Samuel_Tow

Well, that could always be a the token utility power. I grabbed Disruptor Tesla for the simple fact that Arachnobot Disruptors had it, but a single-target heavy endurance drain would be sweet, too. The only problem with that is NPCs recover too fast and their attacks don't cost too much. So unless you want to turn this into a Power Push replica where it's less fire-and-forget and more something you have to reapply all the time, but get good uptime on for it, then it'll be hard to balance, and possibly step on the toes of Electrical Blast.

Not against the idea, mind you. Just curious about how it could be balanced.

That would be that, yes. See, both Pulse Rifle Blast and Pulse Rifle Burst have that cool effect which causes them to extend past the target and shoot off into the distance, which just wouldn't look right for a 40-foot blast. It'd just make people ask why they can't shoot farther than 40 feet if the blast shoots farther anyway. I actually envision this more like the Mace Blast power, in that it would look less like a narrow beam and more like an energy fireball that hits with a bang, rather than a stab. Actually, a lot like the odd kinetic weapons they had in Minority Report.

I REALLY do think there's room for a Pulse Rifle powerset in the game, though. It's actually more comic-booky than the actual Assault Rifle powerset, because this could fit all the wacky space aliens, all the zany mad scientists and all the zeerust retro-futuristic robots and so on. Rifles as we have them basically fit soldiers, mercenaries and a VERY loose interpretation of gadgeteers, whereas a Pulse Rifle would fit rather a lot more. And I'm saying this as someone who loves the concept of Assault Rifle.

You know... I really like this idea. A bit of Half-Life 2 style camera texture technology could conceivably make all the monitors in Grandville transmit security camera footage of YOU, proving that Arachnos is indeed always watching. Every time you look at one of the big screens, it's always you on it, as if Recluse is trying to give you a hint. That'd be cool

As far as civilians go, as long as they have no clipping, then I don't mind mobs of fans gathering around me. Make them pushable like Mastermind pets, perhaps. I'm not sure I'd specifically like it, though.

However, causing civilians to react to your hero IS something I'd like to see more of. I mean, they already do, with a nonchalant wave, but I want to see more. The aforementioned sell phone photos are a good idea, and I'd like to see a bit more of a reaction, as well. Have a girl go "squee," have a grown man go "Dude!" have them cheer or clap, that sort of thing. Just to acknowledge your presence. And for heaven's sake, don't let them blindly blunder into my fights. It's just absurd!

There's nothing stopping you from keeping the round away from the metal of the blade with proper construction, unless you're talking about some kind of gas pressure effect that would throw it off.

And even if medieval melee firearms were crap, so what? You think our omnigun looks like something that would make sense in real life? Or, hell, our pulse rifle? Claim future technologies and just roll with it.

I'm actually right with you on the "my level or higher" crowd, for exactly the reasons you stated. It's a hypocritical stance to take. If someone's not going to play with people lower level then him but wants to play with me because I'm higher level, then why would I want to play with him? It's a self-defeating position, because it relies on that rule applying to you and only you, and I don't enjoy those kinds of things.

As far as SG-only goes, I tend to take is as a live and let live situation. Personally, I'm as mystified about this as you are, because I've never seen a SG so huge and active that there's ALWAYS someone on ALL the time playing ALWAYS the right type of character at the right level of the right faction. Maybe if I were part of one of those soulless "clans" I keep hearing about that treats membership like work, I'd see more of that, but I interpret SGs as groups of friends. And just as I don't expect my friends to live at my beck and call, so I don't expect my SG to always be available when my whim strikes. As such, I have to ask - who do these people team with? Do they team at all, outside of SG business?

I guess I can kind of understand not teaming at all, but making an exception for your SG-mates, but then that's my stance of not teaming as a base. If you're not going to be teaming at all, then just say so. I look at it this way - if I'm looking to invite someone, do I REALLY need to know who he'll team with when I'm not one of the people he'll accept? And, on the flip side, does his SG not already know he'll team with them? As such, I can see how this would come off as a "Nyah! I'll team, just not with YOU!" comment, but I try not to put too much stock in tone over the 'net.

I can respect that. Again, live and let live is how I like to approach these situations. For me, soloing is a question of consistency and dependability. I want to know that each and every time I log into the game, I'll be able to play any way I see fit. In order for me to facilitate this, I've had to ignore all variables that I know I can't depend on. I can depend on my friends to be good team-mates, but I can't depend on them being online when I'm online, specifically since I'm between 7 and 10 hours ahead of most of them. I can depend on just random people to be on pretty much all the time, but I can't depend on them being good players, or indeed good people, and rather than try to be a control freak on others, I choose to keep to myself.

