Samuel_Tow

People with South American IP addresses are blocked from the PlayNC store entirely. Even as a North American player, you would still be unable to buy Booster Packs if you moved to South America, as your IP would be blocked from the store.

It's kind of the same way as how we Europeans always get defaulted to EU versions of the PlayNC sites, only in the case of South American players, they don't have ANY option to switch to the NA store. As I said - I have friends who've had this problem, and there was no "good" solution that any of us could come up with.

No, no and HELL NO! Keep PvP out of the PvE zones. I don't want it. I don't want to be exposed to it. I don't want to be near it. I don't want to be in the same zone as it. There's a reason PvP zones exist, and that's to keep PvP in those zones. I will never support any suggestion to bring PvP out of those zone and out of the Arenas.

I actually consider this in itself to be a severe weakness for the set as a whole. Having a "choice" between what is ostensibly two separate powersets rolled into the same 9 powers, while good in theory, does not pan out in practice. People want to min/max, with "min" being a very important part. That is to say, people want to cut out as much of what they don't expressly need, and "that other mode" just happens to be one large clump of powers to cut. That's especially true when you consider how many powers and what kind of cost you see out of Granite Armour.

Give people a choice between two "modes" and they will pick one at the cost of another. That's just how it goes. Designing sets with "modes" in mind, therefore, is not something I consider a winning strategy. For an Epic AT like Khelidans I can kind of see that. But for a generic AT which has to toe the line with monolithic sets, as it were, this creates problems.

Not least of these problems is that you create a set which can never really be good at any one time. You can either have decent offence and sub-par defence, or great defence and crappy offence. This, again, sounds good on paper, up until you realise that most other sets tend to have offence AND defence all the time.

This becomes worse when we consider Brutes, in fact. Had I picked Stone Armour on a Tanker, I could have conceded that it is my job to survive and tank, not deal damage and dealt with the lack of offence. But when I pick this on a Brute, this power runs completely contrary to what I see Brutes as being designed to do - hit things and deal damage.

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I feel Stone Armour as a whole needs to be re-examined. There are just far too many questionable decisions in there.

That's more or less what I was going to say.

On the one hand, yeah, it's sad and all that hardened criminals and ruthless killers have to die sometimes. It's just as sad every time they kill innocent people, so it's not as clear-cut as people present it.

On the other hand, tip missions SOMEWHAT deal with this, but the problem with those is they try to be too specific in what defines heroes and what defines vigilantes. Sometimes vigilantes come off like no-nonsense heroes who just want to get the job done, sometimes they come off as stone cold killers, and sometimes they come off as complete ********.

That's actually why I have a problem with having this many moral positions - it starts to become specific and defining in a way that, in turn, becomes limiting. Right now, a vigilante is defined not just as a person who's prepared to kill, but also a person who's prepared to sacrifice the lives of innocents and doesn't care, a person who's willing to take on good guys for disagreeing with him, and a person who's willing to commit out-and-out crimes.

I, personally, was much happier when there were just good guys and bad guys without specifically defining what made which kind of good guy and what make which kind of bad guy. I don't see why faction swaps couldn't happen directly between hero and villain. If we needed a middle ground to accommodate Praetorians, then we should have had ONE middle ground that was right in the middle, not two middle grounds that were on either side of the line divide. Right now, we have these people who aren't really heroes, but they aren't really villains, only they're not rogues, who aren't really villains, but then they aren't really heroes, but they're still distinct from each other. And they're not Praetorians, either, who are themselves not like each other and it just makes a mess of factions and moralities and specifics that, to me, does more to harm than to help.

More of a misappropriated trope, actually, mostly because I didn't remember my TVtropes well enough. A dork age appears to be when a comic book company or franchise enters a new "age" that simply and utterly flops. It's not quite what I had in mind to say, however, so I should have probably gone with the more appropriate "dark age" of comic books, since that's what I was talking about.

Well, I'm not cultured enough to know either way

I remember a player once kill-stole me, then flew in close and told me "Please give me money." How did you know that was the key to my heart?!?

Actually, that's mostly player inference, which caused a feedback loop back into the game in offhand comments. The only real actual reference to flamethrowers = bad is in their info descriptions, in that they keep those away from the cameras. That's it. No horrors of war, no moral ambiguity, no questionable ethics. They just don't like to flame people on TV.

The comment about Praetorians being horrified by Longbow is actually the reverse - it's Longbow soldiers talking among each other. Specifically, that the Praetorian police officers are armed mostly with non-lethal weapons "and look at what we're carrying." Which is an amusing community reference, but goes on to ignore the fact that those "non-lethal weapons" were used to break a guy's back, and those same weapons were used by Chief Interrogator Washington to KILL Cleopatra.

