Samuel_Tow

Then I have to ask what difficulty you solo this at, because difficulties which spawn large spawns don't lend themselves to Piercing Rounds too much. The target cap ensures you won't hit much of the spawn even if God had them all stand in a line and wait.

Hitting multiple targets on an alpha is easy enough. You can almost always line up at least two, and a third is often close enough to catch the shockwave. However, in combat, I've almost never been able to hit more than a single person, for the simple fact that enemies move around too much, and they tend to form in rows, not columns. That, and for the fact that by the time Piercing Rounds has recharged, the enemies have surrendered to Avoid code and scattered to the winds.

That, and I Hover practically all the time to avoid melee attacks. I've died far too many times to keep chancing it at ground level. That puts me on a different plane from the rest of the spawn, making things even more difficult.

But even if we supposed I could hit multiple targets on every shot. How does a resistance debuff once every 20 seconds help me make a dent into a large spawn? How, specifically, when chance can put me up against upwards of a dozen minions if I get a lieutenant-less spawn. Sure, I'll debuff three, to kill with the following Rain of Bullets, but what about the rest? I can't wait 20 seconds for the power to recharge, because by that time either I'll be dead, or they'll have been killed off for the most part. I don't want to run away and ditch aggro every fight.

Let me just find my Caps Lock key... There we go. WHAT CHANGE?!? I never mentioned starting in the Isles AND THEN moving to Paragon City. I never mentioned abandoning anyone anywhere for any reason. I didn't see anyone so much as imply this, either. The question was why make heroes in the Rogue Isles in the first place, which assumed the opposite of why not make heroes in Paragon City TO BEGIN WITH? Where did you even get this idea that you'll take an established CoV character and cross it over into CoH? I didn't talk about it, that's for sure.

Did my bringing up Going Rogue somehow allude to this? Because Going Rogue will open up all ATs to both sides WITHOUT having to start in the Rogue Isles. At the very worst, you'll have to start in Praetoria, and from how things look, you'll be able to start acting heroic as soon as you pop up. Moral choice system and all that.

Really, I understand your position. I understand your example. But please understand that it is IRRELEVANT, because what you're accusing me of suggesting is not something I suggested, or even implied. Yes, obviously you can cross established villains over to the hero side, but if you made them into established villains, you'd need A REASON to cross them over. That's precisely why I didn't talk about this. I specifically pointed out that Going Rogue will open all ATs to both sides, even if it doesn't necessarily open up all characters.

And, really, this story you told about could just as easily have been told about City of Heroes. There's nothing inherent in the Rogue Isles that this story relies on that can't be relocated in one of Paragon City's ghettos with just as much effect. Well, other than Arachnos.

"Selling yourself out for money" is only bad because you end up doing whatever they with the money ask, not out of some sense of loyalty or ethics. Yes, you can pick and choose what to do, but again, you can't always choose something good, you ALWAYS have to do Mayhem missions, and you still end up skipping half the game.

Look, if you ignore "petty chatter by the contacts," then you might as well not even bother to read the text at all, because that's what it amounts to. EVERYTHING contacts say is petty chatter. That's what they're there for - to give you a basic mission objective dressed up in petty chatter to hide the fact that the game is one long sequence of killing stuff and clicking on glowing objects. If you out and out ignore the text or just stick to out-of-setting missions from story arcs, then you very well could have an unproblematic hero in the rogue isles. You could just as easily say the Rogue Isles are on the moon a thousand years in the future and all the people are Doombots orchestrated to amuse you.

There's just not paying too much attention to briefings and messages that assume too much, and then there's simply ignoring the settings of the game and rewriting them with your own ideas. Obviously, it's your game so it's your call, but there comes the question - but couldn't this much hand-waving just ret-con hero-side into this kind of setting? Because it ought to.

Well, as far as use goes, it's reliable in that capping its three target maximum is actually doable on a first shot now. That arc increase really helped. As far as its debuff goes, however, it's unreliable in that you can't really hit more than one target in the heat of battle.

