Samuel_Tow

I've seen City of Heroes attempt to use Origins in a similar manner, actually. Take that large bomb of the Destroyers, for instance. If you Tech, you can spot the hidden wire, cut that and disable the bomb that way. If you're Natural, you're fast enough to yank the wires simultaneously. If you're neather, you do your best but trigger the rest of the explosives. It... Kind of works... Sometimes.

However, even that is a bit wonky, in that the exact meaning of any of the five origins is rather a very loose concept. Does Natural mean "very skilled human" or "super alien?" Does Tech mean one who makes machines or one who IS a machine? Is a Magic character a caster or does he just have a magic sword? These are all questions which become relevant once you try to use origins for... Pretty much anything, really. Even SOs are questionable. After all, how many cybernetic eyes do I need to implant into my face before people start mistaking me for a bipedal insect? How many cybernetic hearts can I fit into my chest before my rib cage starts sounding like a kickin' drum beat?

Assumptions about a character are very dangerous in instances where specific characteristics and their implications are not set in stone. And in City of Heroes, no such thing exists.

Well, I don't get accused of hating everything for nothing, after all. I've had people overestimate my age by a factor of three from just Internet communication. I'm told it's because I sound like an angry old man.

Really, though, what I hate here is how forced the comedy is here. A friend of mine once said there's a difference between humour and comedy, and the Duray joke is so deep into comedy it crosses over into parody. Self-parody, in fact, which is just demeaning to the game.

Fusion and Jane Temblor are strong enough characters on their own to carry both the narrative and the humour without help. Yes, their slacker attitudes do go some ways towards diminishing the tragedy, but that's kind of the point. We are seeing people's lives being destroyed, refugees hiding in the sewers, an entire city destroyed, and these two jerks are making fun of it and bickering like children. It adds insult to injury, and makes defeating them that much more satisfying.

It has the potential to be a very strong story, but we just couldn't resist spoiling it with corny in-jokes, because hot-diggity-dog! City of Heroes is just a silly goofy little game. It cannot possibly be taken seriously, so why bother trying when we can take the piss out of own game? It's cheap humour, it's not funny and it's insulting to what is otherwise a very solid story, and one of the few left in the game which are both well-written and well-enacted.

We don't need this parody, and all it does is detract from the experience.

I don't believe you. You don't sound British enough. Try harder.

Please!

The Incarnate SYSTEM isn't. Incarnate LOGISTICS, on the other hand...

Speaking only for myself, I've never done this, and I come from a background of writing where this actually standard practice. I've gone out of my way to never, ever have a narrator or another person explain a character's emotions, motivations or personality, at least not as certainties. If such have to be explained, it's either the character doing the explanation personally, or another character operating under the "apparently-possibly-probably" rule of giving subjective impressions.

That would really depend on the people you're playing with. Some are more easily suggestible and less bothered by these kind of intrusions, but some - and I use myself as an example - do get bothered by these instantly. It just sounds "wrong" to say things like these, and my immediate instinctive reaction is to respond with "Oh, yeah!" I tend to run with a pretty good idea of what each character involved is like and what can be expected of said character, so whenever something aberrant happens, it's pretty quickly obvious.

Now, whether people will mind if the game assumed their characters thought what the players had in mind for them to think anyway, my guess would be no. However, the chance of a static system guessing even a single player's ideas spot on is very low, and thinking people don't do much better as they usually perpetuate their own ideas, instead.

I ran that mission earlier today, actually

Venture makes a good point that I neglected to mention - there's nothing wrong with telling the player what sensation a physical interaction created, because this isn't specific to the character and doesn't rely on the character's interpretation.

For instance, if I were to say "You touch the mysterious object and find it covered in alien goo. Your hand sticks to it like in glue." then this is not inferring much of anything about the character. He touched alien goop and this is what happened. Granted, one can argue that "My hand is covered in super-slick forcefields!" or "But I'm a ghost, I can't stick to things!" but these concerns are far rarer and far easier to justify, even by the players themselves, especially when they occur in situations that aren't terribly important.