Most of the "Longbow are actually evil" rhetoric has always come from players and their interpretations, or re-interpretations as the case may be, of the faction, and often in the face of stated canon. Whenever the game needs a default good guy faction, it defaults to Longbow, even in cases where that seems out of place. You need to spread Outbreak through Paragon City? Longbow are there to oppose you. You need to kidnap an important scientist? Longbow are there to guard him. You want to go blow up a public building? Longbow are trying to stop you. They are the de-facto good guys, and suffer mostly from the simple fact that they are a simple re-dump of the 5th Column Ubermenschen corps for the most part.

That's actually something of a pet peeve of mine, because it keeps being brought up and always with the same arguments, and these are arguments that were invented before my eyes back in the day. Keeping to strict canon definitions, the worst you can find is Longbow traitors like Lt. Demitrovich and that Longbow agent who was stealing from various factions, pinning it to Arachnos then selling on the black market. But they don't represent the faction. And I don't know how "arrogant" Miss Liberty is, since none of that characterisation is in the game, and the Top Cow comics aren't what I'd describe as "good."

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I'm not against better defined canon (where cannon is spelled with a double N), just so long as it isn't REWRITTEN canon which invalidates my characters who were perfectly fine up to that point. In fact, I prefer loosely-defined canon over that, if it gives me more creative freedom. I CERTAINLY don't want another mess like the Origin of Powers nonsense which suddenly tells me who my characters really are and where their powers actually come from. More to point, I don't suddenly want the game to redefine what it means to be a hero and yank my heroes from under me because they didn't fit someone else's definition.

Fine by me, really. I don't necessarily need my enemies to die, so much as I need my characters to be free to aim for head shots without feeling terrible about themselves, just as a random example.

And again - I don't restrict myself to JUST what the game represents physically or what's told in specific lore. The only time I'll restrict myself is if the game specifically CONTRADICTS what I want to claim, which it doesn't, for the most part. Yes, FrostFire comes back. Faceless Skull #124123332, on the other hand, doesn't. Or at least I don't think he does...

Huh... Duly noted. I don't think I'd rely on that, however. It's cool that it's there, but not if it costs me a use of Placate. Placating an enemy I don't intend to fight for a while has been very helpful of late.

I just think it's interesting to let that be a chance occurrence on all hidden criticals without special precautions, but I don't think that's very likely to happen, as I have no real argument for why it's good other than "Wouldn't it be cool?"

So essentially what you're saying is multi-damage-type attacks are actually multiple attacks, each with its own damage type and possibly secondary effects? Be nice if that showed up in real numbers.

However, the way you describe it, it sounds like only the physical part of Thunder Strike has a guaranteed critical, whereas the Energy part has a chance critical, meaning that you still have to roll the dice if you want a full critical on your specific target. This concerns me, but it's still better than nothing.

Yeah, that's basically what I mean. Have some powers be straight-line instant-hit beams, have a few be those fireball-style blasts, have a few be that Photon Grenade ballistic projectiles and maybe even have one that's a "spray" of energy of sorts. I don't mean for them to be all different colours by default, just that it's not "laser, more laser, thicker laser, several lasers" and so forth.

In fact, if I were designing something like this, I'd go like so:

1. Mace Blast from the rifle
2. Pusle Rifle Burst
3. That Arachnobot energy spray cone attack
4. Build Up variant
5. Photon Grenade
6. Tesla Cage or a re-run of that lost containment temp power from that one mission
7. Assault Bot Plasma Blast from the rifle
8. Laser Beam: just a long, bright laser beam from rifle to target
9. Orbital Lance power via targeting laser from the Rifle

Pretty basic setup, really - three blasts, AoE, Cone, control, Build Up, snipe, nuke. If we must be fancy, we can probably come up with something new to do with Build Up, such as adding Energy damage to attacks like Fiery Embrace does.

No, I actually DON'T remember. In fact, I don't remember this ever having been stated by anyone in power. This is, and has always been, a comic book INSPIRED game, but developer after developer has said that while they will take ideas from comic books, they will not limit themselves by the limitations of comic books. In other words, "just because it's not like that in comics" isn't a valid argument.

Furthermore, you're assuming American comic books released somewhere between 1950 and 1980. The 90s dork age of comic books, by contrast, saw PLENTY of killing super heroes, like our friend Pitt, the Young Blood and practically everything else Rob Leifeld ever made. And much as people try to deny it, Rob IS a part of American comic book continuity. And then we have comic books which aren't American. Grab almost any Japanese, Chinese or Korean manga, and you'll see that those cultures are far less squeamish about killing people. All of the animes I cited are made after mangas of the same name. Even when they deal with pure, divine, morally just heroes, those still end up taking the lives of their victims.