That's kind of why I'm apprehensive to just take and use other people's conclusions - oftentimes either I miss something, or they're based on a playstyle I don't support. In this case, I kept seeing Piercing Rounds touted as a big help, and assumed it helped in general (my fault), whereas practically all I fight is spawns of upwards of six enemies at a time.

Many games allow you to keep on playing after they're done, basically to pick up on all the things that you didn't do in the actual playthrough. I could bring up Mass Effect 2, but I want to be "oldskool" and bring up Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now. This game had a fixed succession of races punctuated by timed challenges, ending with you pressing the button to launch the nukes to start WW3 and set about the post-apocalyptic future of zombies that the original Camrageddon took place in. Once you do, the game basically unlocks all cars for you to use and lets you replay all of your old races if you really want to. It does not, however, unlock all of its engine, armour and offence upgrades, as those are pickups on the levels, so if you haven't gotten them, you can always go back and collect them after the end.

You can keep playing, there are more things to do, you can still earn money and spend it (largely in lump sum every time you split your car down the middle), but the game is very much unequivocally and unquestionably over. You can play it, but it's already over. That's what I want. A point at which the main progression that the game is built on comes to an end, with only side activities left to take care of. I can deal with Inventions, but why would I want to? The game is almost entirely playable without them. But I still COULD if I so chose to. It doesn't make it any less "over," it just gives me something to do after the end. However, as I don't have to collect ALL upgrades in order to beat Carmageddon, I'm glad that I don't have to collect enough Inventions to "beat" City of Heroes.

What worries me with the new and upcoming post-50 progression system, on the other hand, is that it will move the goal posts and put the "end" too far away. Yeah, you got to 50, sure. But now you can gain another 50 "not-levels" and get a bunch of other rewards, and that will take you TWICE as long as it took you to get here! Oh, and you'll need 50 people to even attempt this! Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha! Not for me. I just know they won't sell whatever future system they add in as optional this time around.

Well... When paper missions tell you that the voices in your head order you to smash, when practically every missions is you selling yourself out for money that's only spoken of but never seen, and when half the time you buckle under pressure because someone threatened you... I'd say the game succeeds a lot more often than you give it credit for.

Am I? You had a look at the enemies fought, but did you have a look at their writing? Because even a mission that has you fight Arachnos can still paint you as the jerkiest of jerks, and evil, to boot. For instance, yes, you may technically be fighting the Council, but when you do so to collect gambling money for a casino run by the mob... Yeah. Or how about collecting cybernetic body parts by ripping them out of people's body? Doc Buzzsaw is very cavalier about it, and you're almost exclusively fighting otherwise bad people, but really? Can that REALLY be spun to not be pretty damn sick? Because I can't really see past ripping out the legs of a young woman, even if she does work for the bad guys.

There are a few, obviously. Petrovic has you save the Iron Widow and Hardcase has you save a bunch of people over and over, but by and large, the missions are not nice. Timmothy has you harass the Rikti and kill their offspring, Verandi has you basically make a mess out of St. Martial Island, Daos sends you to kill - not defeat, kill - his own son, Dobbs has you crush the Arachnoids' last hope for a cure, Darla Mavis has a sickeningly bitter story of revenge, Angelo Vendetti has an even more sickening one, and that's not even counting all the straight up "agent for the mob" or "agent for Arachnos" characters who basically hire you out to forward Arachnos' goal.

You can, theoretically, look past all that, but chances are you won't see the horizon. If you simply ignore what contacts say and just go by who you have to beat up, then sure, that could work. But at that point you really take nothing out of the actual game. It's the stories that make the game.

See this... This I can get behind. You own City of Heroes AND Villains, and it makes sense to try and make as much use out of what is ostencibly half of the entire game as you can. OK, I can roll with that. I'd actually not thought about it like that, and given that I've been making points to a similar effect recently, I really can't argue against this.

Objection withdrawn, question answered. Thank you.

Voices for regular options are indeed not linked to powers, but several powers include voice anyway. Off the top of my head, powers like Taunt, Scare and Invoke Panic would need to benefit from voice customization, as well. And seen as how the Scare sound accidentally bled over to everything using the same animation, like X-Ray Bean and Laser Beam Eyes, it sounds like they're part of the power effects.

