Samuel_Tow

Huh... I honestly thought it was from Division: Line, but it turns out it's from the Organ Grinders. It makes sense it would be. OK, my bad.

They do, yes, and they give you a long-winded clue with more detailed information on the subject. The Dark Watcher's version does indeed have a comparable clue, but the guy could at least stand to be more serious about it, rather than "Read it, give it to your friends, wipe your *** with it, I don't care. Just don't tell people where you got it." Really, the dude too serious and mysterious to take this kind of hands-off approach.

Nothing's stopping them, I guess. Since they've already done it with Positron, one can only assume the others are next. I guess the only problem I can think of is one of narrative, since TFs tend to want to end in climactic battles, and it's odd to have, say, three climaxes per story.

As far as World Wide Red goes, I actually don't want it split up. I prefer longer, more intricate stories tied together into gigantic arcs. So what if it's long? You don't have to do it in one sitting, so what does it really matter?

Originally, as in the original Survivng Eight TFs, all of which are still in the game in their unchanged forms, other than Positron, plus the four Shadow Shard TFs, which would be Quaterfield, Sara Moore, Justin Augustine and, of course, Faating the Jerk, to quote the Hamster.

Back in the day, there was a very hard divide between Task Forces and Trials, and if you look at the paper map that shipped with your CoH box (if you have one), you'll notice a clear divide between Hazard zones and Trial zones, as well. I don't know what Trials were originally supposed to be. I'm not sure anyone ever had a good answer to this, because when the game launched, there WERE no Trials. I guess the Faultline Dam trial was supposed to ship with the game, but it did a Cathedral of Pain move and was never actually put in.

The first actual trial tagged as such was the Hydra Trial, access from the Abandoned Sewers, which was and may still be tagged as a Trial zone, hence the HUUUGE spawns down there. Then, and perhaps even now, the Trial consisted of one massive hunt (150 Rikti in the Abandoned Sewers), followed by what was essentially an hour-and-a-half boss fight. Back then, the difference between TF and Trial was TF mode, as the Hydra Trial did not use it. It was basically a mission which could be taken from some woman near Penny Peterson in Founders' Falls by people between 38 and 41 and over, but it did not lock the team, did not have level requirements for team-mates (above and beyond the level 36 requirement for the Abandoned Sewers, which should no longer be in effect). Instead, the TF made it so that if you brought people higher than 41, then either they couldn't take the anti-hydra weapons, or possibly even that the crates would not give anything with high-levels on the team. Since the hydra head could only ever be harmed by anti-hydra weapons, that would make it unkillable.

However, the next TF added to the game - the Respec Trial - broke the "no TF mode" rule by basically instituting TF mode to split the trial into its respective level ranges. I don't know what motivated this decision, but I assume it was the fact that non-TF mode Trials were chaotic and difficult to scale and, most importantly, difficult to keep high-level players out of to prevent them from just pwning the trial.

Every Trial since then - the Eden Trial, the Hollows Trial, etc, has been using TF mode. Actually, I'm not sure if the Caverns of Transcendence or Terra Volta was first, but either way makes sense. The point is, Trials began using the TF mechanic. So then the question recurred - what is a Trial and what is a TF? At the time, reverse logic suggested that TFs were like story arcs - long strings of missions that followed a story, whereas Trials were kind of like raids - short build-up to a large, long, intricate boss encounter. The Caverns, Terra Volta and Eden trials certainly suggested this.

Then CoV came out and threw it all out of the water. Not only did CoV dispense with the concept of Hazard and Trial zones altogether, but its TFs were actually a lot like what we called Trials in CoH. And, yes, we call the, Strike Forces, but it's still the TF mechanic at play. Virgil Tarikoss' SF, for instance, is basically a few short missions followed by the HUGE final encounter in Bat'Zul's cave. Even Kathie Hannon before that was a fairly short TF with "interesting" boss fights.

