Samuel_Tow

Precisely. It's an empty question. There are no "better" ATs here, only ATs some people like more than others. If you like 'em both, play 'em both. There's no need to choose.

Unless you're asking about a specific character and need to choose for that one (which I don't think you are), in which case let's hear about the character first and we'll figure out what's appropriate then.

"It," not "they." It's a single Automaton in one of the one-off missions, and even your contact comments on how bizarre it is for the Rikti to be unable to tell it was an imposter and that Nemesis appears to have psychic tech at his disposal. I think the implication is supposed to be that he's been studying the Rikti for far longer than the rest of the world even knew they existed, in turn implying that he started the Rikti war.

Nemesis' technology has always had that uncanny ability to do the impossible, which it is actually directly described as doing multiple times in even the oldest plotlines. And that's kind of why I love the guy. Most people would look at making a psychic alien robot and think it's ludicrous. A few would try to make one anyway, spend ten years and eleventy billion dollars and come up with crude, unconvincing prototypes. Nemesis, on the other hand, sits down and works on the thing for 50 years and before anyone even knew he was interested, he has an automaton that does the impossible.

Some might find it cheating. I just find it awesome since he's really the only character in this game that gets this treatment.

"Most?" Are you referring to Broadsword and Broadsword vs. Claws, Spines, Dark Melee and Martial Arts?

Well, we do get to make progress against Crey, we just don't start a character's career having already made said progress. If there is any point at which I accept the "Crey is obviously evil" argument it's post-40 when you've already arrested and convicted the Countess and the corporation's dirty business has been exposed. THEN you can stop and say "Woah, these guys made the machine that's been inside my brain? Ultimate yuck!" Prior to that, though, I don't agree with it.

I spoke about this on the "spoilers" thread - if the game treats something like a reveal, I treat it like a reveal until the point when it is revealed. That Crey is "evil" is treated like such a reveal until the 30s when you actually meet them. However, before that point, you're saving their labs and helping their staff, like you would with with Prinkley and Sons or any other legitimate business. If the game treats them as a legitimate business (and it used to), then so will I.

See also: Tina McIntyre and the meeting with a cackling-evil Vanessa DeVore 5 levels before she's revealed to be the leader of the Carnival.

Morten is somewhat of an abstract concept, to be honest. She started out as sort of this amorphous shadow entity which fed on the energy of the living, until an event that's too complex to retell caused her to develop a conscience, solidify into a physical form and leave her den. For her, it makes sense to have more abstract, less visually defined powers, and the fancy hand gestures of Kinetic Melee just aren't appropriate. In fact, if I didn't hate support ATs, I'd probably have made her a Controller or Defender. I mean, she was a Blaster originally

Actually, my main quandary with Morten was always between Dark/Dark and Energy/Energy. I'll save Kinetic Melee for one of my more athletic characters.

Speaking of which, I was recently asked to write a recension to the diplima work of one of my colleague's students, and I ended up spell-checking her entire 40-page monster for her. It was rife with hideous errors, not all of which I caught. I mailed it back to her with "track changes" enabled, and later on received a shocked and embarrassed reply when she realise just how messed-up her typing was. And the kicker of the whole thing is that the scientific work was very, very good (she got excellent marks for it), but the presentation suffered, and suffered bad.

That's exactly how I feel when I read stories that clearly lacked an editor - they may be great, but they're still ugly as sin.

Actually, the conclusions you present here should NOT be obvious. I don't blame you for it, though, the actual game treats these things as obvious. I was once asked to review an Architect arc where the contact bluntly told me to raid a Crey warehouse. I asked the author "Wait, Crey are a legitimate business. What right do we have to raid their property? Shouldn't we get a warrant for this?" The response I got was one of surprise, to the effect of "Well, aren't they sort of a known villain group?" Well, no, they shouldn't be, but that simply isn't how the game treats it.

I don't know when this happened, but Crey turned from a legitimate business, the sort of modern face of clandestine organised crime into a moustache-twirling conglomerate of evil. I've heard people muse on why we don't just arrest everyone in Crey and put an end to the corporation, and the game doesn't really give me a good answer. Once upon a time - as you'll see when running pre-I1 Crey arcs - Crey were presented as a secret conspiracy. People at large believed them unconditionally and kept buying Crey Cola, Crey software, Crey pharmaceuticals, Crey industrial machines and so forth. We - as protagonists - knew they were corrupt, but no-one believed us, because people at large thought they were legitimate, if a little too ruthless. We could never prove any of Crey's crimes were truly their own, and even when we arrested Crey operatives, the Countess simply let them take the fall.

It's like if all of a sudden it turns out that MicroSoft were developing nuclear weapons or that AlienWare were coating their products in psychotropic drugs. I mean, yeah, we'd buy it if it were proven, but if MicroSoft came out with a new virtual reality gadget, would you immediately assume they want to kill you?

