Samuel_Tow

Hmm... If we did, then I'd have to re-roll Slime Girl:



So, yeah, I definitely approve of this idea.

However, when I try to load it into Mids' using the Import From Forum option (the only one I could find), it gives me an error. More specifically, I get told that:

and

This is on Windows XP 32, so I don't know what the problem might be. I'll try it at home on Windows 7 x64 and see if anything changes.

*edit*
Also got an error in getting updates. It occurs to me... Do I need to have registered an account to use this?

*edit*
It works for my PC at home. Could it have something to do with the fact that this didn't seem able to grab my alignment when I was at work, but was when I was at home?

Or just type /info with no target selected. Easier if you want to bind it to a key.

I think we'll just have to agree to see things differently. I try to look at everything to do with the from an in-game, storyline perspective without breaking the fourth wall. I try to look at players in completely the opposite way, in a meta-game, out-of-character way, approaching them as people, not as players. As such, I want my CHARACTERS to feel animosity for their CHARACTERS, but I don't want to be their enemy, and I don't want them to be my enemy.

What the game tells me happened is what happened. What a player wrote in his bio happened is what happened. What level a character is or what badges that character has... That's meta-game. It doesn't mean anything to MY CHARACTER. It only means something to me as a person, to know what that other person has achieved with this character. I will never, ever RP with another person, simply because I don't want that. Regardless of the channel, chat with other people is just that - chat with other people. Not RP, not character-to-character. Just chat with other people the same as if I called them up on the phone.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. Others have already made arguments why going F2P doesn't mean you've "failed." But even if I were to assume that they did, you can't really make an argument that they failed because of that.

To summon Goodwin's law somewhat, WW2 Germany failed in the war, but WW2 Germany developed jet aircraft. That didn't mean jet aircraft sucked, and in fact the US syphoned off a great many German aeronautics engineers and developed their own jet engines, greatly benefiting aviation for the entire world.

You CAN take a good idea from a bad project, because it's unreasonable to assert that ALL parts of a bad project are themselves bad. The reality of the situation is that a lot of failed games actually have almost entirely GOOD ideas that then get recycled in far more successful games.

Yeah, that's the big thing for me: I'm really anal about my characters and how they're written. If it's a generic system that gives me a selection from one of three personalities, like "playful villain," "serious villain," "sinister villain" and just had a few generic lines upon showing up, like "This time I will eat the marrow from your bones!" vs. "So we meet again, kid. Ah, I so enjoy our little meetings." then I can probably take it, as a sort of acceptable break from reality in the same way as I accept that we can't open doors with our hands or pick things up from the ground. It won't be ideal, but it will be excusable. However, when I give this to a PLAYER, then I will judge it by the same standard as I'd judge my own work, and other people just can't read my mind.

But again - the idea actually really does have merit. I'd actually suggest taking this to the Architect forum and starting a trend there. I'm sure people will pick up on it and run with the thing. Post a screenshot of said character and a bio up to a certain limit and then have someone else write a mission or an arc with that.

Here's he thing - I believe all players should be friends and want nothing more than to either make each other happy, or at least keep out of each other's way. I actually hold the same belief even in competitive games, which is why I don't tend to compete with people I don't know and trust to not be cheap bastards. I want to encourage players to play together even when their objectives compete. I do not want to encourage one person to want to screw another because that's what the game is about. I wouldn't play such a game.

I've played competitive games. Believe me, I have. When you have decent players who are all there to have fun, it's the best time in the world. And when you have cheap bastards who exploit the system just to piss you off, it's one of the worst frustrations you're likely to meet on a daily basis. I don't want the game to encourage players to be enemies. Their characters on a storyline level, yes, but the players themselves? I don't want that. I don't want to see missions that instruct one player to screw over another. Just not something I want to play.

Perspective is never a bad idea. FORCED perspective, however, is insulting. The quickest way to make someone who's already pissed of out-and-out blow his top is to tell him "your anger is meaningless and you have no right to be angry." Trust me, no matter your intention, this inspires a man to want to punch another man. Literally. There are ways to calm people down. "You're stupid for getting angry," which is what the starving children picture basically does, ain't one of them.

Here's the thing - yes, it's true that we can be worse off. I could be DEAD. I've had a gas stove explode in my face with enough force to blow a door off its hinges. But here's the thing - all this serves to do is stifle people's enthusiasm. Some of the greatest achievements of people, both practical and artistic, have been born of a person's enthusiasm to build, create and express. They have been born out of a person taking his pretendy-fun dreams and caring enough about them to make them a reality.

