Samuel_Tow

That's why it's really so hard to be mad at any one person. I know that some people do enjoy longer, more measured posts while others hate them, so it really turns into a no-win game. If I go ahead spending hours (and that post took me an hour with the revisions), I end up getting told that tl;dr and if I don't, I invariably say something unclear and ambiguous. I don't know why this case in particular got to me.

This is where your train of thought breaks. I said "I guess I'm used to Fire and Archery" not as evidence that the set solos poorly, but as evidence that my judgement may not be objective. I'm well aware Archery and Fire are considered overpowered, which is why I felt it necessary to point out that, yes, my subjective experience may be coloured by unreal expectations.

That the set solos poorly has nothing to do with Fire and Archery, and all to do with the fact that it kills me in places where my other Blasters (Blasters OTHER than Archery and Devices, Blasters such as Rad, Psi or Energy) do not. I mentioned Archery and Devices as a caveat. In retrospect, I should have used this as a trap to see how many people will jump down my throat as soon as I so much as mentioned Scrappers in this thread, because that's what you guys did - you ignored context and train of thought and latched onto a single sentence.

Then when "someone" who's been basically taking pot shots at anyone who doesn't run his posts through a PR check took my post completely out of context and said "But Archery and Fire are overpowered!" even though I said as much multiple times, I didn't feel like giving that point the light of day, so I stuck in a non-sequitiur there, expecting that people who have been obviously following the thread like you have would pick up on context and know what I meant, but apparently I painted myself into a corner by not writing up a long explanation of exactly what I meant and exactly why I meant it.

And you know what the most fun part is? The moment I take the time to write up a clear, unambiguous, exhaustive explanation of my entire train of thought in the finest detail so that no-one can wilfully misunderstand it, I'll simply get accused of being long-winded and told that no-one wants to read my walls of text. Charming, isn't it?

Let me spell this whole storyline for you, because I'm tired of seeing you act below your your level.

Step one: I state that Dual Pistols is weak at soloing. It doesn't suck, it's not necessarily underpowered, it isn't even bad. But when I play the sets, I know which ones are good and which ones aren't, and this one is on the low side. It has decent attacks, but everything takes so long to animate that I take MUCH more damage than I have any business taking. I said this before, and I stand by it now.

Step two: I so much as MENTION Archery, Fire Blast and Scrappers. I establish clear context that I am not using this to judge the set's objective, practical validity, but everyone ignores this. I bring them up not to compare to Dual Pistols, but to express my preferred level of solo play. As I've explained numerous times, I'm dissatisfied with the entire AT and where it's balanced, as I feel Blasters are still far too dangerous to solo for what they bring to the table, and if I had my way, their baseling performance would closer to that of Scrappers. I bring up Archery and Fire Blast to explain what it would take for Blasters to reach this performance, but I am simultaneously aware that they ARE outliers, which is the point - if it takes an outlier overpowered set to reach the kind of performance I'm looking for, then there are more problems than JUST Dual Pistols.

Step three: I get called out on a claim I never made. I blow it off and apparently shoot myself in the foot by not providing seven paragraphs of explanation, safe in the knowledge that if I had, I'd have shot myself in the foot for providing too much explanation no-one would read anyway. I'm accused of wanting Dual Pistols to be overpowered like Archery and Fire Blast, which not only did I not state as such, but have actually stated I do NOT want. My reply to compare to Scrappers was more a comparison between BLASTERS AS A WHOLE and Scrappers than between Dual Pistols and Scrappers, which I didn't feel I had to specify because I thought comparing one set from one AT to AN ENTIRE OTHER AT would be so stupid no-one would assume that's what I meant, but apparently I have the reputation of a very stupid man who's likely to make those connections. Too bad, so sad.

Step four: I get pissed off at people intentionally misreading things I've said and people refusing to read into context, so I spend half an hour writing up an over-long explanation no-one is going to read about exactly what I meant when I said "Scrapper" and why I placed a comma there instead of just leaving a space. I wouldn't have thought this was necessary, but since you guys are so adamant about misquoting me, there you go.

