Samuel_Tow

First and foremost: Thank you for the numbers. I know what they mean, but I'm still not sure what to take from them. I can see the improvement, however, to say that much.

However, in response to the quote above, this is one of the spots where I usually get called colourful names and dismissed out of hand, but here it goes: I hate disorganised enhancements. One of the most satisfying feelings for me as I reach level 50 is looking at my enhancements screen top to bottom and just enjoying the neatness and order of it. Everything is level 50, everything is arranged in an orderly fashion (to the point I'll buy extra enhancements to rearrange order within powers) and everything is just... Perfect.

To consider playing a build that'll be all over the map, from 25 to 54 and Lord knows what else in-between and, worst of all, a build that never really feels "finished" is enough to sour me on the game. I know it's stupid, I know it's irrational, but when I can't have things JUST RIGHT in how I want them, I tend to lose my motivation to even bother. I can stomach playing a character who's a work in progress if I can at least foresee an end and some kind of completion somewhere along the line, but to take that as my ideal build? No. The performance gain isn't worth the discomfort.

Normally I wouldn't complain about this, but there's a problem: I lack this kind of patience and, indeed, I lack this kind of commitment. I stick with my characters for the long haul. My currently 35 SS/Inv heroic Brute is the only thing I've played since she was created around New Years, and I have played nothing else. However, as soon as I stop playing her, chances are she won't see the light of day in another year or so. The type of Marketeering you suggest really only seems to work if I'm willing to play multiple characters simultaneously, so I can put a few bids for one, park him for a week and come back to my enhancements, when what I really want is to spend the money NOW and get my stuff NOW, and in the Market, this means big money.

So one would think, but it never seems to play out that way for me. I don't really over-list anything. I list my common salvage for 250, my uncommon salvage for 1000, my rare salvage for 5000 and any recipe I'm selling for as much. I have tried listing everything, but the result is unimpressive. First of all, my transaction inventory gets clogged up with junk no-one wants REALLY fast. Secondly, even when this "junk" does sell, it goes for... 1000. I mean, sure, 1000 is four times as good as 250 to the vendor, but at the cost of not having enough slots to list or, heaven forbid, big on things? There just isn't enough turnover.

I've managed to more or less learn what sells for a lot, and failing that I've learned to spot when an item will sell well and when it'll wait a week or more, and I manage to do well enough for myself and my own needs. However, my needs are humble, and the most I've ever had on a character doing that is around 100 million, including a few 50 million + chance drops, like a respec recipe or whatever that heals set is which sells for ungodly amounts.

Now, I do have the option of simply being more aware of the intricacies of the Market even if I don't necessarily play the Market game, but I just can't seem to keep up and remember these things. Sometimes I make the right call, but a lot of times I just misjudge how expensive something should be to people. Even as we speak, I still have a bunch of recipes listed for 5000 that have recent bids of over 100 000, and they've been rolling around my transaction inventory for a week now. As long as I can keep the long-term items below about 5 or 6, they don't get in the way, so I let them linger, but sooner or later I'll just pull those and dump them at a vendor to make room.

Ha! I love this idea It actually does make sense, since the first time I've ever been able to get a first-hand view of Praetoria was long after Anti-Matter and Neuron had made a sport of raiding Primal Earth, so it's not too far-fetched that they'd steal Primal Earth technology where it could benefit them. In fact, the very fist thing Anti-Matter did in his old arc was steal our portal technology (machines or schematics, I'm not sure) to boost his own portals, so they're clearly not above taking technology from other dimensions.

With this in mind, it makes sense that Primal Earth mediporters would have been reverse-engineered from Rikti technology and Praetorian Earth mediporters are in turn reverse-engineered from Primal Earth ones. A sort of conga line of industrial espionage, and something that actually has canon-established precedent. It doesn't get any more justified than this.

