this as a put-down, but I think you're biassed. Your character fit the very, very, VERY narrow niche of character types the arc is written for, and so you had fun. My character did not fit it at all. Mine was intended to be aggressively intelligent, which the arc doesn't allow for (and which doesn't require super powers), VERY reserved in her mannerisms, to say nothing of polite to an exception, which the arc doesn't permit with the boorish attitude in the dialogues, very precise in her expression and very exacting in her command of the English language, something that the borderline slang and plethora of ellipses in the given dialogue don't permit, and above all dignified in her conduct with everyone and anyone.

I played through the arc with Mother Haggan, my cultist technocrat who serves as technical engineer to an Order of Salvation superficially dedicated to eradicating all evil, but practically and most often seem massacring innocents on suspicion of being tainted by evil. Of all the Order cultists, Haggan is the only one who didn't join the Order through indignity, and as such is immune to insults by virtue of her almost infinite patience and well-skilled in verbal debate by virtue of her wide breadth of knowledge and high intelligence. She is capable of handling both high praise and humble humiliation with the same stoic dignity.

Virtually NOTHING about this character works in this arc. The villain the arc assumes I'm playing is a low-brow, rude, impatient, angry villain all too eager to strike it big, but like Willy Wheeler not really succeeding without the help of a mysterious benefactor, in this case Scirocco. I do not, as a point of fact, have ANY characters that fit the template this arc requires. Had I known it required my villain to be an oaf, I would never have run it, but there are two problems with this particular act of clairvoyance:

1. No other arc in the game - at least that I'm aware of - assumes so much about my character and requires this specific a character for its dialogue to make sense. Some are more railroading and specific than others, but just about ALL of them will work with all characters to some degree. This one doesn't. At all.

2. At no point anywhere in the arc am I given a clear idea of exactly what kind of villain I'm expected to bring to the party - the stuttering kind, it turns out. The only way to know what the arc expects me to bring is to play it, invariably with the WRONG villain, so that I can infer from its style and narrative what it wants me to be, and only AFTER that can I know what to bring. It didn't truly dawn on me just how unlike anything I've ever made my villain had to be in order to make sense, which was far, far, FAR too late.

I'm glad it made sense for your villain to act this way. It didn't for mine. At all. It was, in fact, almost diametrically opposed to what would have made sense for my villain, and the lack of options really cements this to being specific to only one kind of villain anyway. I don't like an arc which puts words in my mouth and doesn't let me choose what those words are, simply because what the writers think is cool almost never seems to match up to what I think is appropriate. Choice is one solution to the problem and NOT NOT NOT putting words in my mouth is another.