I write stories in my free time. Whether good or bad is not for me to decide, but this is what I do. I care about these stories, I love them to bits, I enjoy their plotlines and intricacies, and with every new one, I want to make it bigger, better and more exciting than before. This is what gives me my enthusiasm. If, however, I were constantly being nagged about the starving children in Indonesia or Africa or wherever and beaten over the head that THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT, then I would stop caring about my stories. And when I stop caring about the stories, what I end up writing is garbage. And I don't want to write garbage.

All I'm saying here is, yes, perspective is important. But what I think is even more important is to let people have their fantasies without constantly reminding them they are fake and unimportant.

No, we don't. "Souls" are just a cushy lie we tell ourselves to distract our brains from the the very clear and very real notion that one day, we'll die, and it's all over. We like to think that our "souls" will go off to a better place, but they won't. We cease to exist, and that frightens people.

Humans are nothing more than very complex machines made out of meat. Both history and medicine have demonstrated that emotions, love, dreams and personality can be controlled by purely physical means. If it makes people feel better about themselves by believing they are somehow more "special" than that pile of rocks over there, then I'm not about to stop them, but don't try to dismiss other people's ideas just because you need to believe that humans aren't precisely as soulless as a computer.

This is also false. Our imaginations are not unlimited. In fact, they feel unlimited simply because we're not even imaginative enough to see the boundaries of cognition. Different people's finite imaginations don't always overlap, which means a lot of people have ideas a lot of other people don't, creating the illusion of infinity. But imagination is no more infinite than the water in the ocean is. Yes, when you're adrift out at sea and there's nothing but water as far as you can see in all directions, including down, it "feels" infinite, but it's not.

Romantic ideas like souls, imagination, love, good and evil and all of that are perfectly fine for fictional stories. Prudent, in fact, as they make for some very engaging themes. But they cannot and should not be applied to the real world because the real world doesn't work that way.

GOOD! I don't want to play games where players are enemies. There's a reason I chose this one and not Lineage or Aion or Wow. I don't want to compete with other PLAYERS. I'm perfectly fine with competing with other villains. I play both heroes and villains, as do my friends. I don't want the game to try to convince me to be enemies with them. If I wanted to compete, that's what PvP zones are for, and what you guys are asking for is what you get IN WARBURG. Why can't you go there and be enemies with other players? That's what it's for.

MY heroes and MY villains. Me against me, on my terms, by my rules. That's still me against the computer, not me against other PEOPLE. I prefer fighting stupid, unfeeling, uncaring computers over real players. How is this heroic? I saved the world. Who cares that I didn't save it from a PLAYER? I still saved the world, and that's all I care about. Other people don't matter unless I choose to involve myself with them, as it should be.

How can you tell? I mean, how do you know who's robbed what? And how have NPC "never really [done] anything?" They plant bombs in buildings, kidnap people, kill people, alter history, unleash viruses, create monsters, commit crimes. What more do you need them to do? Kick a puppy? Oh, but we never see them do it. No, not really. I don't see player villains rob banks, either.

No, thanks. My interest in personal nemesis situations extends only as far as having them occasionally show up in otherwise unrelated missions. I don't want to go ahead and have the game or other people write actual stories about my villains, because I'm very particular about how they're written. But even if this were instituted as an actual in-game function, I'd still prefer that it were somehow customizable by me. I don't want to lend my characters out to other people to write for.

That doesn't mean the idea isn't a good one, however. I'm sure there are plenty of other people who'd take you up on that offer. I just happen to not like the Architect and the way people use it. If a nemesis system existed, I'd rather that were controlled by the developers and by the actual game, not by other players. I'm no more willing to trust others with the narrative of my characters than I am with the keys to my house. That's just how I operate.

This kind of attitude itself creates a lot of the problems, however. I started this off by saying that the original article was dismissive of people's emotional investment, and this notion that people on the 'net will act like dicks because there are no consequences only serves to make things worse.

The kinds of people who rely on anonymity and are transient in communities where they cause problems are not, at their root, members or founders of said communities. Because for those of us who end up belonging to a specific community (by choice or otherwise), anonymity is not an option. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I know for a fact that people here know me. I know for a fact that if I make an *** of myself, people will remember it. I know for a fact that the next time I show my face here, people will still remember that. As a point of fact, I am not anonymous here.

To be honest, a large percentage of Internet drama seems to be instigated by a dissonance of values when different personalities meet. When you have one person who scoffs at "pretendy fun games" and is liable to mock people for their attachment meet with another who is emotionally invested in his fictional universe and his immaterial community, then emotions usually fly.

The "Internet" may not be real, but it is still as real as television, radio or the telephone. It doesn't have to be "real" in any sense of the word, because it does nothing more than provide an environment for real people with real feelings and real emotions to interact. And as long as real people interact with each other, the interaction is "real enough," and as such shouldn't be dismissed as no big deal.

If it intrudes AT ALL, it intrudes far too much. I have precisely ZERO tolerance for other people intruding into my own business unless I specifically chose to involve myself with them. That's why I'm not playing any of those other MMOs out there.