I hadn't actually thought of that particular problem, to be honest, but it IS something worth addressing. I'm not sure if the game actually tells us that defeated villains are teleported to the Zig or if that was a developer comment, or indeed if it hasn't been just player-made assertion, but the point remains that it raises some interesting questions in light of Roy Cooling's arc. More specifically:

If villains are indeed tagged to be teleported upon defeat, what exactly makes the system unsable for civilians? Why can't civilians be tagged?

If villains aren't tagged to be teleported upon defeat... Are we actually killing them? Like, in cold blood? Yikes!

See, before Roy had to open his mouth about the controversy, that was never an issue, but now that we know there's such a huge problem with providing people with emergency teleporters, then the question of how villains manage it becomes ever more pertinent, as does the question of whether they "manage it" at all.

Something I want to clarify a tad. When I say using "Sets," what I mean is using Set Inventions Enhancements. I'm most likely using the incorrect term, but I just mean the enhancements that are part of specific Sets and listed Uncommon and up, as opposed to Common Inventions, which is what I use now. My bad.

Yes, I do mean frankenslotting and frankenslotting is what I want to look for.

Good point, that I had completely forgotten. Offhand, I can't think of too many attacks that only ever just do damage, and those would probably come down to Fire-based attacks and I think a few powers from Dual Blades. I should check what sets my powers take before checking what sets they can use. Thank you.

That sounds like an interesting idea, and a good way to save a slot. I take it the triple-aspect enhancement isn't ungodly rare and expensive and all that? ParagonWiki lists it as Uncommon and dropping from enemy defeats, but their Set recipes being unpurchasable concerns me, since I know there's almost never any supply for most of them, and they come in all levels, not just the 5-level increments that Commons come in.

I want to make a point of saying this: I refuse to play the Market game. Ever, for any reason. The less time I have to spend on the Market, the happier I'll be and the less likely I am to rant about something unrelated. As I said before, my patience for Marketeering does not exist. It's just about enough to snag a full set of commons even if I have to pay 40 million for them (which I had to, last time), though I could see myself staggering Set Inventions slotting over the 50-to-Incarnate process. But not by too much.

Point is, I want to kill stuff, not play broker. In fact, this is one of the VERY few things that's likely to make me ragequit out of the game in very short order.

I'm not doing this to shut people up. Over the years, I've grown quite good at ignoring Inventions-related build advise What keeps bringing me back to Inventions is the concept of "frankenslotting," a concept made all the more relevant with the advent of the Incarnate system, which is itself essentially a more limited example of just that. If the game offered me set-bonus-less multi-aspect COMMON enhancements with recipes available at the university and comprised of common salvage, I would go for that in a heartbeat. I actually enjoy the math of multi-aspect slotting, and would very much like to experiment with that.

Unfortunately, this comes with the baggage of Sets, which is opportunity cost, specific set limitations, the inability to slot the same enhancement twice in the same power and the need to hide those behind ever more elaborate group events. I want to see if it's possible to use Inventions as a frankenslotting alternative that doesn't shaft some characters, isn't hideously expensive and doesn't come with too many strings attached. I'm really not trying to solve performance issues, or indeed even min-max all that much. I just enjoy the math and the slotting of multi-aspect enhancements, and like it or not, the only source of multi-aspect slotting in this game is Set Inventions.

Well, and Hydra/Titan/Hamidon enhancements, but I don't count those.

Sadly, I don't think this is going to happen, exactly because I'm "missing the point," as it were, in that Set Inventions aren't about the multi-aspect frankenslotting, or at least not as much as they are about the set bonuses. And "set bonuses" as a concept is something I've hated in every game that has ever had it, including Diablo 2 which is where I first saw it. The last thing I want is to provide performance stats in packages where most of the stuff I don't want and all of the stuff is both very minor and very specific. Like I said, my problems with Set Inventions are many and varied, but one of the things I DON'T have a problem with is the concept of multi-aspect enhancements. Who knows, maybe we'll get some of those that aren't tied to Sets in the future. I sure hope we do.

