Samuel_Tow

Yeah, I know I've been trying to reach you for a couple of months now, but you always seem to be busy with something else

I agree with your point in the general sense - there really isn't much that can help after seven years short of a HUGE influx of new content. However, this doesn't exactly bother me anywhere outside the incarnate system. My goal remains what it has always been - to get all of my existing and future characters to the "end," to complete them, in a sense. This approach suffered a drastic setback when I deleted three level 50 Blasters and condemned a couple in their 40s, but it's getting there. So long as I have characters who aren't 50, I'll have something to play.

That's really the sum total of my incentive to play - the illusive goal of "finishing" all of my characters at some point. Yes, I may have already tried most of the powerset combos from the four ATs I play, but this doesn't leave me with nothing to do. So long as those characters are not 50, I can still play them.

And, hell, even when those characters are 50, I can still play them, if there's something to do which they haven't yet run (and it isn't "repeatable"). I brought up both Sam and Zik (my only two 50s at the time) and played them through the Rikti War Zone when I10 rolled around. I'll eventually do the same for them if and when Incarnates have more content than I can run through in a couple of days.

Note I say "content to run through," not "rewards to earn." There is already enough of a time sink to keep me at it until I turn grey, grinding for rewards, but this gives me nothing new to actually DO. OK, not "nothing," but very little.

New TFs - being what they are - are always designed to be quick and painless, because people don't want to commit entire days to them. As well they should. However, miring your progression system only in game systems which require a commitment just serves to undermine it all. A Story Arc can be long. 20, 30, maybe even 40 missions? World Wide Red is 25-ish, after all. No, people cannot do it in a single sitting, but they aren't required to do so. They aren't required to commit the time to run through 15 missions without getting off the PC, going to dinner or sleeping. Not so with a TF.

I'll stick with the part of the game which still promotes the playing of many alts, until and unless such a day comes when the rest of the game embraces it, as well. When people ask me why I don't deal with Inventions, this is my answer as well - I do not pool my resources from all characters into one "main," because I have no main. Not even my own namesake.

This is very well said, to the point where I want to post it in the All Things Art thread. One of City of Heroes' greatest strengths is the ability to make our characters look like we want them. We don't have to select from a preset of developer-made characters. We can make our own. This isn't just about the colour of our shoes or the pointiness of our chin, but rather about the overall feel. When I make characters, I want them to "feel" like I'd envisioned them, and I don't need a developer holding my hand and telling me what looks good, what looks heroic or what looks appropriate to the genre. I decide this for myself, and because I make this decision, I live with the consequences, and in so doing, I feel invested in the experience. It is MY experience.

I've done some of that, myself (but I have a policy against promoting my own Architect arcs), so I know it's doable just from what you pick up playing the game. Jack taking his story bible and running home was just a joke to illustrate how unconcerned current City of Heroes writers are with City of Heroes canon, and how often they write completely unrelated stories when a completely related alternative existed.

I'm not sure if it's because they didn't know any better (Reichsman, raise your hand) of if they just didn't care (Roy Cooling, step up to the podium, please), but what I see is an almost complete abandonment of established City of Heroes lore for some kind of "whatever you think of on the spot" approach to writing, which I HATE.

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I've written a few longer stories, myself. I appreciate the need for a story bible, if for no reason other than so I don't forget what I called historic locations and characters. To write for a whole world without consulting one is outright irresponsible.

It's not a question of creating enough content to meet or exceed everything that came before by sheer bulk. It's a question of providing enough for players to not need to repeat any one task more than twice, at most, to get progress in the game. I COULD run nothing but ITFs from 35 to 50, but I don't have to. I could run missions and story arcs, instead, and those do not repeat.

That's pretty much where I stand for. Once upon a time, people complained that there was nothing to do at level 50. And I was one of them. The eponymous Samuel Tow has done every arc and every mission available to him (without exemplaring), so the only thing left for him to do is run that same content again. Why, I ask, would I replay the same content with the same character when I could replay the same content with a different character and get at least some measure of variety?

We wanted more things to do at level 50, and more things to do at level 50 is precisely what the Incarnate system is not. It's like coming out with a 100 new badges for 45-50 story arcs, 40-50 enemy kill counts, exploration and so forth and announcing "Here. Now you have something new to do." No, I don't. I have the same things to do that I've always had, they just give different rewards now. But it doesn't matter if you give me money, merits or spider scout cookies, it's still the same content with still the same experiences and, worst of all, with still the same characters.