And, by the way, when I said "quote where I said," I meant just that. Quote the sentence where I said what you claim I said. Not alluded to, not suggested, not inferred. SAID. And you point me to fairly large posts that seem to maybe suggest what you're saying I said, but when I read them, they still read just fine to me. Could you maybe point me to WHAT I said that led you to believe this? Because I re-read my old posts, and I still don't see it.

*edit*
Just for the record, the "Archery/Fire" comment was not in response to your post. It was a post script addendum intended to clarify my own post and provide a bit of context. It was most certainly not me responding to you that "Oh, you're wrong because I'm comparing this to Archery and Fire Blast." Not only did I not actually say anything even remotely like this, it was not an answer to you, which is why your sequence of events breaks there.

*edit*
Oh, and then there's this that I didn't see the first two times I read your post:

Really? Is that what I said? Let's follow that link, then:

Where in this post do I mention Dual Pistols? I mention "it," but even if you check the quote I was responding to, you will not find any explanation what "it" actually is. You assume "it" is Dual Pistols, but "it" is actually Blaster performance in this case, since that's what the quote of the quote of the quote was talking about. Theoretical, overall Blaster performance. Archery and Fire Blast is where I feel Blaster performance should be. Not in terms of damage, but in terms of "I am not afraid to enter into a fight" feel of reliability. Most Blasters don't have that. Most Blasters I play make me feel reluctant to pick fights because I know that even if I don't die, I'll be seriously hurt. Fire Blast and Archery allow me to have the kind of confidence in my ability that a Scrapper would give me.

Dual Pistols is only tangentially related to Blaster performance by virtue of being a Blaster set, but when I bring up overall Blaster performance, I can't really talk about just one set, so bringing Dual Pistols in this is out of context. I could have brought it up as an incredibly weak set exception, but it doesn't take a genius to tell that it's not, hence why I didn't feel I needed to specify. Dual Pistols does not compare to Scrappers. Dual Pistols does not compare to Scrapper sets. BLASTERS compare to Scrappers, and Blaster PERFORMANCE compares to Scrapper performance, and neither comes down to a single set.

Just as a general rule of thumb - when you quote people, do quote people instead of trying to paraphrase and rephrase, especially when the point is to bring forth evidence of who said what when.

That's a good list, and I'll give you a few things, but:

Security/Threat Levels: Those don't actually need a ret-con. Most fiction and at least a few real-world organisation use security levels to grant clearance to parts of a whole to certain people and more parts of it to certain others. It doesn't matter what exactly you explain it as, it's just a system for ensuring heroes have some way to be scored on their expected performance.

Combat Levels: Yeah, that's a bit more meta-game than real fiction, but it's more an idealised representation of the relative strength of a hero, the relative strength of an enemy and the gulf between the two. It's "OVER 9000!!!" in a more orderly form.

Trainers: I don't see how that is a problem. The process of training itself is cut out entirely (as in, you pick from a menu whereas something like Revenant would have made you actually TRAIN), but the concept of visiting a veteran handler to get advice on how to train up a brand new ability is not at all meta-game. In fact, games where you spontaneously develop a brand new ability our of the aether without having used anything even remotely like it is rather less believable.

Contacts: Outside of the physical limitations that prevent them from ever moving away from where they've had their shoes nailed to the ground, what's the problem with contacts? Even a non-super-hero detective will have his cadre of contacts, some from the actual crime organisations, some experts with information, and he will gather intel from them. Granted, he won't actually get his orders from them, and to this extent I agree that many missions assume you're doing jobs FOR the contacts, rather than getting information FROM the contacts and doing jobs for other reasons. To that extent, I agree that they DO break immersion somewhat.