There really isn't much to do with animal parts other than make characters with animal parts. To expect more from them would be akin to expecting horns to be useful for more than just Mr. Guy With Horns. Look at Hooves, for instance - right now they have no use other than just what they are - creating a character with hooves. It's the rest of the costume that pulls the concept together.

Personally, I hope an animal parts pack is indeed JUST animal parts, because there's a whole lot of them that the game can use, and trying to fit other themes into them would just cut into breadth of such a pack. I'd love to see Frozen-Fire's idea of adding snouts and eyes to regular heads, and I would love to see animal feet integrated into normal legs IN ADDITION to Monster legs, which should open up a few more concepts, but above and beyond all else I just want actually useful animal heads that don't look like roadkill and more monster legs that don't look six years old. Anything else, I can put off for another pack or another Issue.

Point for point: any that go up to 50, none, not very much.

Non-level-50 enhancements on a level 50 characters bug me. A lot. And I'm not happy with the percentages of sub-50 enhancements, as well. With that in mind, I really don't want to use sub-50 enhancements, and if I had to, I'd probably not bother.

I don't really have a lot of patience. At all. I have no problem with planning ahead of time, provided it's done once and over with, but having to constantly remember which recipes I need and what salvage I should keep and what I should dump has the potential to be game-breaking for me, especially since the game lacks the ability to track this for me.

I don't want to spend a lot of INF for the simple reason that I don't have a lot of INF to spend, and from everything people have told me on how to get a lot of INF, I don't want to bother. Ever. Not my kind of game.

I should also note that I'm really not interested in set bonuses. That's not to say I DON'T want to have them, but I wouldn't go out of them. The best ones are also the most expensive and rarest, and going for one often means slotting things I don't want to slot. It's especially difficult, it seems, when I want level 50 Sets that don't include rare enhancements. I haven't checked the other enhancement types, but I only found one of those for Melee Damage, and considering this is 90% of all my characters, it's fairly important.

On the one hand, yes, the situation doesn't call for great power because it's assumed it's stolen either by civilians or by more conventional criminals thanks to circumstance. On the other hand, an item of this importance really should be handled by a powerful hero regardless of the task's difficulty, just because of how crucial the task is.

You don't send a squad of marines to pick up a package from the post office, but if you expect this package to be a suitcase nuke, you very much do send a squad of marines even for a task as simple as mail delivery. Just to be safe.

Now, of course, I wouldn't have too much of a problem with this if a point had been made of this fact, but no-one ever seems to question the wisdom of sending a lowly hero out to secure what's keeping every single hero out there alive.

Oh, and then there's this. Yeah, that part pissed me off to no end. Usually when a hostile target turns blue, it's because I don't WANT to attack them any more on account of them being beaten and helpless. That's what blue targets signify - people I don't want to attack. The first time I thought he was beaten when he did that, but the second time it just infuriated me that the game essentially forbids me from attacking him while he monologues.

Castillo makes no sense to be on the Sky Raider rig to begin with, being that he's the regional commander of the Sky Raider forces in Faultline and the rig is over at Sharkhed Island something like 50 miles out to sea. He's also annoying, unfunny, ugly and not really appropriate for the serious mood in that last mission. Castillo makes sense in Faultline, and I have no doubt his appearance grew out of inspiration from how Doc Delilah talks about it. I can just picture a writer having fun with the Doc's dialogue and then going "Make me an NPC that fits that!" Hence the blond hair, the flames on the pants and so forth. He was a joke in Faultline because Doc Delilah made it work. He's a nuisance in the Roy Cooling arc, because its tone is very much more serious.

Not every pack can suit every player (even if all of the previous ones have suited me), but if this is true, then I'm just happy to see they're doing something to expand the range of characters we can make, rather than adding in "still more plated tech" for the umpteen bajillionth time.