Most of all, though, I enjoy the freedom of no-one depending on me or waiting for me. If I suddenly develop a craving for TV, I drop what I'm doing and watch TV. If I go hungry, I get up from the computer and go have dinner. In the middle of a mission, when necessary. If I want to dick around with pointless things like walking the full length of Steel Canyon, I can. If I want to sit in place and chat with people I can't currently play with, I can. On a team, I'm never as free as this, because other people are always waiting on me. Even if they're very patient, I just don't feel comfortable dicking around when people are patiently tapping their foot.

But you know what? That's the beauty of City of Heroes. If I want to go solo, I can. Sure, I miss out on a few TFs and a few high-class rewards, but I don't mind. The biggest reward for a TF is the TF team experience, and since that's not something I actually enjoy, that's no skin off my nose. As far as tangible rewards go, I've already bored everyone to death with why these don't motivate me. Suffice it to say, I've carved out a little hovel for myself out of this game, and I'm perfectly fine in it. It doesn't mean I'll never ever team, I just don't go out of my way to do it.

Wait, what? Are you asking what my response to my own action would be? If I did something to someone else absent any context, then wouldn't it be up to that someone to react?

I guess if you gave me some context about how I didn't think I was doing something bad but I suddenly realised I was and what my reaction would be to that, then I could work from there, but as you formulate your statement, I just don't know what you're asking.

Off the cuffs, my reaction to the situation as you describe it would be "Sorry about that."

Actually, as far as I'm aware, inflation is defined an increase in the amount of currency in circulation within any given economics system. It's what keeps governments from just printing more money to swell up their budgets. The more currency there is in circulation, the less each individual unit is worth and the more worthless units each item of commerce costs.

As such, the prices of Inventions items and their availability are just a side effect of the larger problem of influence entering the system faster than it leaves it. I'm not confident that this occurs, but assuming that it does, this causes prices to increase as the rich get richer and progressively looser with their purse strings. Even if we increased supply, that still wouldn't help the little man unless that supply went to HIM, because more supply is still going to be gobbled up by those with more money, and the only way for poorer players to buy anything would be to either outbid the rich, which won't happen, or simply wait for them to buy what they want and buy after them, which rarely happens.

However, obolishing the market is not a solution, either, because it returns us to a very old, very irritating problem inherent to a lot of old-style MMOs - grinding. Yes, certain activities could give a higher chance to get drops, but that just means that you'll be rerunning these activities and crossing your fingers until you distort your knuckles. The Market provides a solution to that - you don't have to farm for anything when you can just buy it, provided people sell it for not too much. And I, for one, tend to sell for no more than 5000.

But the Lemur has a point. Currently, the Market interface is REALLY cumbersome. For one, you have to put your items into your market slots to see what they go for, and when you have fewer slots than items, that presents a problem. Furthermore, the market cannot be made to assume you want to drop all items in a stack and will always ask you, defaulting to the number of the previous stack you transferred.

It's already irritating enough to do when my inventory fills up once every half dozen missions or so. It'd be much worse if I had to do that every mission.

Far as I'm concerned, fixes to the economy need to target the community from the top down. I assume that's what the Market tax was designed to do - 10% off each sale, which hits big-money sales a lot more harshly than small-money sales. Buy a piece of salvage for 1000, you pay 100. Buy a recipe for 2 billion, you pay 200 million in taxes. Frankly, I'm not convinced that this is insufficient.

The point is, no-one has encyclopaedic knowledge of all the world's history to know when something was first created, and even those that do still get it wrong because it turns out "new" inventions were invented and forgotten thousands of years ago. And even then, there is far too much we just don't know. That's why I said it's too absolutist to approach things that way. We don't know. And unless we bend reality in some fashion, we never will. And even if "we" do, the individual still won't. What that basically means is that we shouldn't use the term "original" outside of strictly scientific, fact-founded statements, and that just ain't gonna' happen. Not even in strictly scientific circles, who tend to devise their own terminology anyway.

Basically, you shouldn't define the term "original" as something purely objective, because that's not how people use it. Certainly you can hold them to task to the dictionary meaning of the word (I guess, I haven't checked), but that's just bogging things down into semantics, specifically when you know what they're actually trying to say. "Original," as people mostly use it, is a value judgement just the same as "cool" or "creative." It may not necessarily "mean" that, but that's what people say it to mean, anyway. You could keep insisting that it should mean something else, just as I keep insisting that colour and armour are spelled with a U, but you really should read the word as people say it, not necessarily how it "should" be used.