And then we got the Recluse SF and, subsequently, the Statesman TF, both of which play more like raids than they do like TFs. And then we got the Barakuda SG and the Khan TF, both of which end in a HUGE final confrontation that takes up easily half of the storyline's total time commitment. I honestly don't think there's any point in using the term "trial" any more outside of simple convenience, because Task/Strike Force and Trial are completely interchangeable at this point. The old ones aren't exactly the same, but in new content, there is no distinction. A TF is a SF is a Trial. It's the same thing by different names.

But why have a distinction to begin with? Why have TFs distinct from Trials? What did they have in mind? Well, to my mind, I don't think TFs were ever supposed to be anything like what they became. Like Hazard and Trial zones, they were designed to be nothing more than forced team content, but I don't think any of them were designed to be more "epic" than regular content. And you have to remember, back in the day, content was never designed to be specifically soloable. In fact, we weren't meant to solo it, which Jack tried and failed to fix. Тhe distinction between solo content and TFs was never meant to exist. It was ALL team content, TFs just needed to ensure you had a team which could beat the AV at the end. The distinction came out of our ability to solo things we weren't supposed to, so it stopped being a question of "able to solo" so much as "allowed to solo." That gave birth to the notion that TFs were the only team content in the game, when in fact THE WHOLE GAME was intended to be team content.

Read your Launch manuals and look for the entry on the Boss class. There it will tell you that bosses are very hard enemies which really should not be faced alone and even if you could somehow manage to defeat a boss, you should know you really weren't intended to. Not how it worked out, is it? But Jack tried to force that with the I4 boss buff, but that tanked. This train of thought is also why we can disable bosses in missions. They were supposed to be unsoloable, so he threw us a bone and let us turn them off if we wanted to solo, under the impression that... Why would we want to solo, anyway?

The reason I'm talking about this is that if you look at the old game - I'm talking pre-I1 content - you will notice an astonishing lack of AVs of ANY kind. There's Dr. Vahzilok, yes, but he's the ONLY ONE you meet until you get to the final level range (which at the time was 35-40), where you meet the only other one - the Envoy of Shadows. I'm entirely convinced that the ONLY reason for TFs to be team-only content was so that the system could ensure there were enough people by the end to defeat the AV you would face. Elite bosses appeared with I2, but even today, they are just a handful. Frostfire, Atta and... That's all I can think of, pre CoV, anyway. So TFs WERE basically just regular content, only with an AV at the end.

Of course, I1 gave us the 40-50 game which Jack says he and Positron designed around being "epic" and taking as long as 1-40, so it made sense it would be epic forced content all the way, hence the "AV in every mission" difficulty. People like me complained a lot, so eventually somewhere around I7 or I8, AVs began scaling down into EBs under certain conditions. And that's when TFs took their final turn into what they are today - "solo" content would scale down, but TFs never would.

Then we got rare recipes that dropped from TFs only, then we got Merits, then we got Quick Kathies, and little by little the whole TF system mutated into something that was coded to require all of those people via several different system. NOW TFs are team-only content, and I've been insulted over suggesting there be soloable, reward-less double of them... Like the Ouro TFs. I do not know what the design intention behind those was, but they were technically TFs that used the TF mechanic, only they scaled down like solo content. I don't know if they scale their rewards, but I doubt it. That is kind of what TFs originally were, but people refused to accept them if they didn't mandate teaming, so the Ouro TFs are the only ones that do that. Pity.

Basically, it seems like TFs were designed to be nothing too special, while Trials were intended to be the EQ-style raids and dungeons. As with most of our game, it was originally built after the most rigidly traditional styles but because of poor implementation and questionable development in its infancy, mutated into something wholly its own. And I dare say little of it was by design.

That's kind of what I mean. Since we have so many rewards tied to the end of a TF, we're really beyond the point where we can just fiddle with the system to allow dynamic team building. It'd just be far too exploitable.

To be fair, I'm not sure WoW Dungeons are much more time-consuming than our own TFs, even if they generally constitute less overworld travelling. I guess full-scale Raids in WoW might take longer, but they usually constitute of one lone fight or several smaller ones in a gauntlet fashion. However, I do know WoW allows on-the-fly invites. I don't know how they handle rewards in those instances, though.