Again, what's a "normal human?" Darkstalkers' Felicia is pretty much a normal human, in that she has human skin, human arms, human legs and a human face, and yet she walks on all fours most of the time. Yes, a human in a business suit running on all fours would look odd. So would a human in a business suit fighting with a pipe wrench and sewer lid, but all of those can be made to look good given the appropriate design. Swinging into thin air cannot, regardless of design, concept or explanation.

Batman in general looks stupid, so that's a moot point.

But if you think Batman running around on all fours is somehow unusual, then I dare say you haven't played many Batman games. A lot of those have him crawl around on all fours half the time. Hell, I spent the better part of Arkham Asylum doing the duck walk, yet that game is critically acclaimed.

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I know you're being intentionally dense to make a point, but your point is empty, especially when it comes with bias.

And they don't. That's the thing. I haven't run DPS calculations, I haven't taken up a stopwatch, I haven't taken a tape measure to it. I know what I see in real practice - a Scrapper cleans house, a Stalker takes time. Yes, solo. Yes, for the same spawn sizes. A Stalker will kill ONE thing fast, but then what? This is what it comes down to - you assassinate, "and then what?" Stalkers have no answer to this question, because what happens then is they turn into a weaker version of a Scrapper. That's weaker offensively and weaker defensively.

When you're solo, you draw all the aggro regardless of what you play. Stalkers CAN Placate enemies and thus avoid their aggro, but the Placate is very short-duration and you cannot enhance it for that.

And I never said anything of the sort, either. I want parity between my own characters. When I look at a server full of heroes and villains and my mouse goes to one of my Stalkers, I don't want my first reaction to be "Oof... He's not strong enough. I'll play him another time." Stalkers do not feel strong enough. Not nearly as strong as they should be, all told.

And if their AT gimmick were built so that you could actually use it more than once per period of calm, I'd agree with you. If there were better ways to hide mid-combat, better ways to avoid aggro, better ways to control and influence enemies, then hell yeah I'd put up with their lacking performance. But they don't. The entire design of Hide and hidden criticals ensures that you HAVE to play like a gimped Scrapper, or end up sucking even worse. You CAN hide mid-combat by dodging around a corner and waiting 8 seconds, but the critical gained is not worth the wait, and you're usually interrupted anyway. You CAN placate, but not nearly often enough. And if you're not using a defence-based set, then you're very SOL.

I'm not saying Stalkers need to be stronger and be more like Scrappers. Quite the opposite, they need to be able to rely on Hide more and score criticals more often and under more circumstances. I really liked the "Hide on kill" idea from the other thread, just as an example.

So it would seem. But that still leaves Ninja Blade, Broadsword and Electrical Melee without decent critical attacks, essentially forcing them into being Scrappers.

Furthermore, 50% critical chance on AoEs is not five times more effective than a Scrapper's 5% critical change, because that assumes you're in Hide, which is so designed to NOT last you for any length in combat. A Scrapper can easily fire off five AoEs before a Stalker is able to re-hide, and by that point he's done more raw damage than the critical could ever have counted for.

And again - this is not a problem with wanting more AoE criticals. On the contrary, I want guaranteed single-target criticals on what should be large-scale single-target attacks, but which are designed as something else. When I placate with an Electric Stalker, what do I hit with? Thunder Strike will only deal as much critical damage as Havoc Punch, Jacob's Ladder will probably miss and I don't think Lightning Rod even scores Hidden criticals, but even if it does they'll be at a chance to occur. I could use Chain Induction, but that power's initial hit is only marginally stronger than Havoc Punch anyway. When I'm playing Ninja Blade, I want to Placate a boss and surprise him with Golden Dragonfly's heavy damage and big critical, but it won't happen because the critical will miss, so I'm forced to use the significantly less damaging Soaring Dragon.

Stalkers are built around single-target burst damage delivered from hide, yet they are not given the tools to deliver that aside from Assassin's Strike, and that REALLY bothers me.