Security Zones: This confuses me. What's the problem with not allowing a hero to enter a zone that he's never going to survive in? Granted, the meta-game limitations of not allowing sidekicks in always sucked, and were that in place, I'd have seriously called foul, but I have nothing against the concept of NOT allowing characters into certain zones if they're below a certain level or accompanied by someone who's allowed to enter. I have no problem bringing a newbie into Ouroboros, but why can't I bring a newbie into Cimerora. If I'm trusted to be there, am I not trusted to bring help? The solution of just removing the restrictions is too crude, in my opinion, but I'll take it.

Ambient crime: Well, probably not, but your heroes won't skip a crime scene unless you specifically choose to ignore it, so I'm not really sure you can blame the game for that one. Yes, crime never ends, but really, isn't that what you'd expect? You'll never stop all crime ever committed ever ever, so you really need to expect that no matter what you do, more will occur. Either you bust every mugger along the way, or you don't, but that is your choice.

INF: Yeah... This I'm going to give you without context. Prior to the Markets, I could KIND OF see Influence/Infamy serving as some kind of non-tangible IOU currency or reputation, but when we have markets where we're basically trading it like cash money... Yeah, it's money, and it's immersion-breaking to keep calling it Influence or Infamy. It's $$. Drop the pretence crap and call it what it is. Trying to keep claiming it's anything BUT just kills any sort of immersion related to the economy, and with the completely meta game that is inventions, that's the last thing we need.

And I'm really trying not to spin these. I did the best I could to avoid using any "but maybe" justifications and stuck just to what makes direct sense out of context and without need for justification.

The argument is the same as it was for power customization - no reason more than because people ask for it. What reason more do you really need? If it comes down to an argument between people who want it and people who don't want to see it added, then yeah, I can see the need for a solid, grounded argument, because then you'd be overriding some people's preferences. But for this? All you're really saying is "bah humbug." I want it, other people want it, it's been suggested plenty of times. Unless it bothers you to see it happen (why?), then what reason do you have to argue against it?

I think they should do a lot of stuff they aren't doing right now, and my justification is because I want to see them. It's up to the developers to pick what to prioritise and decide what's worth the investment. Our purpose here is to judge suggestions based on how much we want to see them vs. how much seeing them will hurt us. Unless it hurts you, what, specifically, do you have against it?

I agree with your reasons (again ) and I'm not questioning why people would want to make heroes villain-side. The way you explained your motivations made perfect sense to me last time and little has changed since. I accept the premise, but just because I do, it doesn't mean I have to accept all the arguments used to support it, specifically when they're given as exclusives.

Well, yeah, but that's something I find to be a MAJOR problem with City of Villains. Everything is always dirty, dark, disgusting and d... Dunpleasant. City of Heroes offers me some places that are dark and foreboding, some that are bright and cheery and some that are kind of in-between. If my hero is a borderline recluse, he'll hang out in Dark Astoria. If my hero is a paragon of justice, he'll hang out in Atlas Park. If he's a modest crime fighter, he may hang out in Kings Row. Villain-side, though, I have a choice between dark depressing brown town, dark depressing black town or the other dark depressing brown town. In a sense, that kind of setting is what makes people hand-wave so much to begin with.

To be honest, I don't think everyone is cut out to enjoy villains, just like some people just CAN'T enjoy heroes because they keep wanting to punch the contacts in the mouth. For me, it comes down to finding the kind of villain you would really like seeing as the antagonist to a really cool hero. The kind of villain who's a threat and evil enough to want to see fall, but at the same time seems to kind of make sense in what he wants and what he's trying to do. I do very much turn my nose up at engaging in acts of pointless malice and brutality, but any good story needs a good villain, and I just happen to enjoy using my own

Thanks to ED, upgrading triple-slotted ++ SOs into level 50 Commons is not going to give you much of a benefit. Your SOs already put you past the ED cap, and at 42.4% per 50 Common vs. the 36.66% per ++ SO, you only get an extra 5.74% per enhancement, or a total of 17.22% total. However, thanks to ED, you only get 0.15 of that benefit, so you end up increasing by a whopping 2.583% for all three enhancements.