That said, I'd very much like to see that just the same. It'd add a new depth to customization and to making our characters feel much more... Ours. It's really unsettling to have a little girl sound like a shouty, gritty adult woman, or a supposed cyborg grunt like a dude who's been dining on rock and gravel his whole life

Something to anchor the team inspirations bar already exists. It's "the team." Whenever two people join together or one player enters or selects a mission, an abstract "team" is formed, and anything selected for it remains attached to the team. In fact, the team leader selects someone else's mission, has that someone else enter his mission, then that someone else quits the team, that team will still get the quitter's "Mission Complete" message, as well as an apology that they weren't in the mission long enough (like, at all). Similarly, if a Kheldian joins the team, then Quantums will spawn for it even if the Kheldian leaves, because that team is now permanently tagged to spawn them.

The team is not attached to any one player. Players are attached to the team. Like a SG, the team will exist as long as there is at least one person attached to it, and will persist even if leadership changes and even if the original leader leaves. So, with this in mind, a team inspirations slot has something fairly permanent to be attached to.

The problem is that teams persist even for single players. In fact, a player cannot enter an instance without being on a team. When a solo player enters an instance, a team is formed with just him attached to it, and the instance is then attached to that team. Instances are attached to players in terms of their settings and rewards, but an instances' existence is only ever attached to a team. That means that every player will constantly have access to this "team" inspirations row, making it a veritable fifth row of inspirations, only one that's prone to wipe itself if you join another team.

Huh? I've not played Planetside, but I've played a LOT of Battlefield 2142, and I have to ask - why is it a bad idea to give Commanders and Squad Leaders control powers? If anything, NOT having a Commander and not having Squad Leaders worth a rat's *** is a much greater drawback than anything they may do to annoy you. The only bad things a commander can do, he can do to the handful of squad leaders, and even then it comes down to doing nothing, like most commanders do anyway, or yelling at you to "Follow orders, squad!" Well, that and give you dumb orders because God made his brain on opposite day, but that comes with the territory.

Even if you gave a thousand typewriters to a thousand monkeys, I'm sure they won't be able to reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare faster than he himself produced them.

Last one, I promise

That's pretty much where I am right now. My Blasters, when solo, are a lot harder to play than, say, my Scrappers or my Masterminds. I picked this difficulty specifically to give them something that was comparable to what my more powerful characters could face easily, yet still wasn't so overwhelming that I was pulling my hair out and punching my screen. And for the most part, it works.

My Blasters (who use no Set Inventions, so please keep your "softcapped defence" comments to yourself, everybody) can handle -1x3 fairly easily, which is to say without dying (obviously) and without being put in a position of having to rest after every single fight. Certain enemy groups are harder than others, but by and large, it's manageable. However, when I get hit with two even con lieutenants plus over half a dozen minions, which is what a standard -1x3 spawn is, things go really ugly, really fast. ESPECIALLY if it's a nasty enemy group like the CoT or the Rikti. Anything with flying lieutenants and/or serious ranged damage is dangerous in this way.

I don't WANT Inventions. I don't WANT a better build. The build I have is perfectly capable of handling he difficulty I've given it, which is -1x3. My build cannot handle +0x3. It was never designed to handle +0x3. Not even with the old difficulty settings would I have considered that, nor would I have been able to achieve it. Not even my Scrappers are designed for +0x3 (though they could probably handle it anyway). I don't want to play against +0x3 spawns. That ought to be kind of evident from the fact that I didn't choose +0x3, but rather -1x3. If I had to go +0, I wouldn't go against +0x2, mirroring the old Tenacious.

As Tenzhi said:

I'm not asking for the game to be made even easier. The difficulty settings I'm being offered are plenty easy enough. I want the game to be made more consistent with the difficulty setting I've chosen. When I pick -1x3, I don't expect to see x4 spawns or x2 spawns, do I? I'd rather not have to worry about fighting spawns that aren't -1, either. Certain missions where enemies can't spawn -1 to me, that I can understand, but when they CAN, I'd really like to have an option to ensure they will.