To the developers' credit, they seem to have completely missed their guess when it came to how people would play TFs when they originally made them back in 2004. TFs were designed to be something SGs would do over several days, taking breaks when the play session became too long. Because this requires serious coordination, reliable friends in-game and actually quite a serious commitment, people chose to instead just sit through the whole thing all at once. So the old TFs designed to be long enough to fill a few days' worth of gaming were rushed through in, say, four hours, causing people to complain.

In a smart move of changing to game to match how people are already playing (rather than Jack's version of getting people to play how the game had been designed), newer TFs were made smaller and shorter, designed with the expectation that people would try to sit through the whole thing even if it sucked, so it made sense for it to not suck. However, because of this, TFs are now self-limiting. They are designed to be done in a single sitting, but are constrained by how much people are willing to do in that one single sitting. About four ling-ish missions seem to be mid to high norm.

However, as story arcs have shown us, you CAN'T condense a story indefinitely. Even if you have excellent writing, some stories just take longer to tell. Granted, a lot of hero-side arcs are padded with missions that accomplish nothing, but a lot actually aren't. The response to "story arcs are too long" can be seen in CoV, where stories are still long, but split between several arcs and several contacts. For instance, all four of a villain Ptron's story arcs put together aren't longer than Crimson's World Wide Red, but the story is still staggered.

Personally, I enjoy long story arcs more so than short ones because I enjoy the story more than the rewards, and if I were ever given the chance to play a TF for the story, I would choose a longer TF over a shorter one. Sadly, the only way to play ANYTHING for the story is to play it by yourself, and I can't start TFs alone, and probably wouldn't be able to finish them if I could.

You do realise what you're saying, right? "Well, I guess that means some people would never see the light of day, but SUCKS TO BE YOU! HAHA!" I'm sorry, but I don't find that argument convincing. So what if other games do it? It doesn't make it good. As a point of fact, that I'm here playing this game and NOT there playing that game ought to suggest there's something I like here that I don't like there. Day/night cycles just happen to be one of a long list of such items.

So, no. Not only am I fervently against realistic day/night cycles, I'm flatly against lengthening the cycle at all. It gives me the ability to see multiple days and multiple nights during any given play session, and I treasure that highly.

Also, there's this clock if you want to work out the in-game time.

This is patently false and a pretty ugly straw man, at that. Please do not insult people's intelligence in the future.

*edit*
I'm a 69 month veteran and I still highly disagree with the concept of veteran rewards. I realise the point is to reward people for staying with the game longer, but I'm not too keen on the concept of NOT rewarding people who have NOT been with the game longer. I've never drawn satisfaction from other people NOT having stuff I do.

Ever heard the tale of the self-fulfilling prophecy?

I dare say a lot more people would enjoy absurdly long TFs if they weren't team-locked. Of course, at this point that's simply not something which is likely to change, but the pressure to do it all in one sitting is what ruins the TF experience.

Well, that and having to do it with other people who've usually done it dozens of times and just want to get it over with, but that's besides the point.

Thank you, thank you

I'm not sure if there is much left to tell about Slime Girl, to be honest, as the most fun about her was her origin story was her actual origin, plus going farther into it I risk getting into topics that are likely to get me in trouble

More importantly, though, I'm starting to notice my tastes and my writing change ever so slowly away from the darkity drama I used to favour when I was unhappy with my life and into a more even mix of drama and light-heartedness, such as you would see in many non-emo anime. I'm actually seriously considering going forward with that Leninist elf, I just need to read up on Carl Marx and Vladimir Lenin's writings

If I remember correctly, it's not power animations that need to be redone, but rather combat modes, the transitions between them and the transitions from them into the stances powers "expect." Ninja Run already does this, so it's doable, and BABs actually did say that he may, at some indeterminate point in the future, look into adding power use with Walk when and if it were actually scheduled.