However, replacing only single-slotted enhancements has a rather better benefit of 5.74% for just that single enhancement. Specifically, that's enough to put a 1.0 native accuracy power past the 90% streakbreaker mark against +1 enemies with a single slot.

But, yeah, the overall difference is not that great, all things told. You can only really get the kind of monstrous benefits people are talking about from specific Set combinations. Commons are just slightly better SOs that don't expire.

Fine, then. DON'T do it because of roleplaying and roleplayers. Do it for writing and us writers who DO NOT roleplay with other people, are not interested in roleplaying with other people and prefer to not be around other people roleplaying. Some of us enjoy writing, and I know for a fact that a lot of us enjoy reading. Unless you have a specific reason why this is harmful to the game (and, no, bad bios are not a good reason, unless you want to remove the bio field alrogether), you really have no reason to argue against it.

As we ought to have established, "they should work on something else" is not a strong argument and, really, outside of that, what argument is there? That a small bio field somehow encourages people to write better? Because I know for a fact that it doesn't work that way on me. Either it encourages me to not write at all (which I hate), or it encourages me to just slap five sentences in there to put together the skeleton of a premise of a character who has a MUCH deeper, MUCH more interesting backstory that I don't have the room to even allude to unless I resort to a bulleted list. A bio needs to be informative and actually nice to read, but the character limit means any sort of lingual eloquence just puts you past the cap in two sentences or less.

Hell, JUST the size of this post would fit in the bio field, and I didn't even try hard.

It's also bugged, in that Jenkins isn't emoting assumepositionwall.

From everything I've heard, I firmly believe that the hero and villain tutorials will get a face lift, both to improve the new player experience (even if I have nothing against them, myself) and as part of the "improved 1-20 experience" that we've been promised, which I assume will at least involved the respective tutorials.

Furthermore, the tutorials have been improved, expanded and extended as time went on and technologies evolved. For instance, the original City of Heroes tutorial did not feature Flower Knight at all, being that the game lacked the technology to support companion NPCs, and it didn't include the wall-of-text explanation on enhancements right before Coyote that you get from the info terminal. The contact just gave you a quick run-down and sent you on your way. Coyote himself was added to the tutorial at some point between Launch and I1, as a tribute to a good player who passed away, if I remember correctly. I do know that when Samuel Tow first did his tutorial, that final mission was given to him by Yet Another Cop.

We're seeing the Posi TF improved with I17, and with the expected influx of new players with Going Rogue, it would make sense to update the old tutorials.

Hmm... You know, you do have a point there. Believe it or not, that actually makes me feel better about the state of affairs.

Obviously, there's a lot of that because the assuming narrative in CoV is one of its chief failings. I do end up either ignoring or ret-conning much of the CoV storyline to shoehorn my villains as they are intended to be placed, but I'm still trying to put villains in the city designed for villains. I consider putting a hero in a storyline designed for a villain to be at least one step beyond what most villains do to NOT be poorly-written mercenaries.


I mostly play solo and don't do almost any TFs as a result. I obviously don't manage to do every contact's missions, but I'm usually at around 70-80% content done by the time I move on to the next level range. I do skip a LOT of the low-level contacts simply because we level up so fast, but past the 30s, "most" is what I usually do. Mind you, that's CoV-side. CoH-side has so many contacts I DO skip most of them, but City of Villains just doesn't have enough locations or contacts for me to skip much of anything, especially when so many are locked, too.

I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that. Unless you want to cite your source material that paints them villains, you're just hinging your entire point on your interpretation that an unambiguously POSITIVE group is fair game to be shot at and stabbed. How can you even make the argument that Miss Liberty is evil for sending unprepared kids to die on the one side, and then go out of your way to "provoke" them by shooting them in the face and still try to claim the moral high ground?

Longbow protect innocent people from murder and kidnapping. Longbow protect the streets of the city from villains and criminals. Longbow basically go out of their way to do the right thing, even if they end up presuming too much. Even their very WORST portrayal, as found in the various Vanguard story arcs, is still far removed from anything even remotely approaching a negative light. They might not be the Superman type heroes, but I have a really hard time accepting a character as "heroic" if he'd ventilate Longbow agents like they're any common gang.