"Stalkers aren't built for long fights." So what do I do when I'm forced into long fights? Mercedes Sheldon's trio of arcs puts me in numerous situations where multiple ambushes come in the middle of a boss fight. In fact, a Stalker with enough burst damage can trigger all three ambushes at the same time. The final fight with Hector is even better. Hector is a boss, he spawns two ambushes with bosses in them at 75% and 50% health, and he spawns Menelaus at 25% health, who then spawns three more boss ambushes at 75%, 50% and 25% health. If you're fast enough on the trigger, you can spawn up to six boss spawns on top of you right around simultaneously, and if you try to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed, you're in for a long fight.

And what about ever other mission in Praetoria? Those like to throw massive ambushes at you as a matter of course. How about the Ghoul mission with Dr. Steffard, where no less than 20 Ghoul ambushes descend upon you, several at a time towards the end? What about that Syndicate mission which spawns endless ambushes for its entire duration? One of Vincent Ross' new missions has continuous waves of Coralax ambushes, and I counted at least 10 before they stopped, with no time to rest and targeted on ME. What about when fighting your average elite boss, where running away simply lets the elite boss regenerate while you're gone? Or how about the final fight in the Roy Cooling Arc which has you fighting Castillo, then Castillo, then Castillo and then an elite boss Zeus Class Titan?

You can't avoid long fights in this game. Not when they're written into the content. So when your AT "isn't built for long fights," it suffers, and suffers greatly.

This makes no sense and follows no path of logic. How do you define "normal human being" when half the X-Men mutants look like humans but act like beasts? If "normal human beings" can fly, shoot lasers out of their eyes, turn to stone and meld with aliens, then running like a beast is just one more super power.

The reason people like me detest "swinglines" is two-fold. First of all, there is no "offscreen" in this game. Your camera angle is not limited, which allows you to look straight up, something you will have to do when scaling a building straight up - something a grappling gun should be able to do, and which is pretty much half of what Batman uses his for. Secondly, grappling thin air over open ocean or, worse still, grappling the air next to a building instead of the building itself, looks stupid. Far too stupid to tolerate being added to the game.

Running like a beast has nothing to do with it, because running like a beast is not inherently stupid.

I'm hoping for Monster Heads, Monster Feet, more Tails, Gloves, Upper Arms and Wings, at least. These are some of the categories which have had NO ADDITION to them since CoV. It'd be nice to have a few monster heads that don't suck.

Yeah, that's the bad thing about it. When I first played this arc, the horrible writing made me fuming mad, but I still had to admit that the unique maps were cool (especially the ship map), the complex encounters were well-done, and that elite boss Zeus Class Titan was a really good idea. That's really why I've given this arc so much thought. It's fun to play if I shut down my brain and just kill stuff, which is why I keep coming back to it, but that just means I keep coming back to the story and it makes me frown.

Hmm... Now that is very interesting. I can't wait to see more.

This doesn't answer the question of WHAT the "upgrade" constitutes, though. I know that, in writing, you don't always have to explain and describe every little detail, but when we spend the entirety of an arc chasing after an item, it shouldn't be too much to ask what the item actually is. Is it a machine? A chemical? Software? At this point, we may as well have spent our time looking for an infindibulator for all I know what it is.

Hmm... Well, this kind of works, but it raises a couple of extra questions. "The device" was stolen by Rogue PPD working with the Citizens for Mediporters community, presumably with the intention of making mediporters available to everyone. What reason do they have to delete backups and cripple a system they want to proliferate? Remember, only the very leader of the group is working with the Sky Raiders. As well, the time frame for the invasion is far, FAR too loose for this to be a race against time. I know no-one wants to be in danger of being killed if an invasion did, in fact, occur, but there is no evidence anyone believes it will happen any minute now. In fact, the only source of dramatic tension seems to be the fear of losing the device forever, which stops making sense once we recover it.

The problem is that the real tech ISN'T in danger. We don't give Malta the physical "device," but rather an electronic copy of its schematics. Electronic information is infinitely copyable, and the arc makes no mention of it being otherwise, so we do not, in fact, lose anything, making this dash to copy the device entirely pointless. As well, Roy saying "I don't know" is essentially a lampshade hanging which is not something to be used with such abandon.