This is by far my BIGGEST fear not just about Incarnates, but about raid grind in general. Already I'm being told (in a delightfully condescending tone, no less) that it's foolish to expect to make more than a couple of characters Incarnate. Why? No game has enough content to keep me chugging for five years, but a game CAN have enough content to keep me indefinitely if I have enough characters I want to replay with with, with each character being a different experience.

"Altitis" is one of City of Heroes greatest sources of revenue, I would think, considering how many of us it has kept coming back year after year because "I just had the best idea for a new character!" Having something for level 50 players to do is great (if it were actually true), but I'm not sure it's a good idea to do so at the expense of people's motivation to make dozens of alts.

I didn't get the impression that there was an "entity" behind Merulia from the Vincent Ross arc, aside from the Well of the Furies, which is being written to be behind everything. It stands to reason it would be behind her, as well. The "shadowy figure" she fought could also be the letter writer dude.

I do believe Merulia was connected to the Leviathan, because she was a goddess of the Coralax, and it was the Coralax who summoned the Leviathan to destroy the Mu after Hequat appropriated their island by pulling it out of the deep. Calystix the Shaper keeps forming a cult to try and awaken the Leviathan not unlike how the Banished Pantheon keep trying to wake up Lughebu, or how they attempted to try and capture Tielekku. I can buy that.

The Blood Coral, on the other hand, is made up on the spot, and for no real reason. The "Shapers" are an outright travesty to Coralax lore, specifically because they crap on the idea of THE Shaper who appears immortal and keeps turning up throughout history.

Methinks no-one ever sat down to write a history of the Coralax and to establish their society and world like what was done with the Oranbegans, so writers are making it up as they go. Which isn't a bad approach, per se, if it didn't trample over content that IS established, or otherwise completely ignore it.

But again - who and what are he Legacy Chain, above and beyond good guy mages? What is their history? What do they stand for? Never explained. Who are the Coralax? Where did they come from? What do they want? Never explained. Never, it appears, explained to the writers, as a point of fact.

More specifically, I was referring to the comments made about Final Fantasy XIII. When people complained about the game running them down linear corridors though a plot which made little sense, they were told that the game got better about 25 hours in. This is not an acceptable approach to game design, yet developers continue to approach games this way. I'm much likely to share the opinion of the Escapist Magazine's Extra Credit - if you don't capture the players' interest within the first 10 minutes, they're not likely to stick around to where it actually gets good.

For a more domestic examples, look at Controllers. Every now and then, someone will complain that they don't do enough damage, or that levelling them up is painful or whatnot. That person will be told that they are just fine, because Controllers become awesome when they get their pets at level 32 (Mind Control notwithstanding, obviously), which is an argument that baffles me. If it sucks out the door and I have to wait for what is ostensibly 2/3 through the game, then the wait ain't worth it.

Furthermore, take your conventional end game and what it tends to do to people. Specifically, the notion that "the real game starts at 60." Or is that 70 or 80 now? The notion that the game itself is a chore which must be sidestepped wherever possible for the sole purpose of getting to the level cap, where the REAL game starts.

You claim to play just because the game is fun, and this is a credit to your character. I respect that. But to a great many people, this is not the case, as evidenced by the fact that they seek ways to NOT play the game if they can get away with it, all for the sake of earning a specific reward. RMT wouldn't exist were that not the case.

In general, I have a profound disrespect for the "carrot on a stick" approach to game design, because its cornerstone philosophy is to goad players into playing something they will not enjoy playing, because they're not doing so for the love of the game, but are rather working for a reward. Throwing great rewards at horrible tasks should never be a preferred solution.

You're comparing a body of content enough to get you to level 50 three times over without ever touching the same mission twice, vs. an endgame where you have to repeat the same two tasks how many times?

That's what I'm saying - the pre-50 game has many different tasks, the post 50 game does not. You could say that the pre-50 missions are a lot a like, but that's still a step above THE SAME missions. Are you seriously suggesting that there is as much mechanical difference between the Lambda Sector Trial and the BAF trial as there is narrative difference between ALL the missions from ALL the contacts in the entire 1-50 range?