Telling people their physical reaction, such as "he punched very hard" or "this room is very cold" is necessary and unavoidable, and that's A-OK. Even if your character is a creature made out of frost and ice, he should still be able to conclude that, yes, it's very cold. Not necessarily uncomfortable. Just cold. "It's cold" is a fact, not a matter of interpretation.

This is as significantly distinct from telling a character what his conclusion from said experience is, or what his mental reaction to it should be. This assumes several things which are never safe bets - it assumes a mentality which would lead to this conclusion, and it assumes a certain psychology which would produce this reaction. Telling a character that something seems like a good idea is distinctly better than telling him he thinks it's a good idea. Both statements are vague and possibly wrong, but the latter is far more intrusive, to say nothing of insulting, especially when it's wrong.

I tend to pay less attention to the distinction between player and character, and I've simply never felt that problem in either first or second person, but I'm probably biassed that way. I've often said I approach the game more as a writer than a roleplayer, which means I never so much as even have the option to confuse. Anything which happens on-screen happens to my character, because "I'm not even there." That doesn't mean I won't get the odd moment of saying "I have Team Teleport, I can help you." when I get into the actual gameplay element, but story-wise, I've never so much as tried to identify with any characters on-screen. Possible personal bias, I admit.

If you're referring to what I think you're referring, this is actually server lag. That is to say, it has nothing to do with the speed or clarity of the connection between you and the server, and all to do with the processing speed of the server itself. Just like your machine will chug and turn into a slideshow if you overdo your graphics settings (or log into City of Villains), so the server will chug when it has to do too many computations, and everything will happen slower. If you're in a situation where every second, so many things happen that the server can't process them all, it slows down, and a "second" of server time becomes rather a bit longer.

However, because player movement, and the entirety of the interface is run entirely locally, your client will try to take a guess as to when your powers should have recharged by timing their animations to your much faster seconds, so you end up with icons for recharged powers, but asking the server to fire them causes it to tell you they're still recharging on its end.

I'm not sure what causes this, in particular, but I believe having too many people in the same place fighting the same fight puts a large stress on a small part of the hardware, causing it to slow down. The solution, really, is down to hardware at that point.

That's good advise, actually. Don't watch a bad movie with me, because I WILL go MST3K on it post haste. My patience for bad comedy is particularly low. I don't think I've watched one that hasn't made me rant more than laugh in years.

Just because something is complicated doesn't mean it has to be ill-understood or difficult. It could easily mean that it's unwieldy, often unnecessarily so.

Consider how one would get to the Test server for the first time using the old updater. You would need to:

1. Create a new shortcut to CohUpdater.exe on your desktop.
2. Edit said shortcut and add -test to the end.
3. Make sense of the *** backwards menu choices, pick a folder (that's always *\CohTest)
4. Reinstall the whole damb game.
5. Wait eight hours.

And if you don't want to wait, you instead have an extra step of copying the contents of your entire City of Heroes folder to your CohTest folder.

And then you have to reset AAALL of your graphics settings, options, windows settings and so forth. Even if you took the extra few steps to copy over your default settings file, graphics aren't saved to one of these.

This is complicated. Needlessly complicated. Unpleasantly complicated. ANNOYINGLY complicated. Compare this to how the NCsoft Launcher does it.

1. Select City of Heroes Test.
2. Click Install
3. Wait.

The end. Simple, easy, efficient.

"Complexity" is not a positive trait in any system, and should never be regarded as such. "Variety," "customizability" or "interactivity" may be the traits you guys are looking for. Any game system should always strive for as simplified and streamlined a design as possible, hiding its complexities under the hood and attempting to represent the greatest possible array of options and interactions with the simplest possible player interface.

And a giant lump of many-times-redundant recipes and a zillion components and three different currencies is not simple. It's a pain in the ***.

I actually find "you" to be more ambiguous. If a block of text says "I feel" or "I think," that's attributed to the person saying it, and if the text is explained to be coming from your character, then that's who it should be attributed to. "You feel" and "you think" is a little bit more amorphous, because "you" tends to be addressed to the reader, which in this case is the player. There's an extra step of immersion in reading "you think" and translating it into "he thinks" as regarding the actual character.