But they announced the upgrade as an official fix and, when the device is returned to them, they applied that device to the system. This is not what a prototype is made for, despite what sci fi movies would have us believe. If they had made the original device as a prototype, its purpose would have been to test the system and eventually lead to a final, official product down the line which would be intended for actual use with all the cut corners of a prototype avoided and all the allowances for testing equipment removed. According to Roy, the device was ready to be used, which means it was a production device, and since they only seem to need one, there's no reason to copy it.

That doesn't seem to be the case. When holding Zanella for ransom, what Malta request is not the device, but rather its schematics. This request more or less ensures that Medicorp scientists retain the original device. Malta do not want Medicorp to not have the device, they want the device for themselves. If Malta wanted the device destroyed, they would have requested the physical device in the trade, as well as all copies made of it. One of the central plot holes in this arc is that the ransom demand does not rob Medicorp of the device, but the story treats it like it does.

And herein lies the problem - this makes Malta look like amateurs. The only reason I was too good was because I was fighting Sky Raiders and PPD rejects. Were I fighting Tactical Operatives, Sappers and Gunslingers, I'd have been rent to shreds and they'd have had their device. And this still doesn't explain why they couldn't have snuk a copy of it away before the thing was shipped abroad. Sinking a ship and pinning it on someone else is something I'd expect from the Cobra Commander, and a guy who tried to have his face engraved on the moon isn't exactly fit to be a clandestine conspiracy leader.

I disagree. The best way to keep people from knowing you're involved is to cover your tracks, which Malta professionals should be far better at than Sky Raiders and Family goons. When you deal with mercenaries, you have to expect that they'll be sloppy, that they'll talk when cornered, that they can turn on you if they're offered more money, that they'll take longer and so forth. And even if everything goes perfectly, you still leave behind a bunch of people who know you were involved but aren't under your employ. The best way to do things is the way Malta already does things: Send in a squad of commandos, have them in and out before anyone even realises they're even there and leave no traces behind. Think Hitman 47, Sam Fisher, Solid Snake and so forth.

This looks like an attempt to recapture that "Woah! Gunslinger!" moment from the Praetorian Penelope Yin arc where the Dark Watcher tells you about a Malta infiltrator into the Syndicate and, sure enough, you fight a gunslinger in a business suit. However, in that case the man is cut off from Malta because they don't seem to have dimension gates, so he's forced to rely on local forces, and you can therefore understand why he'd need to act through the Syndicate. Here, Malta are intentionally tying their hands behind their back, and all for the sake of less productive and reliable results.

Again, this makes Malta look like complete amateurs, on the level of robbers who drop their wallet at the scene of the crime. If you can claim you are anyone you want to be, to still use your real name is just dumb. And Malta are not dumb. They plan for emergencies and foresee eventualities. A full third of the forces of the World Wide Red programme, including not one but two Kronos Titans, are assigned to protect CIA head of China Relations Jack Fonzie, otherwise known as Director 17, even though Malta don't expect him to actually get in a situation where he might need this protection. They know there's a chance that they might fail and so make contingency plans, and then contingency plans for their contingency plans. The identifying character trait of Malta is their paranoia, and a paranoid fundamentalist would never use his real name, or anything at all that can be traced back to him. Malta using their real name is a COLOSSAL security liability that an organisation built on secrecy and conspiracy should be too smart to fall for.

I can see that, somewhat. But for this to work, we have to assume that Roy has information SAM doesn't, information he is intentionally keeping from them for whatever reason. If this were the case, then he wouldn't be as open and casual about the information with our low-level heroes who don't even have Omega level clearance yet. Instead, he chats about Malta's existence like it's common knowledge. And while I can see how he could mean that he's theorising about Malta's motivations, this comes within the context of a "let me tell you about Malta" conversation. He nonchalantly drops the Malta name and seems to know a lot about them, at least from the way he acts.