But then I guess that answers my question of why make heroic characters villain-side, doesn't it?

That's quite a leap inferring that working for people and doing exactly as they tell you isn't tantamount to helping them. You do realise that Black Scorpion is the only Patron whose entire premise is infighting, do you not? All of the other Patrons have visions and ideas far and beyond the confines of Arachnos. Ghost Widow wants to be alive again, Scirocco wants to change the world and replace evil with good, and Mako just wants a lot of power for whatever he plans to do with it. It's twice as bad, in fact, that these stories basically threaten you with "Arachnos, arr!" and force you to betray your contacts, despite at least half of them having purely noble intentions, Scirocco especially. And, yes, you can spin those intentions to be not as heroic, but you can spin anything into anything else. It doesn't change how it's WRITTEN.

And even contacts aside, let's look at what you do for the various "non-committal" contacts. For Operative Kirkland, you find information to serve Arachnos. For Operative Vargas, you prevent a hero from stealing Arachnos tech and save Arachnos from having to deal with misguided villain reprisals. For Moongoose, you rob a bank and protect a few illegal legal casinos. For Operative Ruthger, you take out an intelligence officer spying on Arachnos for authorities and help Arachnos strike out against Agincourt. For the Shadowy Figure and Lt. Demitrovich (That's DIMITROVICH! With an I!), you do odd jobs to help forward Arachnos' interests. For Kelly Uqua, you help the Rikti and cover up a Rikti spy. For Billy Heck and Lorenz Ansaldo, you basically help the mob strongarm poor, downtrodden people and act as muscle to clean up in-fighting, streamlining their operations. For Terrance Dobbs, you cover up an Arachnos mess and help them contain the PR damage. For Vernon Von Gurn, you end up giving Arachnos one more brilliant scientist and launching their knowledge of the Devouring Earth years ahead. For both Shadow Spider and Abyss, you handle problem heroes (real heroes you can't spin as quasi-villains) that allow them to run their operations more easily. For Johnny Sonata, Hard Luck and Basse Croupier, you're basically helping support an illegal casino that not only rigs its slot machines and cooks the books, but also has people murdered if they can't pay their debts. BY YOU!

And that's not even getting into the league of creeps like Boccor, Thermai or Phipps. I'm really, really, REALLY not buying how you're not actually helping villains with practically everything they do. Specifically because I don't buy the idea that helping one, then helping his enemy somehow evens things out. It doesn't. It's like putting more and more weights on both sides of a scale to keep it even. Sooner or later, you'll snap the axle. This is not a zero-sum game where an advantage for one villain is equal to a disadvantage for another. The stronger all the villains are, the more the people who get caught in the crossfire. And the more you "provoke" villains (and heroes) into armed conflict, the more lives you're putting in danger.

Look, I'm not trying to dictate how you should write and play your own characters. I don't even want to claim your designed heroes shouldn't really be heroes. I mean, who the hell am I to pass judgement in you? All I'm saying is that you are making a SERIOUS stretch here, and while you are well within your right to make it and give me the finger (as you probably should), that actually serves to depict the problem - you need to ignore a LOT of the game's actual canon, writing and apparent intent to shoehorn a hero into the Isles, at least comparable to the amount of such that you'd need to put such a hero in the Paragon City settings. It would take no less bending of the rules, and I'd bet money on this one.

*edit*
Something I feel I have to append:

I do not mean to judge, criticise or presume. Your characters, your subscription fee, your game, your call. You can and probably should disregard my opinion when it comes to actually making and playing your characters. I don't mean to dictate what you should do or think, not in the slightest. I'm merely illustrating a specific point, specifically that it takes a fair amount of ignoring, rewriting and tuning out aspects of the game to get a heroic hero in the Rogue Isles, and that it's unreasonable to deny that much the same can be done to Paragon City, perhaps even to fit in a similar character. It's not a question of who's right and who's wrong and who's heroic and who's villainous. It's a question of spin, and spin can, and should, go both ways.