It's no more ambiguous, but at least to me a lot less intuitive. Simply because people don't talk like that.

And, yes, I'm aware of second-person narration. It's was fairly popular in point-and-click adventures, for at least one instance, and I did a lot of those when I was a kid. The thing, though, is that in those cases, it mostly narrated events happening on-screen that graphics at the time were too poor to depict. Once you start writing emotional content in the second person, things start to break down, because it's unnatural to speak like this, to me at the very least.

I have a problem with disembodied narration in general, to be perfectly honest, and when parsed through the sensibilities of physical communication - which is to say a conversation between two people - it becomes almost insulting. Telling another person to his face that "No, what you REALLY want is this!" is, to be perfectly honest, the height of intellectual insult. I'm probably biassed, since I tend to be an easy target for that sort of expressions on the forums. This is often the case when a person chooses to paraphrase another's words and distil another's meaning, but more often than not this ends up producing a straw man, be it intentionally or otherwise.

In simple terms: Telling another person what he thinks, how he feels and what he wants should be a no-no in practically every circumstance.

The sentence grammar is suspect, yes, but I only noticed that after I'd copied it over. I'm not sure it's salvageable without a general rewording.

I do, however, agree with the character-jacking problem. It takes me, personally, out of the narrative since I always end up arguing with the narrator in my head. It's very easy for an impersonal narrator to be wrong when written for a player character that cannot be accounted for. A lot of the game's flavour text is written as though made for a book or a comic, which makes it inapplicable for a game setting.

However, it's important to remember that the game can't give us a free hand in making choices in developer content. There are only a limited number of possible paths we can take, and a player has to be given reason why only those options are available. Character hijacking and telling us what our characters want is one way, albeit a POOR way. Presenting the facts and concluding the "only" logical or reasonable choices is another possible way, but that has its own problems, as well, in that the "logical" and "reasonable" characters sometimes aren't, often obviously in such cases.

And I'd still prefer the latter way just the same.

The joke is that Fiusionette is stupid. That's really the sum total of it. And it's not even a funny "ha-ha" joke, it's a funny "NPC companion AI sucks!" joke.

Once upon a time (and possibly even now), Fiusionette's AI had her rush ahead of her companion player, aggro additional spawns, die and fail your mission. She was incredibly weak and her powers did almost no damage, turning the mission into a very annoying, very unpleasant one. Players complained, then complaints turned into parody and Fisuionette was compared to a "n00b" player. This was supposed to be funny, and so the joke began.

Because about half of Faultline's storyline is sketch comedy, the joke seemed to perpetuate, and was extended into the Rikti War Zone, where Fiusionette was officially written as a ditzy klutz with a low IQ and Faultline was written as an inexperienced nitwit who was unsure of himself. Their relationship was forwarded, as well, with then next "joke" being a botched tell from Faultline to Fiusionette where he forgets to add the slash in /t, and a comment from Fiusionette as a captive, telling the Rikti: "You just wait until my Build Up recharges!"

In general, Faultline and Fiusionette were written as a lovey-dovey couple of semi-competent class clowns with a ton of play-driven humour surrounding them, and I use the word "humour" very loosely.

Enter Fusion and Jane Temblor. They're the opposite in terms of personalities - rude, crude, arrogant and insufferable. They are, however, the same in terms of approach - incompetent and inefficient. Their relationship, instead of a kissy-huggy one, was turned into sort of a love-hate relationship as exhibited by Bonny and Clyde style couples in crime. It's no longer as adorable. It IS amusing to see them knock each other down with their finishers, though. That's funny.

Then we have Praetorian Duray teaming up with Primal Duray, for the finisher. See, Fusion and Jane are actually amusing in the way they play off each other and the way Duray plays off them. "If you've just about wrecked everything, then why am I standing on an intact highway?" "Eh! Blow it out yer ear!" Not exact quotes, obviously, but that's how it comes off.