Generally, I find it's a good idea to try and figure out what people mean, even if you have reword it completely in your head. Language, by its very nature, is never precise, clear and unambiguous, and the more exact you try to make it, harder it becomes to understand, ironically. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to be precise in their phrasing when what we all do is basically hurl words and sentences at each other in the hopes that the other will "get it." It's one step removed from prodding your mate and pointing to that can of beer, hoping that he'll spark an imagination and understand you want him to hand it to you. Language isn't actually too much more precise than that.

The appropriate response would be:

"Wait, so are you saying that <fill in the blanks>? Really?"

If the response is "Yeah, I am!" then, by all means, punch him in the mouth. But in pretty much every case I've ever asked that, and I ask this almost every time I see something I suspect is really bad, the response has been "Wait, what? No! What I meant was <fill in the blanks>!"

I realise that I don't always practise what I preach, but that's still, in my eyes, the best approach.

I don't want to discredit your opinion, Ex, but sooner or later you'll have to understand that some of us don't WANT to play with other people and will make that fact known when asked or prompted. I don't put such search comments in my field, but does it really make a difference when, if you ask me to team, my response will be "No, thanks. Not at the moment?" 'Cause that's 90% of what I reply to people with.

It changes inside the thread, but I'm pretty sure the name displayed in the forum view inherits what's in the original thread. Or does it no longer work that way?

And again, this is far too absolutist a stance to take. If your position is that the term "original" is suspect because it relies so much on subjectivism, then that instantly nullifies the merit to having such words as "like" and "fun" which, by their very nature, defy any objective definitions. Trying to paint the world in objective definition is, by default, a futile effort because the only tools of observation we actually have - our senses - are themselves subjective on the one hand, and subject to the interpretation of our minds, which are even more subjective in turn.

There's a part to this argument that - and please don't hold it against me for saying this - really irritates me. It's the notion that any statement made without a variant of "in my opinion" or "to the best of my knowledge" appended is invariably an absolute. And it's not. It's not what most people mean when they say, and it's ugly to append an endlessly looping descriptor to the end of which statement, to boot. In fact, one should assume that a statement even stated in absolutes is, ultimately, still a subjective evaluation and best guess approximation.

And that's actually ignoring the meaning of the term "original." This is not a value judgement, it is merely a term to describe the first of a kind and origin of a concept. Given that precedent for original items goes both ways and depicts both terrible examples where time improved it greatly, as well as masterpieces which were never replicated, I don't think you really should be inferring moral judgement into something being "original." Yes, "some people" will try to use it as a value judgement, but that argument can extend to infinity, because there is absolutely nothing that "some people" won't do.

As with most uses of language, one should never bog down into fine semantics at the cost of ignoring context, because it's never a question of what we SAY, it's a question of what we MEAN.

When the system offers you an "uglier" out as a legitimate choice and reassures you that this is perfectly normal, people are a lot more willing to take it. When you're basically compromising your own name to game the system, it feels a lit less "right" even if the net result is the same.

And historians rely on records written by the victors. I could bring forth several examples, each of which has the potential to get me permabanned.

Funny you should mention that. I just got out of a Battlefield 2142 game where I could easily call a couple of players "evil" without batting an eye. See, Battlefield in general is a cheap game. Grab a large armoured machine on a map that's largely Infantry and you ensure that each and every player on the opposing team will curse your name. Granted, these players annoy me for the simple fact that I don't like being killed over and over again, but that's what the machine is designed to do. I can't fault the people driving it for using it to its full potential. If I have to hate someone, that'd be EA and Dice for balancing the game as they have.

But these two spawn-camping bastards, they were evil. They'd set up a fire point directly in front of one of particular spawn point and opened fire on anyone who spawned, shredding players before their machines could even load the scene transition. There's annoying, there's cheap, and then there's this. These two clowns were evil, and the entire PAC team pretty much agreed with me, seen as how practically every player on our side swamped them with sheer numbers. I'm generally not a vindictive person, but I'm still proud of being the one to shoot them both.

I'm not sure how relevant this is to the discussion, but I don't think it takes a genius to realise that spawn-camping is bad. Whether you respect this or not is where the real decision lies.

Let's avoid making me make an even bigger *** of myself if at all possible

See, this I can roll with. Make the wrong decisions, things end up BAAAD! It's no different from something like Mass Effect, where a prepared, able Shepard can basically everybody who can be saved, whereas a sloppy, stupid Shepard can get everyone, including himself killed. Let's just hope that Joker can save the universe. As long as there are no "supposed to lose" fights and I still have a shot at a good ending if I play my cards right, I see no problem with this.