In short, I can see why someone would want to bend the rules and have a heroic villain (which I assume will go Rogue with Going Rogue), but I can't see why one wouldn't want to try to make the exact same concept on the hero-side. The game supports it no less, put it like that.

OK, that makes sense. It's not just a question of settings, it's a question of evil government. All right, I can roll with that. Question answered.

Well... It's more than JUST a warehouse district, you know, and American movies have never had a problem representing run-down American Burroughs as horrible, crime-ridden places where gangs rule and violence is lawn. Hell, even Las Vegas. Hell, something like Sin City is still an American town that's still within US borders and, presumably, under US law, but it doesn't really strike me as a nice place.

In Paragon City, the police EXIST, but it's up to heroes to take a bite out of crime. And even though there are, like, a million billion of us, that doesn't seem to make a dent in the number of gangsters still roaming the streets, pushing drugs and killing people. Sure, you don't have the actual government trying to eat your soul, but the actual government doesn't really have much of a say in, for example, Kings Row. Yeah, they have that large gleaming plaza, but go down the stairs and down the slope and you're in no-man's land where gangs rule life is cheap.

Of course, that's one interpretation, but if one can spin a noble villain, why can't one spin a less-than-noble Kings Row?

Wait, says who?

Sure. Then we'd just have to mandate Scrappers to take Manipulation secondaries and tweak their modifiers into the Blaster ones and... Wait a minute!

In addition to being against the rules, the time before your original post and your THIRD bump was 23 minutes. This is the pinnacle of impatience here. Post a thread, leave it alone for a day then come back and see what happened.

Umm...

You don't have to try and present Steel Canyon as a den of evil, when you can try and present its counterpart - Skyway City - as one and not be too far from the truth. The whole zone is basically abandoned warehouses, empty lots, giant depressing overhanging highways and trolls and mutant beggars. How can you present it as anything else?

Missions seem to suggest otherwise. Yes, not all of them do, and no, not many do in their direct briefings, but they do in style, in approach, in clues and pop-up messages. It doesn't have to be anything directly stated as such. At lest to me, it's clearly evident these stories are intended to be done by a villain. Yes, you can claim that your villain does all of this not for the money but because of something else, but you're still going against the grain of the narrative.

You don't see half OF HALF of the game. Remember, villain-side is only half of the entire package of City of Heroes and Villains. Missing half of that doesn't put you at more than a quarter of the total game, and even then I seriously doubt you won't see even half. I run through practically every contact on my villains, and I don't try very hard.

My point was that if you ignore everything, you basically ignore all of City of Villains.

I still don't see how you can explain GETTING those contacts in the first place, since I really don't think you can claim you don't care that your Broker wants to get rich, you just wanted to knock over a bank. And then again, what do you do 30-35, when practically all missions are against Longbow? Ret-con them into bad guys? What of the times you have to travel to Paragon City and fight heroes in the name of Lord Recluse? How does that work? Or when you fight heroes in the Isles. Abyss missions are practically all about kneecapping dogooders.

Look, I don't want to argue concepts and I don't want to tell you which characters are good and which aren't. But I just don't see helping one bad guy beat another bad guy as the definition of a "hero." You may end up beating on bad guys and "not care" that you're actually helping make other bad guys that much stronger. You're basically pulling a Grand Theft Auto 2 here, and I have a REALLY hard time seeing the protagonist in this game as a good guy.

Again, your concepts, your call and I don't want to judge them. But that still doesn't answer the question - what's stopping you from doing this blue-side?

On the one hand, that's true. On the other hand, what else could "more end game" stand for? I know what people are asking for, because I've read the suggestions, both for a level cap increase and for more raid type content. People seriously and really do envision it as more levels, tasks or loot grinds that would take LONGER than the game up to this point, citing this as the reason why we won't run out of content as soon as it's introduced. And it's not just one or two people. Practically every suggestion about "more end game" revolves around the concept of this "end game" taking more thousands of hours than even the hardest of hardcore could put in.