City of Heroes is also heavily inspired by pulp fiction, film noir and even sci-fi themes, including those concepts in there, as well. Sci-fi themes, however, also include steampunk, cyberpunk, dystopian future and other crapsack world concepts, which in turn include killing as a modus operandi. Furthermore still, a fair few themes seem inspired by Western movies, if not insetting then at least in spirit, and Western heroes like the Man With No Name were all about shooting the bad guys. Hell, the very point of the quickdraw contest is to KILL the other guy before he can KILL you. And even though TriGun plays with the concept of being a gunslinger who doesn't kill, it still displays the harsh reality of an outlaw setting. Characters transplanted from those settings would, in fact, fit right into City of Heroes.

But the most damning evidence that the setting does, in fact, support and promote the killing of bad guys is the fact that at least half the powers heroes get constitute either lethal weapons or deadly effects. Swords, guns, axes, hammers, fire, electricity, radiation, the list goes on. Yes, you CAN make up your own explanation why the ones your character uses aren't as lethal as they really ought to be, and that's fine. I have no problem. However, there really is no ground to claim that my character using the tools the environment provides as those tools are meant to be used does something the environment doesn't support. You don't give the player a gun and enemies to shoot, then claim he should have known he was never supposed to shoot them. Well, some games try to do that, but it's a big enough dick move that most developers know better.

And if that weren't enough, the game gives you no definition of what enemy defeats at your hands actually constitute. You "defeat" enemies, and the game says no more. What that means is up to you to decide. Up to me to decide for myself. If you opt to interpret that as "knocked out and teleported to jail" then that's fine. If I opt to interpret it as "shoot in the head and let corpse fade clean up," then I'm just as in my right. If someone else interprets it into "beat so bad he turns into coins," then... Wait, what?

All I'm saying is the setting supports this. If you want a "comic book only" game, there's already a game that's pretty much that, and pretty much that is the reason I'm not there now. Kill or arrest is down to player interpretation and really not something anyone is "right" about. I don't tell you you're wrong to play a perfect hero in a flawed world, so do me a solid and don't suggest I'm wrong for playing a ruthless hero in a perfect world.

And nothing I've said suggests this, either. Again, I'm not talking about homicidal murderers. I'm not talking about "kill EVERYONE" but more about "not refuse to kill ANYONE." I treat my heroes less like spandex-clad icons of goodness and chastity and more like soldiers in a war against crime and the forces of evil, to borrow a PowerPuff Girls quote. And, no, that doesn't constitute Vigilante, because the way Vigilantes are written in this game is as complete dicks who just want to mess with bad guys.

If I had, just as a random example, a guy who's determined to protect innocent people from criminals and other villains, and that guy sees a robber holding a hostage at gunpoint, my guy will shoot the robber in the head without a second thought. Why? Because he's a crack shot and because all other other options are considerably more dangerous to the hostage. I happen to dislike playing with people's live for the sole sake of not killing the bad guys and REALLY dislike your typical cop-out children's cartoons resort to to prevent this, such as having Wolverine do nothing but kick people in that 90s Fox cartoon.

No, I mean visually different. I'm more interested in what you'd define as an "energy rifle" without having to specify what energy you're shooting. We have a wide variety of strict-theme energy blast sets. It just feels like making one that's all laser beams would be redundant and potentially not as interesting. Kind of akin to making an assault rifle sets that consisted only of shooting different bursts out of the rifle. Say what you will about the Assault Rifle set, but at least it's not boring.

That's kind of why I want to see lasers, plasma blasts, energy balls, energy sprays (think Arachnobot lieutenants), that ball lightning style Photon Grenade and so on. Beams, blasts, pulses, balls, etc. Even something like Energy Blast skirts the line, with Power Bolt, Power Blast and Power Burst being just about the same power.

Thing is, all it takes is one boss-level Gunslinger and pretty much any boss in the game is taking a dirt nap. Especially FrostFire, who isn't all that strong even as an elite boss. And that mission has the potential to spawn multiple bosses.

And even if it didn't spawn bosses, it can spawn over half a dozen lieutenant-level Gunslingers, enough to make even a Tanker cry. And ForstFire is no Tanker, lemme tell ya.

Wait, so if I Placate while I'm hidden, I get a chance for a double critical? Huh...

OK, so apparently I was wrong on Thunder Strike, which actually makes me happy about it. That had the potential to really mess with Electrical Melee, and I'm glad it doesn't. Still, though, it means that I can't get decent criticals out of Head Splitter, and that ticks me off to no end.