A couple of points:

Yes, I'm positive it's not a scaling mission issue. For one, I've seen it in the Architect itself when I KNOW I've set the mission to be flat. Secondly, I've seen this in unpredictable patterns. It's not always frontloaded or backloaded. A lot of times they alternate at random. One room will have +1s, the hallway after it will have even cons, then the next room over will be even con and the next hallway will have +1.

Secondly, I don't think your difficulty should affect your mission. Once upon a time, team size affected a mission without resetting it, but difficulty did not. I'm not sure why that was exactly, but I suspect it was because difficulty set the mission's LEVEL, and then basically treated you as two people, if you picked 2 or 4. Right now, you have similar situation. The level of enemies you've chose will affect the level at which the mission spawns, and you can see this in the Missions window. Picking enemies -1 will actually drop your mission's level by 1 when you start it.

Beyond that, spawn size works, I assume, like how TFs have an absolute floor of people who need to be on, such that even if people logged out, spawns would not reduce in size.

Basically, picking -1x3 will drop your mission's level by one as soon as you enter it, and will make it so enemy spawn sizes never fall below three people's worth, even if you're alone.

There's a bit of a loophole in this, in that if you invite a second person with you, you won't get four people's worth of spawns (i.e. not you*3 + team-mate), but will rather still remain at three peoples' worth of spawns. That's because the game doesn't count you as three people, it just sets a minimum spawn size. You can go ABOVE that and still increase spawn sizes by being on a team of four or more.

All of that said, your difficulty settings shouldn't affect your enemies' LEVELS, as their levels are set to the mission, which you can't alter without resetting.

Really? Unjustified? Let's see...

You're basically accusing me of having some kind of agenda in trying to earn rewards I don't deserve, in-between suggesting that I'm too weak of a player to suggest something like that. Look, I don't take offence easily, and while this is insulting to my intelligence, it won't keep me from sleeping at night. But can you please stop hogging the moral high ground? You're basically assassinating my character as a tool to counter my argument and then try to patronise me by explaining how "unjustified" my comments are. If you want to argue the merits of the actual suggestion, then I welcome the discussion. If you want to argue my right to make it or my motivation for doing so, don't expect me to respond or read it.

And just to avoid being accused of any more scheming, let me quote myself on my difficulty from earlier in the thread:

Again, if you want to argue the actual suggestion, please ensure that you read the following bullet points detailing my motivations and kindly avoid inventing motivations I didn't specify.

*Spawn size varies, but larger spawns are not restricted to being low level. This means larger spawns can spawn high level, making for a fight that's more difficult than the mission should have.

*I enjoy playing with many enemies of a low level because it looks much better than fighting few enemies of a high level. As such, I need a way to ensure that the enemies are low level, or their increased numbers will kill me.

*I don't give two rats about drops. I care about a game that looks cool and plays well. Wiping out large groups of enemies is what looks cool and plays well for me. All rewards that I'm aware of scale with the enemy strength and level. By refusing to fight higher level enemies, I'm consigning myself to getting less reward.

*I'm asking for an additional option for people who like LESS variety and more predictable enemy strength. Some of us actually don't play for the challenge and would very much like to walk over most of our enemies, and we're perfectly happy to give up our "mad XP" for this.

Let me know what problem you have with my arguments and do try your best to do so without accusing me of being a farmer, an exploiter or some variant poor player.

*edit*
I just want to address this:

Yes, as a matter of fact changing the game does make more sense. I and, as you can see, a few others prefer to play against more enemies of a weaker level. It's what sets this game apart from something like WoW. As such, giving us more control over our difficulty settings is indeed superior, because we can get a game that LOOKS good and still doesn't require too powerful a build to achieve it.

Furthermore, you can easily run the same argument about the option to turn AVs on and off separate of level and team size. Before, you could have argued that an AV spawning with two or more people on the team at difficulty 4 was working as intended and people should just drop their difficulty, but it doesn't change the fact that people liked their difficulty, but just didn't like the AVs. Instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it makes much more sense to allow people to remove only that one aspect that bothers them, instead of wholesale lowering difficulty to a level that looks bad.