This I believe is a technical limitation. Walk uses, if I'm not mistaken, the "disable_all" state, which almost all powers are tagged to be unusable under just by default. So instead of going around and manually retagging each of the hundreds of powers to be specifically exclusive with Walk, they simply used the tag that's already built in. That way, they don't have to chase down bugs, like some obscure temporary power which shouldn't be usable with Walk but was missed and remains untagged.

You know, I've spent a lot of time talking about "evil lairs" and equivalents like "home turf" which would be kind of like base building, only on an above-ground set, and this idea actually fits very well. Suppose each hero had his own "home turf" that's, say, beat down and crime-ridden at the start, but through a few home-specific missions, say 1 per 10 levels, it could be cleaned up, improved and eventually flourish. You know, kind of like Villa Monteriggioni

The same was done to Mercy, as well, negating the comments about long treks through difficult terrain for anything outside of the Market, which in turns isn't really needed that early in the game anyway. I just chose to address the comments within their context, rather than challenging it.

"This" is simply the fact that you have to stand in full sight of the tree for a few of the vines while being unable to affect it, which is true. You don't have to do that with the Hydra Head because all of the generators and all of the paths between them are either out of range or out of line of sight of the Hydra Head. In fact, it's usually the tree smoking people that causes respec teams I'm on to see vine respawns. It's just too slow to be cautious around it and too dangerous to not be.

Personally, I'd like nothing better than for the tree to simply be inactive until the vines were dead, but oh well. I honestly don't feel its presence prior to downing the vines adds anything GOOD to the encounter.

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense, I'm saying it invalidates the gravity of Angus McQueen's arc and the importance of being given this information, when the Dark Watcher is handing it out like leaflets. The War Zone arcs are interesting, but they are made so at the expense of older arcs and older stories.

And "Timothy doesn't care" is a really bad reason to have his reveal be so ***. It's like Luke Skywalker learning that Darth Vader is his father mid-way through Episode 4 when Obi Wan says "Trust your feelings. Oh, and Darth Vader is your father. Just thought you might want to know." Even if it makes sense, it's just BAD storytelling.

Actually, if you look at the Praetorians as they are described in-game NOW, the conditions that gave them life weren't that different, just the Praetorians seem to have been born dicks so they reacted differently. For instance, Dominatrix hated being the daughter of a hero, so she up and killed her mother (if I remember correctly). Miss Liberty doesn't same to hate her mother, and even seems to have followed in her footsteps. So, basically, you have two copies of the same situation - daughter of a super hero - only they turn out completely differently because the two versions of protagonist just react to them differently.

I'm not saying there's no spur-of-the-moment inspiration that turns characters on their heads, but that's kind of what I mean. In fact, it's also kind of how I plan my own stories in very loose terms. I'll start with a guy who gets pegged as the hero, and I'll do what I can to incline him towards better deeds, but at some point I might suddenly decide that his opponent makes a better point and HE is the hero, whereas the original protagonist is the villain, whereupon I will re-spin his old actions and tend to incline him towards more questionable deeds. At the end of the day, I might flip a character back and forth any number of times in my head, and even though I'll usually clean up the narrative before I put it to writing, that sort of mental process highlights what I mean - a character himself isn't always good or evil and doesn't always have defined reactions for all situations.

I've seen a lot of people instruct beginning writers to think "What would that character do?" I would actually advise against this, because it means you don't "feel" the character if you HAVE to stop and reason it out, and more importantly because I tend to think about how I want to depict the characters more so than what "they" would do. Every character has good sides and bad sides, it's just a question of which one I want to focus on in that particular time.

You can't spin any character taking any action in any situation, but you CAN spin any character to be good or bad (not evil, just bad), and which you go for is a question of choice. A character can be presented with the clearest, most obvious choice for his personality and he can still get it wrong if he's having a bad day, if he's questioning his morality, if he's under pressure or if he just goofs.