I'm not really sure how Thunder Strike gets its single-target guaranteed critical, but I think it's rigged as the opposite: an AoE power where some of the effects don't apply to its entire AoE range. I believe that's how Tanker attacks are rigged, as well. Actually, how DO Tanker cones manage to spread gauntlet around the affected target? Do they even do that?

Orbital Cannon, very much yes. For the rest, I wouldn't be too much opposed to just staling existing powers from the current things which use Pulse Rifles. You already have three powers from Pulse Rifle itself, and between Arachnos Drones, Arachnobots and... There was something else... I think we can compile a full set.

Just for the record, I'm prefer a Pulse Rifle set with a variety of effects, not just lasers.

That was more or less a rhetorical question, though. I know why it hasn't been changed - no-one wants to mess with it, and most likely for the reasons you specify. This was more of a request. "Why hasn't this happened" in the sense of "when will this happen," as it were.

And, yes, I realise that the powerset will likely need to be bent over a pommel horse and spanked into submission with any decent review, but eh. I feel it SHOULD happen.

I was about to say the same. When you pick up Munitions Mastery or the Black Scorpion Patron pool, your costume editor shows a new dropdown with customizations for your new weapon. Not only that, but Munitions Mastery is hooked up to meld with the AR weapon customization dropdown, so you get a new weapon to customize, unless you already had AR either as a Corruptor or a Blaster.

Was there a conversation like this when someone proposed inventing cold fusion, with one group saying it would be good to have and another group saying they'd rather scientists worked on better boob juggle physics?

Wait, what?

People on the forums. And there's arguing RP styles and then there's arguing "You're wrong for making your characters like this and you should be ashamed of yourself!" Do I need to summon Golden Girl to provide examples?

I think you're thinking of someone else, as I've gone on the record of wanting precisely the opposite. When you're dealing with a super hero game, realism just gets in the way most of the time. It's rule of cool and some measure of believability that prevails, even if it doesn't always pan out in a real-world setting even with a miracle excuse.

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As far as those who kill people going to jail, I have to disagree. Wanton murderers, yes, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about people given a license to kill. Pick any cartoon or movie not aimed at kids and you have at least a 50/50 chance of seeing the good guys killing lots of bad guys. Take Lethal Weapon, for example - the good guys capped so many bad guys it isn't even funny, especially Mel Gibson in his spaz attack at the end. Or how about something like Starship Troopers? Sure, they didn't kill people, but they didn't think twice about blowing the everloving crap out of living creatures nonetheless.

OK, so those guys were in danger. So let's pick something else. Let's take Fist of the North Star. In that, Kenishiro never had a problem blowing people's heads up (literally) as a matter of course, even though he was almost completely invulnerable. How about Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher? In the words of Yahtzee "You're expect to cap then in the head anyway." And the guy is never in any real danger since since so damn good. How about Julie in Heavy Metal 2000? Never really took much heed at all the humanoid aliens she took out, despite the fact that she never showed any sign of being in real danger. Or how about the Gyver? How many things did that guy kill, despite being almost completely invulnerable? And that's in both the movie and the anime.

How about people who work for the authorities? 007 himself is the man with a licence to kill. Beyond that, we have Major Motoko Kusanagi, whose very first appearance in the Ghost in the Shell movie was acting as an assassin and killing a man. And what do the cops in that movie do when they're trying to stop a car? They shoot it with anti-tank rifles, turning the driver inside into a side of beef. Speaking of anime, how about Striggan? Even when he's in control, Yu still shoots people without much compassion. When the guy he's escorting turns out to be a bad guy and pulls a gun on him, for example, Yu just kicks him out of the car and under the wheels of the chase car behind him.

Or how about Kratos from God of War? Not heroic enough? How about War from Darksiders. He plays the hero. How about the Prince of Persia? The guy starts every game killing honest-to-god living people, and then moves on to killing monsters. Or is that not considered killing? How about Max Payne? He's a cop, isn't he? And he has a body count to rival Commando's John Matrix. Speaking of which - Commando! At the end of the movie, John Matrix has killed pretty much the entire army of a small South American country and he's not arrested. He gets a pat on the back and an offer to go back into government service. And how about that Jack Slate fellow from Dead to Rights? Wasn't he a cop? Hell, I just watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade last night, and Indie killed something like a full two platoons of soldiers. He's in danger, you say? What danger was he in when he shot the sword guy in Raiders of the Lost Arc?

We need to stop thinking about just Batman and Superman, because the game's thematic allows for rather a LOT more than just that.

Right?