So when Praetorian Duray complains about the incopetence of Fusion and Jane, Primal Duray quips "Just be glad they're not the local version!" in a way that makes me expect to hear that followed up with a laugh track or a rimshot. Because... Jim Temblor and Fiusionette are funny, right? Because they're both clumsy and stupid! And Fusion is a WOMAN here! Laugh, damn you!

It's out and out comedy that, rather than being funny, only manages to destroy what sense of humour I have left. Fusion and Jane are humorous enough on their own. They are humorous because they are well-written and well-acted. You don't need to throw endless references to endless player-spawned jokes. That's not humour, it's failed comedy. Especially the third time through the task force.

This is a direct copy/paste of a 40-50 Tip mission, as told by a disembodied narrator about the player (you) as narrative. Now re-read that as a statement coming from the character, and written as though in a journal. I'll swap just a single word (well, two words, technically) to do this.

See what I mean? Not only does the language come off significantly less clunky, it actually also carries quite a bit more weight as a basic statement, not to mention how much more personal it sounds.

---

So why is this a problem? Didn't I just describe how well it sounds? Well, this is problematic for a few reasons:

1. The language is stiff. I'm not a native speaker of English, so I may be biassed, but I've almost never read or hear expressions like "you feel" or "you think" outside of questions. It feels forced - as I said, like a word swap. This simply isn't how people speak, and it just sounds bad.

2. It's telling us what we think. A cardinal rule of writing for other people is to not encroach on their own minds, beliefs and opinions. "You think," "you believe" and "you feel" are simply not things you use. Whenever a game writer uses one of these, he needs to back up and rephrase.

3. It's a kludge. Reading this, I can almost tell their writer was trying to present a situation where we're given two options for how we feel and we're supposed to pick one, but the writer has decided not to write words into our mouths and in so doing tied his own hands. You can't have it both ways. If it's a question of what we feel and what we think, say it in our own words. If it's not in our own words, then stop assuming.

I know that writing for morality is a tough task, especially when you have to reach into the core of a character and really play off said character's innermost feelings. However, this is not the right way to do it. I know some people might feel a bit offput if they suddenly saw their characters verbalise their own morality, especially if it's wrong or inappropriately worded, but I get the sense that this is one of very few possible options. It's not ideal in terms of personal freedom, but so long as a choice exists (including the "Dismiss Contact" choice), then players shouldn't feel pressured into accepting the game's interpretation of their internal monologue.

The only other option, realistically speaking, is what I like to call "obvious narrative," in that the narrative presents you with only a select few apparently obvious choices and allows you to pick between them with nary an explanation of why YOU would care. I've both used this before and seen it used before to great effect. It's when the narrative tells you "The next logical step would be to..." It doesn't have to be logical to your character's particular mentality, so long as it's logical in a general sense, and so long as choice exists. And said choice could be morally and ethically challenged, but so long as it doesn't tell you WHY you are picking either option, it does not encroach on concept. The easy example is the conundrum between going after the bad guy or saving the civilians.

Of course, this then raises the Venture problem of tossing a character an idiot ball by presenting a wrong path forward as "obvious" or "logical" when a genre savvy player might have spotted the implications from a mile away. As I said, there are downsides to every approach, but I firmly believe that a writer needs to pick one approach and stick with it. Trying to straddle multiple writing styles while cherrypicking elements just leads to a mutant narrative that never feels quite right.

The OP came off as saying "I like Martial Arts and everything else is worse. Why is that?" Extolling the virtues of other sets is only half of the issue. Putting Martial Arts itself in a bit more perspective and explaining how it may not be quite as good to everyone else and how this makes other sets more appealing by contrast is the other half.

I can understand not wanting to "nerf" any one set when it comes to game balance changes, but I will never understand the desire to never speak ill of any one set, either. There isn't one great set to rule them all, hence why this discussion is relevant.

Because it's how many years after the fact? Those of us who complained have moved on to other complaints, but this has not become less irritating. I've been called a surprisingly large amount of insulting names for the simple fact of saying "I find Inventions too complicated to bother with." Surely I must be stupid, because Inventions are so simple, and surely Inventions must be so simple because no-one ever complains about them being too complex. Except when people do, but those don't count.