The developers do try to give the players what they want. In this case, I'm not worried that the developers will suddenly black out and do something stupid. I'm just worried that the constant cries for something that terrifies me to think about it will be heard and instituted in the effort to give the players what they want.

OK, this is starting to get in my nerves. Kindly point out to me where I said I wanted to compare Dual Pistols (as opposed to Blasters in general) to Scrappers with the sole intent of proving it's underperforming. Hell, let's make it an easier challenge. Point me to where I said, not alluded to, not implied, but said in straight, unambiguous text "Dual Pistols is underperforming."

Because I'm starting to get sick of being hit with a straw man every time post a single sentence. And especially from you, Dispari. You ought to be better than this.

Well, the powers system could produce aura-like effects, and at the added bonus of being able to alternate it between attacks. The question is whether we actually want to use it for that, as it may stifle other forms of customization, such as animations.

How about comparing to something else that solos well, then? How about comparing it to any Scrapper you care to mention?

Right, my bad. I meant to say that, with Going Rogue, people will have much less of a reason to make villains but claim they are heroes (that is, they'll be able to use all ATs everywhere), so we'll see fewer of those being made, in much the same way as City of Villains put serious cramp to the "I crawled out of help amid bile and blood so that I could eat dead babies!" characters that used to be so prevalent. I doubt people deleted theirs, they simply shifted their focus red-side and both made and played fewer of these characters blue-side. Obviously, none actually moved, as that's not possible, but the net result was the same - we saw fewer evil heroes and more evil villains.

I view the city, at least as concerns player characters, less as a place where heroes and villains exist and more of a place where heroes and villains are made, played and removed from circulation, ensuring a consistent churn of characters. That's not necessarily true, but for the purposes of the argument, it's close enough. That means that once an alternate path is opened up, these specific concepts ought to churn in that direction, hence shifting their numbers.

Well, even just looking at face value, we have quite a few "run-down" zones. Kings Row is your typical "gangsta" ghetto where street gangs rule, it's always dirty, always gloomy and the people are poor and desperate. It does have one large Police HQ, but the place is so far gone that this has little impact.

Beyond that, Independence Port is your typical 1930s mob turf, with Mafia thugs extorting people, Mafia-owned businesses making up the majority of the real estate and "family wars" between the Family and the Tsoo - the ambitious newcomers - basically turning the place into a very large ghetto. Plus, the port is always dark, always cloudy and always gloomy.

Brickstown is a bit less run-down, but it's easily the most crime-ridden area in the city, with prisoners breaking out of the Zig every day and running rampant. The "Do not pick up hitch-hikers" signs are there for a reason, and one can almost imagine what it's like living next to a violent criminal vending machine. And, of course, it's perpetually cloudy.

Faultline could probably count, as well. It's much brighter, true, but the whole zone has been broke to crap and it's basically infested with everything but the kitchen sink. Even in the city where police have some say, the Lost and Clockwork are harassing the people, and out into the building areas and beyond, it's no-man's land. The whole place is constantly under siege by both the Lost and the Clockwork, who have their own encampments further in, to say nothing of the constant sabotage by Arachnos and the Sky Raiders.

Yes, I agree, the rest of the city zones ARE kind of bright and shiny and...

Oh! Skyway City! That place is just depressing. Trolls rule the streets, pushing drugs, and everyone lives in a practical underworld, with their little buildings shoved in the crevices and spaces left by the titanic, useless elevated highways. It's as run-down as they come, full of abandoned construction sites, empty lots full of garbage, streets that go nowhere and darkness under the concrete slabs. The whole place is kind of a monument to the folly of over-ambition.

But, yes, I agree. The rest of the city IS kind of bright and shiny and hopeful despite crawling with criminals. But those few zones really DO feel the part.