As for the other side of the answer: The Origin of Powers arc. The reason we can dismiss singular contacts' understandings there is because a point is made to show us that they could be wrong. Roy Cooling is not wrong, and I know he isn't because I have meta-game knowledge about Malta which confirms what he says. As such, his words cannot be dismissed, and must therefore be explained. How does he know this? Why does he act so casual about this knowledge? Who else knows? What does this mean for Malta's status as a modern-day Illuminati? What Roy does has a very negative effect on Malta's entire premise and everything that makes them interesting.

Well, nothing is ever stated as a fact, but Dr. Steffard strongly implies the connection. He talks about how you can never be dissociated from the mediport outside of travelling to another dimension, unless that dimension somehow had an exact copy of the mediport system, "but what are the chances of that?" It seems like a meta-story reference to Primal Earth's mediport system. In fact, all of Praetoria boils down to one giant collection of meta-story references of how things in Praetoria are different from those in Primal Earth, such as Paolo Parino mentioning Pia, Primal Earth's Seer Marino, for no real reason other than because we're expected to be familiar with her and so able to get the reference. That's why I read Dr. Steffard's explanation as legitimate, even though you have a point that it isn't "official."

This may well be the most pertinent question, actually. Most of the time, the pre-40 story arcs don't go much past stopping dangers to the city, like engineered viruses and so forth. When you're actually saving the world, there's usually a good explanation of why YOU are saving it. In some cases there just isn't time to call in anyone else, brief them and send them off when you're already on a roll. And in the case of the PCM, Agent Six's Worst Case Scenario document explains why the city can't call in the Freedom Phalanx and have them take care of it. As Spoony would say "It makes sense!"

But Roy Cooling specifically calls out a level 20 hero as soon as they hit level 20. Why? I'm not saying there can't be any reason, but I am saying that there SHOULD be at least some reason given. It doesn't have to be a good one, it doesn't have to be an elaborate one, but it should exist nevertheless. He could say "I asked for you specifically because I hear you're capable, but you're still also low-key, so we can do this without raising too publicity." I mean, it makes sense that you don't put the Statesman on the job because protesters might see it as a sign that heroes only care when they're affected, but a run-of-the-mill 20? They probably don't know you yet. But this has to be at least mentioned for it to count.

This only applies if players have a meaningful choice in the matter. Yes, for those of us who don't like teaming all that much, conceding to team every once in a while isn't such a big problem. But if I want to be an Incarnate, what do I do the rest of the time? Re-grind my old missions? I'll be done with all of them by the time I hit the Uncommon slot, and none of that is Incarnate content, strictly speaking.

This has always been my problem with every proposal for end game I've ever seen, because raids and trials are what people imagine it will consist entirely of. A raid and trial every now and then is doable. Enjoyable, in fact. But I want something to do the rest of the time, and as of right now, such doesn't exist.

Given the latest management address talking about making the new I20 Incarnate trials accessible to everyone, I hope they're using the word "trial" in its literal meaning, which is to say as "a way to test a character's skill and strength," rather than the game system name Trial, which tends to be a very difficulty 8-person TF. If they do mean the former, then even Ramiel's arc can count as a trial for the Incarnate, as it has our characters go out of their comfort zones and take on some serious enemies.

I have the sneaking suspicion that the WRITER doesn't know the specific details, which is a very bad way to write a story which needs to be both consistent with itself and consistent with established canon. Roy himself doesn't have to know the details, but that doesn't mean the story can't nevertheless address them through other means, be they other characters, clues found on the scene, NPC chatter or just anything which at least suggests the writer himself (or herself, I don't know) actually knew what those reasons were.

Roy Cooling's story arc plays coy with details that there's no reason to be coy about, as they don't build suspense or constitute a mystery, but rather represent a very glaring lack of any sort of actual substance to the narrative. I don't need to know every little detail of every little offhand comment, but at least major plot points need to be given some semblance of an excuse and made a point of, rather than hanging a lampshade on them and hoping I don't notice.