For me, this was bosses. Before, I had two choices - bother with bosses and die over and over again to the more annoying ones, or play on a difficulty setting that was far too easy and, more importantly, gave me far too few enemies for me to have fun. Right now, I can have my cake and eat it, too. I can have my large spawns without them coming with high level enemies, and I can get rid of the irritating bosses that would otherwise ruin my fun. I give up on high-level enemy experience, I give up on boss experience (and large inspirations as a part of the game), but what I gain is a game that's more fun to actually PLAY.

Fun for us, irrelevant to you. Isn't that a win-win?

The -resistance gets more credit than it deserves. Yes, it's very strong, but the power is slow to recharge, and if you fight large spawns like I do (-1x3) then you can never really hit more than around a quarter of the enemies with it. Beyond using Piercing Rounds as an opener, it's all but guaranteed to only ever hit one person, so the -resistance is worth even less. And even further less to me, since I have bosses turned off and the things I'll want to use it on are resistant to Lethal anyway.

-Defence is a cute concept, but it's very rarely worth so much as mentioning. Outside of things with high defence values, of which there are very few (Drones, some Behemoths, a few Crey agents and... What else?), it's fairly easy to cap or close-to-cap your accuracy. Even easier with Dual Pistols, since it has the second highest native accuracy mods on its powers, with Executioner's Shot having Snipe accuracy. Oh, certainly, I've had some use out of the -defence in, say, broadsword, but that's been rare.

Knockback IS useful, but every time I've defaulted to it, the results have been underwhelming. Yes, Executioner's Shot does have all but guaranteed knockdown, but for how long that power takes to recharge and activate, I'm not going to use it for that. It's fun to watch and occasionally does help, but it's too rare to count. Beyond that, Bullet Rain has decent knockback, and I've occasionally used it for that, but it's an AoE power, and a fairly expensive one, at that. It's useful, but not by too much. The rest of the powers (I've not played with Hail of Bullets yet) may as well not have knockback on them, because I don't think I've ever seen them knock anything back.

Certainly the mitigation in Lethal ammo is there, but between resistances, lower damage and effect unpredictability, it doesn't make nearly as big a difference as something as simple as Hover.

Of course, that's not to say Dual Pistols suck at solo play. They just don't solo WELL. Then again, my definition of "solo well" might not be entirely objective, since it's based around a Fire/Fire Blaster, an Archery/Devices Blaster and characters that aren't Blasters. It's quite possible my beef may be with the entire AT more so than with just Dual Pistols.

I don't think this comparison is very accurate, or if it is, then I'm REALLY playing the game the wrong way. I don't see "building" the character as the point, goal and substance of the game. I could, in fact, play this game absent of any character-specific progress. Sure, I'm a munchkin, so I'll miss the raise in power, but I'd still be able to play the game because my centre lies elsewhere.

If we had to run with this analogy, playing this game would be like driving a scrap car along the interstates and occasionally running across a shop that does work for free, upgrading this or that on your car as you go along. The goal of such an adventure would be pretty much to just cruise the highways, wind in your hair and that's that, with upgrading the actual car only something that happens as part of the road trip.

If this WERE like building a car, I'd probably have left long ago. When building a car, you're basically spending a lot of time doing work, paying money and probably chasing a deadline if you do it professionally, but you don't actually get to DRIVE it until you're done. Well, you could, but it's not really quite the same.

Basically, I don't mind having goals in the long run, but what I really want is to have my immediate short-term goal be "keep doing what you're doing because it's fun to do what you do." That way, nothing ever has a practical cost. If progress happens as you simply go about playing the game, then it's never work. It's like a cart going down a slope - you don't have to push it, you just have to sort of steer. And when the game is fun for me RIGHT NOW, then I don't worry about goals. If they're there, fine. I'll get to them when I get to them. If there are no goals, then eh. I'll just get to the end, or as far along as I find fun and go play something else.