Crey are supposed to be a legitimate business that heroes simply cannot prove anything illegal about. Similarly, the Rogue Isles, though seen by US as a rogue nation, is still a UN-recognised state with a legitimate ruler, a legitimate economy and legitimate business. Aeon Corp. is the government's primary contractor, and Dr. Aeon is a legitimate, authorised executive of said business. Yes, WE know he's evil, but that's because we're in on it. The public doesn't know. Yes, Amanda Vines knows he's evil, but last I checked, she couldn't get her report out because of either her generators being broken or her signal getting jammed.

We shouldn't mix our meta-game knowledge of what the lore really is with our character's in-character knowledge of what the game has told them. Sure, you can argue that it's "obvious" to your shrewd, observant thinker, and I wouldn't argue there, but I wouldn't want to suggest that ALL characters are supposed to know this.

This is how a video game should be, in my opinion. It should be fun, relaxing and entertaining. It shouldn't turn into a second (or third) job. Every time you catch yourself dreading logging in but doing it anyway, that's alarm bells right there. I know some of you guys are so proactive you just like getting involved and providing for other people, but don't let that ruin your fun of the game. If you choose to look out for other players' fun, make sure you look out for your own first. Otherwise you get burned out, and hard.

When you put it like that, I'm not sure. I mean, they don't have access to Customer Support. I suppose we'll have to decide whether we want to pamper them or give them the cold shoulder. Do we want to take care of Free players and nurture them into the game, or do we want to treat them as "not customers" and let them fend for themselves? I don't really have a good answer to this, but it kind of feels odd that we'd want to protect them from griefing for free, but not let them team for free. It seems like picking and choosing when to pamper them and when not, and I can't really understand how that's decided, other than "That's what they went with, so there!"

That's a loaded question, to say nothing of a meaningless one. City of Heroes is a collection of features, and I dare say no single feature alone is worth subscribing to the game. You should, instead, have asked something along the lines of "Is the lore important/central to your gaming experience."

Story, plot and lore are crucial to any good game. In City of Heroes, they serve to inspire me, expand my horizons and bathe me in amazing ideas. When I am presented with good stories, I am moved to sympathise with the characters, care about events that transpire and generally be emotionally invested in the game. That's the sort of hook gameplay CANNOT offer.

"Fundamentally broken" is also a loaded term, as it implies that the lore is so broken that it cannot be salvaged. It isn't. It is, however, "severely broken" and in need of some serious TLC. The City of Heroes canon contradicts itself all over the place, when new stories are added, they often deprecate older stories, turning them into nonsense (see poor Angus McQueen) and some stories contradict themselves within their own narrative (see Roy Cooling). What's more, for every great, moving story written with love and talent we have ten mediocre flops the Shadowy Figure, Lt. Demitrovich, Roy Cooling and any of the "You go do that and I pay you!" dreck that plagues red-side.

What's worse is that a lot of even the newest stories suffer terribly on a purely technical level. I don't know if Paragon Studios employ an editor, but I've seen far too many story arcs ship with inexcusable spelling and grammar errors that really detract from the experience, and I've seen all too many written in a very ho-hum "Ikea erotica" fashion, boiling down to essentially a sequence of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened again." Just check out the Quaterfield TF souvenir to see what I mean - creatively bankrupt writing that strives for nothing more than to put SOMETHING in the briefing boxes, even if it's terrible.

Comic books can make sense and make for compelling reading. City of Heroes has many shining examples of this. But the timelines need to be straightened up and the writing cleaned up BIG.

That depends. Had you asked me before I heard news of Freedom, I'd have said "No." Praetoria was interesting at first, but it has been sorely overdone and its importance badly overstated. We had more or less a full year of Praetoria, and to me it looked like we were due for a year more. My beef with the whole Incarnate/Praetorian shtick is that it expects all of my characters to be politically-minded. It's not about just doing the right thing or doing whatever you like, you have to be loyal to someone, you have to fight in someone else's war, you have to report to someone else... This whole thing where my characters are always someone's lackey or ally or servant or such just never sat well with me.

If you ask me NOW? I don't really know. I haven't seen much of the I21 storyline since I've been busy with work and the Beta server has been wonky. But to be honest, moving away from Praetoria, even partially, counts for a lot. I like the idea behind the First Ward, I like the idea behind the Shiva meteorite and that's all I know about the story.

This is a loaded question for me, because I don't really even want an evolving, progressing storyline. I don't like having old content taken out of the game or rendered contradictory, and I'm perfectly happy following the imaginary "level-based" timeline without needing a real-life timeline to spice it up. For me, returning the Jewel of Hera or putting down Colonel Metzger is as fresh now as it was back in 2004, because in the timeline of my characters, these events are happening "now."

So, yes, I would like to see the development team spend a significant amount of time cleaning up their act. Fix the inconsistencies and contradictions, spell-check your texts (and actually read the so I don't have to facepalm over your/you're mistakes) and rewrite any arcs that come off pointless. And when I say "pointless," I mean arcs that have zero significance in the grand scheme of things. I don't care about virtual money that I don't even get. If a contact has my villain do something, have that result in something interesting. Not just "Go kill, come back, get paid."

OK, so let me see if I'm keeping track: Purple is bad because it's pink and brown is bad because it's poo. I suppose we can add that greenish-yellow hue to the list because it looks like puke and... What other colours can we think of that always get made fun of?