Let me put it this way: Having Roy say he doesn't is not the problem. Having the entire narrative just brush the whole subject under the rug with nary a mention is where I take issue, because this is not a good way to tell a story. His entire arc comes off as the cliff notes of a story that someone else was supposed to actually write. There are ideas there, but none of them are developed or explored, and almost all of them are simply stated before the story moves on. This is normally passable with a simple, self-consistent story, but when I start questioning why certain things happened and why certain people did certain things, this kind of bare bones approach to story telling really shows.

I didn't form a list of questions just to be an ***. I genuinely believe there is a decent story somewhere in there if I can just make sense of all the unexplained leaps of logic.

So it would seem. But the thing is... Unlike Montague's ineptly-written arc which is simply irredeemable, this one actually had the potential to be an interesting arc. It deals with very interesting canon, raises fridge logic questions that people have been wondering about for some time, and even manages to involve Malta in an interesting way. But it just bugs me that it raises so many not-interesting questions that so detract from the experience.

My point was that people switch the music off because the music sucks, not because that's what people do. My addendum was that people would not switch the music off if the music didn't suck. I wouldn't switch the music off if it didn't suck. I don't switch the music off in any game when it's decent.

You seem to dismiss the very concept of background music, which is composed and designed such that it serves as a background and doesn't become repetitive. Grab the soundtrack to any game and listen to the generic background tunes, and you'll find that most of it consists of things like this, which isn't really so much "music" as it's quite literally background. It's something put in the background not so you sit down, cross your arms and listen to it, but so that you don't play in complete silence. It's no different from 5th Column generators making that looping clang sound or consoles chirping or the sound of opening doors.

I'm not talking about playing Smooth Criminal every time you switch zones, because Smooth Criminal is not ambient music. Ambient music is what you hear in Ouroboros.

Yes, that was my assertion, but it comes with a few problems. For one, this is never addressed or explained, and it's only a best guess we can make. For another, it relies on the idea that a device made to prevent the mediporters from being suppressed can be used to suppress them, which isn't exactly how technology works.

Furthermore, Malta never seemed to have a problem killing heroes to begin with. I can't access ParagonWiki right now, but during the World Wide Red arc, they kill a hero who was investigating them.

Roy never mentions cost, but then he doesn't mention much at all. As concerns slots, according to Dr. Steffard, once you're bound to a mediporter, you can never be unbound by some kind of unexplained physical law, implying that maintaining a person's link to the mediporter network not only requires no maintenance or upkeep, but can also never be broken.

As well, Roy mentions it being "dangerous" for civilians to use the mediporter system, which I interpreted to mean some ill effect on the user. Considering they control the facilities, I doubt it's a problem of unkillable criminals. I suppose one could infer it means that the system could overload and fail to port heroes when it needs to, but again - this should have been explained considering this is what the arc is about.

I examined that possibility in the question itself, but as with a lot of other things, this is never explained. And the reason I keep bringing this up isn't to be argumentative, but rather because it would take all of one sentence to explain it. Instead of Roy lampshading standard tension-building drama by saying "I don't know why," he could have simply said "and they can't make another one because there isn't enough of the Unobtainium isotope on Earth." That's essentially what Maxwell Christopher says to explain why Nemesis can't remake his doomsday device sphere thing.

Instead, we're left with "can't for no reason" and no point is made of this being the only unique device that can be used. You'd think such a unique piece of equipment would have been given a higher importance.

I suppose one could argue that they simply didn't have time to make a duplicate, but given the timeframe of events, this doesn't work, either. The way Roy talks about it, it seems like they only recently discovered that Cole had a way to block our mediporters, and they managed to rush the device through R&D in that short amount of time, as well as produce it. And his Invasion isn't even impending, so while there'd be reason to rush just to be save, there's no immediate, looming danger.