What I'm afraid of is the game offering so much on one play-through that I can never get to the end even once. And if I can't get to the end once, then I'm certainly not going to bother trying twice. And I can guarantee one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt - NO GAME can hold my attention for six years without me replaying a lot. It's the "slow, hard or boring" problem. Any game designed to "last" me for years does so by wasting my time and getting on my nerves, ensure I WON'T get to the end. And once I realise this, I simply won't play it again. Why would I? I don't want to play half a game.

Why this scares me is that it assumes that if the game took longer and required more work to "finish" a particular character, then this is always, unquestionably, unambiguously good. And that's just terrifying to me, because the game's at about the limit of my tolerance as we speak, and we're looking at more "end game" of some sort in the pretty near future. This is the specific, precise, exact reason I don't play any other MMO, despite trying many. Sooner or later, I realise that I'm not going to get to "the end" without trading my soul for in-game rewards. I'm not going to just go play another character and get THAT to precisely nowhere, too, only to go play another and have THAT go nowhere in turn. I'm simply going to play something else.

I currently have 7 level 50 characters in City of Heroes, out of about 30. I still occasionally play those 7 characters, but I don't feel like playing them ALL the time, and I enjoy the fact that they're "done" and I don't HAVE to play them if I don't want to.

I just don't see any way for me to possibly agree with you under any circumstances at all, here. Yes, I very much NEED to replay a game from the beginning for me to keep enjoying it, because not a single game under the sun can hold me for this long on a single playthrough. I don't care if it was designed by God and Santa collaborating, it ain't lasting me six years. Ain't. I can play a single-player game for a week on one playthrough. I can play a really complicated single-player game like Mass Effect for a couple of weeks. But that's the extent of it. I can play an MMO for... Let me think. My first 50 was 750 hours, and I wanted nothing more than to play another character by the end. As soon as I dinged and levelled up, I logged out to remake an old Scrapper girl of mine.

The most I've ever done is play the same character for several months straight, and I was sick to my stomach of it by then. After that, I HAD to replay. That was several months. This is SIX YEARS. That is, and I'm not kidding, a quarter of my entire life. There is NO WAY a single playthrough of ANYTHING is going to last me for a quarter of my life. No. Way. And, to be perfectly honest, I find it utterly incomprehensible to even imagine anything lasting anyone for this long.

Yes, I'm aware that a game can physically take this long to "finish," that's pretty easy to design. Just make rewards puny, progress slow and gear break. Opps, I just described Lineage II! You can easily create a game that takes years to complete. Having to click a button 1000 times, when you can only click it once per day would take around three years. But I see no way that such a game can pull this off without making its content deathly boring, a massive waste of time or so uninterestingly hard that it stops being a game, anyway. And if such a game did exist, I doubt it would fit on my hard drive.

I cannot and will not accept any game that assumes it will last me six years on a single playthrough. And I have more years to go, too.

See, this I can roll with, but it still leaves me wondering about one particular detail. Yes, if you view the entire game as little more than a backdrop, then I can see putting heroes in the Isles as a possibility, but then wouldn't it make sense to pick the most appropriate backdrop? Yes, I realise some heroes need to exist among villainy and scum, but the backdrop in question is less "location" and more "intent." If the game actually accounted for people being heroes in the isles and had actual heroic, or even semi-heroic missions available there (Hardcase notwithstanding, one contact does not a game make), then I could easily see that. But it doesn't provide anything of the sort.

City of Villains' entire narrative is geared towards villains. And it's not just the grandstanding storyline or the specific mission goals. All the little flavour text exudes this. Every little detail paints our characters as callous, sycophantic, violent slime whose only goal in life is to get "brownie points with the Spiders" as a common paper mission puts it. I can kind of see a villain who goes along with this but has an agenda. But once you start putting a hero through this, either you have to basically ignore the entire settings, which makes me ask why not just go hero-side in this case (Kings Row, Independence Port, Brickstown and others are as crime-ridden as the Isles), or you end up with something skirting the line in a BIG way.

I can see the appeal of being a hero in the Isles, believe me. I'm just not entirely sure I see the appeal of being a fake hero in a world designed for villains when you can be a real hero in a world designed for heroes and still have much of the same settings, minus Recluse.