Slighly more seriously, it's a mage in a brown robe. How does that look like poo?

That's precisely where I stumble in trying to figure out the reasoning behind the faux-F2P change. They're handling the game such that Free players aren't really supported, they're just left to fend for themselves and you're actually really expected to make a token purchase pretty early on... But if that's the case, then indeed, why not just ask for a token purchase as a prerequisite for opening an account? And if the intent is to attract Free players and only later convert them to Premium players, why not go father and facilitate at least the basic "MMO stuff" for Free players - stuff like teaming?

It just seems like Freedom is being designed as a "purchase" type game, but it's being managed like a F2P game. Do want Free players running around for any length of time or don't we, anyway?

The unreasonable hatred of pink aside (it's only been "girly" in the last few decades), it's the Circle's BACKSTORY that was always serious and grim. Their attire, however, has never been so. Aside from the few robed minions, most of these guys ran around in funny hats, huge shoulders and long skirts. Most traditional "high mage" outfits are goofy, and that's the POINT. These are wizards. They don't dress for comfort and convenience and they certainly don't dress to impress. They dress in whatever way is appropriate to their arcane arts, and if that means huge hats, pointy shoulders and long robes, then that's just what they wear.

If being kidnapped by a hot pink wizard causes you to question your masculinity, then you are missing the point - irrespective of what they look like, these guys are the real deal. They've lived for 14 thousand years, they possess arcane knowledge and power unparalleled in the modern world and they have no respect for our laws, culture or traditions. If they want to dress in ridiculous hats, absurd shoulders or pink robes, then they are simply going to go ahead and do that because no-one can really stop them from doing it.

The Circle of Thorns have always been over-the-top in terms of looks but ridiculous in terms of appearance. A lot of magical factions in City of Heroes are. Or are we somehow considering men dressing as shamen and not wearing underwear, or men wearing ridiculous car grill helmets to be any less absurd?

What, really, changed about the CoT aside from the extra detail? They have the same hats, they have the same shoulders and they have very similar robes. The colours are loud, but no less so than before. The only truly significant change is the addition of a ton more detail, but that was kind of the point. And that, believe it or not, was the problem with "damn sexy energy mage" - he was too plain to qualify as a mage.

Nothing wrong with Warhammer 40 000. It's one of the most distinct franchises still in circulation and despite the myriad of copycats, the original is still head and shoulders above the rest if for no reason other than its audacity.

I firmly believe that just because something has been done before by other people, it doesn't mean that it can't be done WELL if you put an interesting spin on it. The new Circle do that quite well, I think.

I'm a European and I don't even want a Christmas tree for Christmas. I've been arguing up a storm against the overly complex character designer currently on Beta. I still love those Circle designs. They're ancient. They're arcane. It makes sense that their design would be overloaded with details, because of the complexities of their art. Yes, these no longer look quite like clothes. To this I say "meh." The CoT still have their hoods and their concealed faces, which is all the link I really wanted with them. If they no longer look like monks, that just fine, too.

Well, even without Global friends, you still have Local friends to work with, and while those aren't idea, we made due with them for, what? A year? Two years after Launch? It's cumbersome but doable.

I'm also not sure that Global channels are the best way to engage Free players into the community. For the most part, they're player-made, player-run and player-recruited, more akin to large amorphous SGs, in fact. That said, I would still like to give Free players at least one server-wide channel that they can chat with that isn't Help. Or Arena... Good god, not Arena, though now that PvP is dead, that might not be a bad idea.

I'm not really adamant about giving Free accounts access to THE friends, chat and teaming systems, so long as we give them access to A VERSION of these systems. I'm also not that serious about allowing Free players to approach and proposition Premium and VIP players (though giving Premiums and VIPs the option to permit this would be cool) so much as I want to allow them to better communicate and team with each other. I don't really want a Free player to be able to send me tells or invite me to teams (without my explicit consent), but I would kind of like to allow said player to sent tells and team invites to other Free players.

Basically, cutting Free players off from Premiums and VIPs I get. Cutting them off FROM EACH OTHER? Not so much.

It actually is fairly uncommon. Both Cleave and Shatter (and Head Splitter, while we're at it) are cones with a specific design intention of hitting multiple foes in a line, which is why they're given a slightly longer reach, so they're not a PITA to use. Knockout Blow is the only non-7-foot melee attack that I can think of, and for the life of me I can't figure out why that is.

Still, if Titanic Weapons is all 9-foot melee attacks... I'd like it

Hey, I'd be all for it

Like I said - I don't find "flamboyant pope" to be bad thing. We need a few of those in there, as well. I like that they managed to combine what was sinister about the old CoT with what made that very same group so very goofy, and still keep them stylish, at least in my eyes. I'm sure we'll see more hoods and simpler designs for the low-level minions, but the flamboyant, over-dressed grand masters are pretty much exactly as I'd have liked to see them, given the limitations of the engine, back spikes and all.

That's sig-worthy material right there, and I'd use it if my tribute to the mod who mod me weren't so dear to my heart