Easy example. One character sees much suffering and fear, so when he gets super powers, he vows to protect others from the same things he suffers because he doesn't want anyone else sharing his fate. Another character sees much suffering and fear, but he learns that people will fear power because power can cause suffering, so when he gets super powers, he uses them to oppress people. Same circumstances, same basic events, two totally different outcomes.

In a good story, nothing should be pre-defined. A character should not respond to situations based on an arbitrary construct. We are shaped by the decisions we make, willingly and knowingly, and each character-defining moment is the result of decision taken and choice made. It may seem like a child who sees his beloved parents murdered would obviously turn to crime fighting, but he could easily have turned to crime as revenge against not just the killer, but all people in general. It is the choices we make that defines us, and every action a fictional character has to be viewed as a choice made, rather than as an in-character response.

Generally, characters who admit they are evil are VERY hard to pull of convincingly (about the only one I can think of is the Paladin in Serenity), but characters who REVEL in being evil are just Saturday morning cartoon villains no matter how sinister you try to make them. So, yeah, I agree with that actor.

To expand a little on my own point, I try to build all of my villains with a reason to do what they do, and a reason that makes sense given their personality. "The world laughed at my genius, but I intend to prove them wrong." or "People are killing each other anyway. Why shouldn't I kill a few and take control if it will stop the violence?" or even "Evil must be destroyed, even if we have to kill a bunch of innocents to do it." As long as you can suspend your morality for a second and go "I guess that makes sense..." it's all good.

If there's one thing no zone in CoV can be accused of, it's being welcoming. Even the zones that are supposed to be welcoming tourist traps are clearly hostile, scary and unappealing, and I'm starting to wonder if this is by bad design or if someone got stuck listening to Papa Roach when designing the CoV landscapes. Because, when you get down to it, that's basically what every square inch of the Rogue Isles tells you: Cut my life into pieces. This is my last resort.

Sheesh!

My burning hatred for Atlas Part notwithstanding, I honestly can't say a ramp is much to complain about, especially considering you have to climb two flights of stairs and go through one door and two halls and one open doorway just to get to your contact, then do it all over again to get back up, at which point you're given a mission in the far corner where enemies are +4 to +5 to you, only to find out you can't actually get there because you're blocked by a 20-foot-tall wall-for-no-reason and you can't go back to the terrace you jumped off of because there are no stairs leading up. And then when you hit level 5, you start being given missions on the butt end of Kings Row where enemies could be +5 to you and over, spawning bosses not infrequently. And then you have to run all the way back to Atlas Park to hand in your mission.

Seriously, strip the revolting "public gathering spot" side of Atlas Park and you're left with a zone that's really badly designed in almost every way.

That's exactly what bothers me about that design - with the heel as low as it is, they don't look like digitigrade legs, they just look like someone with big feet. Easier to draw and identify with, I suppose, as they look a lot more human, but the point in wanting digitigrade legs to begin with is wanting something that is clearly, obviously and unmistakably NOT human. At least that's what draws me to them.

That's kind of why I like the HOMM5 Succubus and the Drenai so much - they kind of look like humans, they kind of move like humans, they kind of stand like humans... But then they kind of don't. It's that sense of weirdness about them which makes them enticing and interesting, and "big feet" just don't have the same impact. That's actually why I ABHOR the Champions Online Monster Legs - they look almost exactly like human legs. Ugly human legs, but human legs just the same. They even end on a little shoe.

Non-human parts need to be clearly non-human. That's what they're for. At least that's how I feel.

Would you believe me if I told you I've been in a video game store exactly ONCE in my life? Almost all games I own I've bought online, from other people, through other people or been given as presents.

Not really making a point, just explaining why I may not be able to get it.

That's what makes writing so much fun. Stories don't write themselves and characters don't develop on their own. Each situation and each set of conditions can produce a variety of responses from different people, and it's up to the author to pick what kind of a person the character is. We just happen to have all the Marcus Coles written the same, I'd say either for lack of imagination or for fear of breaking the mould.

That said, every world's Marcus Cole didn't come out the same, if for no reason because not every world HAD a Marcus Cole. I'm pretty sure the Shadow Shard didn't.