Ugh... No, I'm not asking anyone to abandon anything. Why does this always devolve into these kinds of semi-personal attacks? I'm asking why one would want to play a game that's designed to support a certain subset of concepts and stick a different set. Would you try to play Blood as a pacifist? Would you try to play StarCraft as a caveman? Would you try to play Oni as a man?

This isn't about asking heroes to move away from the Rogue Isles. Heroes are not designed to BE on the Rogue Isles. And even with Going Rogue, heroes WON'T BE on the Rogue Isles. At most, Vigilantes will. This is not about taking a hero of the Isles and making him abandon his religion. It's about the purely meta-game aspect of going against the grain and playing a hero in a game where virtually EVERYTHING is written with a villain in mind. Even the simplest of Paper missions try to paint characters as sociopathic jerks, and most contacts do a lot worse.

Even if you cherry-pick only the least evil of evil contacts, even if you stick to the least evil of evil paper missions, even if you somehow avoid fighting MASSES of longbow or robbing a bank in Paragon City every other day, even if you manage all of that, you're still doing enough hand-waving to unscrew your hand from your wrist. Yeah, I could play Aliens vs. Predator and try to explain away how the Predator is really a caring good guy who's actually trying to help the Humans in their fight against the Aliens, but after pulling a guy's spine and head out of his *** (I'm not joking here) for the umpteen bazillionth time, it's starting to feel a little hollow.

I'm not asking you to make moral choices. There are no moral choices to make in the meta-game, no more so than there is in picking an AT. A Blaster isn't inherently less evil than a Corruptor and a Brute is no more evil than a Scrapper. But that's because they're ability frameworks, NOT character concepts. City of Heroes and City of Villains are NOT just different, interchangeable locations. They are environments geared towards a specific subset of concepts. And while it's true that one can go against the grain, the question is "Why?" Why make a villain and claim he is a hero in a game designed to be played as a villain, when you can make a hero in a game that's already designed for heroes?

Certainly, the answers people have given me do make sense, but please don't try to claim my question is somehow morally bankrupt, when what I'm asking is purely pragmatic.

As far as I'm concerned, "investment" and "fun" are semantically incompatible, because if in order for me to call something an investment, it can't be fun. It might actually BE an investment in the purely technical sense of the word, but I'm talking about the feel things have in the game. If I feel that I'm investing something (time, money, effort) into an activity, then that means I'm paying a cost. And by definition, paying a cost is simply not a pleasurable activity. If I find myself looking at a goal I want to achieve, but through a method I DO NOT WANT to commit to, this is an investment. If the investment is big enough, I don't bother. If I don't bother with too many things, I go play something else.

Inversely, if I enjoy an activity, I'm physically incapable of perceiving it as an investment. I see the activity itself as the actual goal, and anything that may or may not come with it a welcome side effect. I enjoy playing video games, for instance. If I could get paid to just sit at home and play whatever game I felt like, I'd certainly not turn my nose up at the offer, but I wouldn't exactly call that a job or an investment. I'm doing what I was going to do anyway, whether I was getting paid for it or not.

As far as having goals, I can sort of agree with you... But then sort of not. I agree that having goals is a good thing, but by the same token, I've always seen it fit to have the most simplistic of simplistic goals. "Kill stuff and roll with it as it comes." Until when? I don't know. Until I burn out on the character and go play another one. It takes some practice to sense it, but it's a worthwhile goal. Or the even simpler "Keep playing until you hit 50." Yes, that kind of assumes you'd stop at 50 (not that I do), but with 30+ characters all in need of getting there, I'm in no danger of achieving my goal to get everyone to 50 before the game shuts down forever. And that's even if it lasted another 20 years.

In fact, I'm completely the opposite of you - if I set goals for myself, I do so with the intention to see them accomplished. And not at some point in the rough future. Soon. Today, preferably, but tomorrow is good, too. If I have a goal hanging over me for weeks and months, I just end up tuning it out like it isn't even there. If I'm not going to be able to, say, earn a Rularuu Sword until I'm level 40 (think before SSK), then there really is no sense in focusing on getting to 40 as soon as possible. It'll take a long time, so there's no point worrying about it. Just integrate "level up, preferably" as my general strategy of approaching content and I'm good.