Really, I don't want to burn all stories with downer endings. I just don't read/watch/play them, or if I have a choice, I change them. Giving me the ability to still succeed if I do well enough ought to take the icky out of the idea.

Not really. They mesh pretty much just fine. Well, you get some discontinuity around the seam, but it's actually no worse than between bare upper arms and fingerless gloves. And the shape isn't in any way odd, either. At least it didn't look odd to me. Maybe it will look stranger if I saw the arm without the sleeve, but I rather doubt it.

I say I hate downer endings and you send me off to read literature replete with downer endings... Isn't it obvious what that's going to do? Either I will and be dissatisfied or, much more likely, I won't for this express reason.

That was just an illustration of where my extreme hatred of downer endings comes from, not an allegation that that's what this thread was about. If I somehow inferred that this is what was being suggested, I apologise. I don't see where I could have done this, but I accept the possibility that I'm misrepresenting myself. It's happened before.

By the same token, this actually IS the kind of emotional reaction I have to downer endings. I've seen a fair few, and believe me - if it's bad enough to keep a jaded ******* like me awake at night, it's not something I'm going to want to approximate even a little. As I said, I don't mind drama and tragedy, as long as it gets resolved. A story that ends in a downer ending effectively accomplishes nothing but wasting my time, and this includes "great" works of literature in there, as well. There's a reason it took me 20 years to even consider looking at the kind of literature I was taught in school, because it took me this long to learn what to pass on before I get too deep in the actual book.

Call me a sissy if you want, but any story that leaves me more depressed than I was when I'm done reading, watching or playing it is not worth my time. I have plenty of ways to depress myself by just looking out my bedroom window. What I don't have enough of is ways to make myself feel better, and that's what I play games, watch movies and read books for. It may be sappy, it may be predictable, it may not be intellectually stimulating, but as long as it makes me feel better, I frankly don't care. It's never a question if we'll have a sappy good ending. It's a question of how we'll get there.

Bill, what the hell, man? You're better than this. Why would you of all people use a sliding scale argument THAT obvious. There is a WORLD of difference between having the confidence that a story won't end on a downer ending and having no story at all. No-one said you have to have everything given to you. You have to fight for your right to party, as it were. But that fight has to amount to something. And, what's more, you can't compare a cliffhanger ending with a downer ending. They're just not the same thing.

As far as anime goes, even though important characters have the tendency to get cut in half a lot of the time, the story itself tends to have a clear, obvious resolution at the end. Well, unless it decides to pull an Evangelion ending and I realise I just spent 64*20 minutes wasting my time and I do my best not to punch my expensive stuff. Like I said - I'm not against drama, or even tragedy in my fiction. Hell, that's what makes fiction so good. I just want an ending that makes the whole experience worth it, and a downer ending just is not this.

And again - are you seriously suggesting that some movies (let's go with movies) have to end in downer endings so the audience won't know what to expect? Because that's not how it works. When people go to watch a movie, they expect a decent ending that provides closure, and when they don't get it, they storm out. Oh, sure, some people enjoy the Cloverfield "They all died anyway, so what was the point of the movie, then?" endings, but I dare say not many share that sentiment.

In fact, let's go back to Anime. I've watched a lot of anime, and the more I watch, the more I begin to realise one thing. When it starts out, the good guys always losing and always being the underdogs is dramatic and impactful. It puts us in the right mood of horror and pessimism about the dangers they face. But after a while, that wears out, and when an anime drags on for episode after episode with me waiting for the heroes to stop sucking and finally get the story going, I just start tuning the drama out and what I'm left with is one long emo train of torturous experiences, otherwise known as FILLER.

Naruto was on the verge of doing this, then averted it, then had 200 episodes of filler, then a few good ones and it's been basically filler for the majority of the Shippuuden. Soul Eater started out very nice, but with three distinct storylines wrapping up in downer endings and without a resolution or even a ramping up in sight, I just gave up on the thing entirely. Good animation is not worth a crappy, slow-plodding plot. The original Dragonball Z had enough simple drama for what it was, but it was 90% filler. The new Dragonball Kai cut most of the filler out and left just the plot-important scenes intact, giving us just enough hopelessness to make certain scenes feel disturbing, but it brings us resolution quickly enough, so that works out in the end. Shaman King has a good mix of drama and hopelessness to success and heroics and still ends on a high note.

I have never seen a story that ended on a downer ending that was actually good to read, watch or play. Ending a game on a downer ending and never releasing a sequel to fix it is just as bad as releasing a game that ends on a cliffhanger and never producing a sequel at all. And Soul Reaver slipped by the latter on the skin of its teeth.