Levels 1 to 50 can feel like a grind, certainly. But the Incarnate game IS a grind, because it consists of repeating the same small handful of tasks over and over again without even the illusion of variety.

In fact, pretending it isn't a grind does the whole system a massive disservice, because it sends the message to the developers that we're A-OK with repeating the same two missions ad nauseum as long as there are mechanical rewards tied to them. I do not agree that this is a good message to send, specifically when I firmly believe that what we should be asking for is more content, not more rewards.

Once upon a time, the explanations why we couldn't have various things was that we were running out of costume "slots" to assign things to. If we can assign multiple pieces to the same "slot," then I would be very much for this.

Ah, the female necks. The game's single ugliest feature. I'm not sure who thought that funnel heads sewn onto cone necks looked good, but right now female heads look AWFUL. This isn't a question of technology or graphics. The meshes for their heads are just ugly. Fix this, please!

As well, their tiny tiny hands and tiny tiny feet are absurd. I've never been able to use sneakers or my girls, especially the skinny ones, because they look like they don't have feet, just legs which end in a stump, they're so tiny. Furthermore, female hands are too small to grasp all but the smallest weapons, and I'm not talking Legacy weapons here. I've had to use Large gloves for quite a few of them just to get a hand of a decent size.

Arachnos Soldiers prove that separate fingers without accounting form them look AWFUL. However, this doesn't mean that mittens are the answer. I don't necessarily need to see fingers separated, but I WOULD like to see them carved into the finger models like they are with Monstrous gloves. Carve trenches between the fingers on the top and bottom of the mitten, then carve fingertips on the end. We'll still have a hand with fingers glued together, but at least they'll look like fingers, rather than like an ice cream sandwich.

It's not a valid comparison, however, as these mission still tell vastly different stories, many of which are good. If I had a wide selection of Incarnate stories that didn't feel like a form letter with faction names swapped and actually forwarded the story, that would be much less of a grind. But that would also be a much higher investment.

As well as usable by players.

Discounting a few specific attack animations that spin your character around, nothing will ever give you a full frontal shot of your character, short of you manually spinning the camera around via /camrotate. None of the powers which do this are unique to Praetorians.

There is an option somewhere in the menus (I think it's under Controls) called "Free Camera," which makes it so your camera will not be locked to your characters' back. As such, if your character turns to attack a target not directly in front, your camera won't snap to his back to follow. With Free Camera, pressing your Mouse Look key (right mouse button by default) will issue a /playerturn command and rotate your character to face the direction of your camera, rather than rotate your camera to match your character.

This, too, is not unique to Praetoria, and has in fact been in the game since City of Villains went Live.

There are, as a point of fact, 10 ambushes per trigger. I counted their NPC dialogue entries when it was all said an done.

I'm not sure what the thinking was behind including nearly a dozen ambushes per mission. Maybe that you'd hurry and complete the mission while fighting off the ambushes. This doesn't work, because the game is incapable of spawning infinite ambushes without separate triggers, so you can bet that any ambush spam will eventually end. At such a point, simply waiting for them to end is the easiest approach.

As far as the arc itself goes, its' one of my favourites, as well. The writing in that arc is exquisite! I keep using Vincent Ross as evidence that Paragon Studios still employ talented writers. The lore of the arc is... A mess, but at least the arc's internal logic is sound, the writing is solid, the plot strokes the ego and it does at least SOMEWHAT tie into existing canon. I give it an A- for effort, but needlessly making up lore where it isn't required.

That's not true. Within the timeline of any one character, the game changes, and changes significantly. At first we start out believing the Circle of Thorns are just a cult that Baron Zoria started in... What was it, the 1950s? Then we learn that they are, in fact, 14 000 year old ghosts who possessed the Baron and used his body. In so doing, we gain Akharist on our side. The subsequent Envoy of Shadows storyline then takes this knowledge for granted and in fact spends a lot of time exploring Akharist's writings. The status quo has changed. Beyond that, when we first start meeting Malta, no-one knows who they are, and Indigo makes it a point to be vague and cryptic. By the time we work with Crimson, we're familiar with Malta and we discuss them more openly. At the end, the Malta conspiracy becomes known to law enforcements.