I guess this would work a lot better for a goal-driven person, but I'm a whim-driven person, myself. I prefer to tackle things as they come, when they come and I prefer to stick to the things I can achieve soon after I decide to achieve them. Long-term goals just depress me in the long term. And serious Inventions-usage is a VERY long-term goal. Me, I prefer things to have an end. Get to 50 and stop playing? Eh, so what? I have other characters I wanted to play anyway.

See, this kind of thing scares me. I'm not an altoholic, myself, as I've made around 30 characters in six years, which isn't a lot compared to some people. But even so, this notion that you'd be disinclined to play new characters because the investment in a single one is too great to have many... That makes for a very hostile game environment, in my opinion. In fact, this is the SINGLE BIGGEST break from replayability that I have in any game ever made. I've no problem with games that end quickly and easily. It just means I'll replay them over and over again. I've beaten Sands of Time so many times it isn't even funny, and I'm still not getting bored with City of Heroes. It's when a game becomes a pain in the *** to get to the end and finish that I'm basically guaranteed to get to the end once, and then never touch it again for as long as I live.

I love MegaMan X4. It's an old game, it's ugly, it's simplistic and it's kind of silly, too. But I can grab that game and replay it from beginning to end without ever even once doing something I don't enjoy. MegaMan X8 is a MUCH better game in the technical sense, in that combat is more fluid, it has a lot more options, much better graphics and interesting bosses. But it is SUCH A PAIN to gather up all the upgrades, and as I'm told it's not even designed to get them all in a single playthrough without grinding minerals in the mine level. Well, that has pretty much ensured that either I play the game once and don't bother, or I cheat to skip over the metals grind. I've beaten it twice honestly and I think twice with Trainers, for a total of four times. If that. I've beaten X4 over 40 times, and I could play it today without batting an eye.

I cannot believe that a single game exists that can be played for six years without replay value. And if I bothered with serious Inventions, the replay value would be SO LOW that I'd never play the game twice, let alone all the times I've spent replaying old missions. If I can't imagine ever having something for ALL of my characters, then I'm not going to get it on even ONE of my characters. Simple as that.

Far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a "labour of love." I mean, I can say it, but I can never feel it. If it's love, it's never labour. If it's labour, it's never love. The moment something stops being fun and becomes a second job, I bail. That's why I'm so cautious about what I commit to - don't want to commit to something I might end up bailing on in the future.

As far as being invested in one's characters, I'm invested in mine. As written by me, not necessarily as implemented in City of Heroes. I'm not as attached to their virtual representations here in-game as I am about the abstract concepts of what I have them conceived as. If the game won't let me do what I want with them, I have other outlets, such as writing, art and, worse comes to worst, other games. If this game stops being fun, I'm not going to stay here and keep playing it for the characters. I can always start them over somewhere else.

To be honest, if I'd stay for anything, it's for the veteran rewards and booster packs, because those are a physical pain to get.

You like low-res, cramped, stacked up menus better than the ones we have today? I can't really argue with personal taste, but I have a really hard time seeing this. It's like what we have right now, only run at, like, 640x480 and much more cumbersome.

I'm not trying to criticise other people's characters, even if I don't happen to agree with the general idea behind some. I'm just more curious why people consistently go against the grain of the game, as while there aren't any stated rules, the design behind the systems isn't hard to see. If you have your reasons, then that's just fine. I have no problem with that. I wouldn't quite run things the same as you do, but then I don't pay your subscription

I don't want THE GAME to be made easier, I want MY GAME to be made easier. Why does it bother you that I want MY experience to be different from yours? Why does requesting a difficulty setting you don't have to use seem to bother you so much you consistently try to sell me as some kind of whining gimp?

Enemies reward experience and Inf based on their level and their number. Whatever levels and numbers I pick, I'm not gaming the system. If I so happen to want mine to not vary by as much as yours, how does that in any way, shape or form bother you who apparently don't want to use it?

Or would you rather they wrote more stories and made more costumes, instead?