I'd like to see someone try to teleport and see how that works for them.

Oh, and before I forget: Googly-googly-goo.

And how is that different from your contact telling you that the Circle of Thorns are trying to extract the souls of an entire unnamed neighbourhood and you have to stop it? Why do player heroes have to oppose PLAYER villains if they're not actually opposing other players?

This has always baffled me. Everyone says heroes and villains should fight more, completely ignoring the fact that this is what you spend the entire game doing. Without exception. If you are a hero, you spend the entirety of your time fighting villains. OK, if you're a villain, you split your time between fighting heroes and fighting other villains, but that's even more strife. Why do you need them to be PLAYERS, ostensibly when your suggestion doesn't actually pit you against players?

This is where the Nemesis idea comes in. People have heroes and they have villains, and they want their heroes and their villains to fight, which you can never do since you can only log one character in at a time. Being able to make an NPC in the image of your villain and have that show up in your hero's missions is a roundabout way to achieving the same goal.

I don't treat players I meet as heroes or villains or Praetorians. I treat them as players, and I am opposed to anything which proposes to change that. I reserve my "hatred" for fighting with NPCs.

You do realise you're neither cute nor funny when you say things like that, right?

That's kind of where I stand. It always bothers me when people diminish the importance of online interaction in the "lighten up Francis" fashion. Yes, online games are effectively incorporeal, but then so are books, movies and actual party games. Yes, you don't have a physical pen and physical paper, but that's not what makes the game. It's the interaction between players and the enjoyment these players experience that makes the game fun.

Very often, the cause of Internet Drama is neither the Internet nor the game. It's other people. I've said it before and I'll say it again - far more than any change or system that this game has ever seen, what has BY FAR ruined my fun the most has been other people, be they here on the forums or in the game itself.

"Critics" often try to paint how petty it is to argue about whether Longbow is really evil or whether make-pretend rain is that important or any other such aspect, and they're right. But Internet Drama is never "about" these things. It's about people. What irks people the most isn't the fact "someone on the Internet is wrong," but rather that someone's actually insulting your intelligence. This is not something unique to the Internet. This happens at work, on the bus, in the street, at clubs and so on and so forth. Just look at fooball violence. People kill each other over whose team is better, and football doesn't produce anything more real than a video game.

That's why I say the article is insulting and patronising. I appreciate the intent to get people to relax and breathe, but dismissing their interests as irrelevant and unimportant is practically the WORST way to go about doing this. Inter-personal problems aren't solved by ignoring them or pretending they're unimportant.

Um...

There really aren't that many option here. If it's "not in some stupid mission" then it's in an open zone. You're either in an instance or you're not.

Those, among others, were methods examined, but I don't want to comment on specifics. Suffice it to say that proxies are not as easy a solution as they seem, or so I'm told.

In a word, yes.

Speaking of which, we really need to proliferate the "robot" tag a little more so things like EMP Pulse (sic) would actually affect enemies it's expected to affect. I don't think Arachnos Tarantulas are tagged as robotic, and I KNOW the old Praetorian Clockwork weren't just for example. Are PPD Hard Suits tagged as such? The only things I do know EMP works on are Mek Men.

Thanks for that

I am still unable to see the sun, however. Seriously, is it something on my end, or is there really no sun in the sky during the day?

This is gonna' make me sound like a complete dick, but: You are wrong. What I'm going off of is the definition of "vigilante" I get from running Vigilante tip missions. Some Vigilante tips are perfectly understandable - you chase after the bad guys and hope someone else will save civilians from danger, as one might in a City of Heroes. Other tips are... Not as pleasant, like that one tip which has you assassinate a bad guy because he'll just get out of jail otherwise. And then there's that one tip where you let a hostage get killed on national television, possibly sparking A WAR, just because you're a jerk and want to punish the bad guys.

A lot of Vigilante tips are worse than some of the VILLAIN missions I've done, let alone the Rogue ones. Plenty of Rogue missions have me abandon the chance for a great scheme in favour of saving some guy's *** from his own trouble, with the narrative almost apologising for this by telling me "But... But... You'll get paid!"

And you know what the real kicker is? I can't "just dismiss tips I don't like," for one because I keep getting the same ones over and over again, and for another because there are something like ten per level range. Not a whole lot of choice there, when I need ten for an alignment switch to begin with. I've tried dismissing distasteful Vigilante tips. After dismissing all three tips I had twice in a row, I gave up and decided that my characters weren't going to be vigilantes if that's what a vigilante was.

The game defines what each alignment IS by virtue of defining the tasks and mentality needed to achieve said alignment. And the tasks and mentality needed to be a vigilante in this game equates to the jerkass, which I simply don't design any of my characters to be.