No-one's asking for the game to change for everybody based on the actions of one player. However, one could and should ask that past events be referenced in future events, both to acknowledge that they did happen, as well as to at least pretend that future events are based on past events.

As Yahtzee said about Dragon Age: I played an elf, and occasionally people would stop and say "Hello! You are an elf!" These things do matter.

It's not a question of liking or disliking the plot, but more a question of there not being much uninterrupted plot to go through. Rick Dakan's old lore tied together like a cohesive whole and made for a believable world. The current plot threads exist in almost complete isolation, ships in an ocean of unmentioned background story. "Why did we need SAM when we already had the FBSA?" is, as a point of fact, a legitimate question.

As I said before, the Praetorian content isn't bad at all, and even the Incarnate content isn't terrible. But it ties into NOTHING else in the entire game, before or since. The Well of the Furies would have been a great opportunity to cross Cole's bid for power with some of the big players from our universe, like Rularuu the Watcher, Lughebu, our Hamidon and so forth, but no. Instead, we get a plotline that may as well have been from a completely different game.

It's like if Chief John Anderton take time out from finding out why he was predicted to commit murder so he could stop a Skrull invasion on Mars before going back in time to exactly the moment he left to begin with. Yes, you can potentially have a stortyline that goes like this and it won't have deviated from Minority Report's plot by too much, but then you're simply splicing two unrelated movies together like so much of Pierre Kirby's career.

When City of Heroes first launched, it launched with enough background lore to build a hundred different stories, with the story arcs that came with the game being just one fraction of that. Rick Dakan's original word was just that - a world. Not one story with just enough background to move it. In fact, his original world didn't really have stories per se, just plot devices to reveal lore elements. And a lot of his old story seeds remain unexplored for reasons I will never understand. Instead, we get stories that tack on extra lore to the sides of this world, just barely enough to make the stories coherent, and in the end, these stories barely draw on the lore of the game, and almost never add anything to it.

This is kind of like if I sat down to write an episode of Star Trek after having seen a total of about three Next Generation episodes, one Next Generation movie and the 2009 reboot. I mean, I could, sure, but would you WANT me to?

I do miss Rick Dakan. I'm not sure why he got sacked (I hear he was a good writer but a terrible project lead), but I do still appreciate all of his original lore, which to this day remains some of the best in the game. Sure, the original City of Heroes missions and arcs weren't exactly marvels of writing, but the lore behind them was so solid it could carry even a terse story through to a good conclusion. After all, I spend most of my days with the History channel going in the background, so I know the value of history retold even if it's not necessarily retold within the confines of an action-packed thrill ride. Rick's old lore was and is so good that even badly-written stories about it are still interesting, because they keep me wanting to know more.

If I had to point to one major failure of writing in City of Heroes since Rick left and, yes, since Jack left, it's that the game no longer has any "lore." It has episodic storylines that start with a contact and end with a contact, but there's no sense that there exists an actual, living, breathing world behind them that these stories were spawned from and existed in the context of. It feels, instead, like someone took 12 different books and strung them up one after the other, rather than if someone wrote 12 stories over the same fictional universe.

And it's not "just comic book writing." As a matter of fact, I may have unduly criticised the writers of this game for not knowing their lore and backstory and not caring for it, when I should have made it a point to criticise the whole game story philosophy that we don't need lore and canon, and that everything can be weaved out of wholecloth as it became necessary. You CANNOT write for a world like this unless you're willing to do research and be careful, which our writers have clearly not been, pretty much from Reichsman on.

If you want to write for a persistent fictional world, you first need to establish this persistent fictional world, or at least have a basic idea of what it's going to be like. I don't know if there's anyone left at Paragon Studios that knows that any more, since Jack apparently took the story bible with him.

Well I'm offended!

That... Is actually a concern I didn't think to have. They'd still need to know my password, but... Damn.

Yeah, OK, at least I don't have to worry about my account being suspected of foul play. Heavens knows people have had enough nightmares with overprotective security measures, like those people who couldn't use the PlayNC store because their ISP was giving them IPs which "looked" like they were in another state. Guess I can be glad it's just a fairly minor inconvenience.

Besides, I'm getting pretty good at deciphering that captcha nonsense. I mean seriously? "Education, alutte"? The hell?