Samuel_Tow

I realise this is a joke, but I'd be all for appending the four Euro servers at the end of the queue and letting us pick from any of the 15. That way, my poor countrymen get to play on a more populated server if they wanted to, and we get... Well, Europeans get to play on more populated servers. How's that?

I managed to turn at least one head with my panda today as I walked up the ramp of the train station, right past a hero going down. I can't say if it was the panda or the walk that did it, but I'm was very happy to be able to do that just the same.

When I talked about "recipes as clues," I meant to use the already existing mechanic of finding a recipe and then looking for its salvage, only its salvage would drop from specific missions you go to to find clues, rather than off random drops. You get a recipe, and with it you get a few extra missions you can go to to look for clues to it. I didn't envisions needing to randomly run across clues for the lead, or to have to put them together yourself, as that's very much out of the scope of what the game seems to have (not that I'd be opposed to it) and instead imagined just having a recipe drop on you, and having three extra missions open up as soon as it happens. Each mission would give you a "salvage-clue" at the end that you can then use to put the "recipe-lead" together and get one more mission where you finish the thing.

As far as having proactive missions in the mission computer, I wouldn't be against that at all, as long as there's a terminal somewhere in the city that I can use to access them, too. Most of my characters are either without a SG or in SGs with cosmetics-only bases, so I don't actually have access to a mission computer. I'm not even sure what it looks like. But as long as there's a console in each PD, I don't see why not. This earns points for two reasons. For one, YOU have to go seek it out, it doesn't just drop on you, and for another, the mission computer would be just information, not ready-made tasks. You decide you want to do something, then go look up info on if over the PD's crimes database, and from there you formulate a plan.

At the end of the day, this is a question of presentation as much as it is of technology. We've already seen the possibility to run without a contact at all done very well in the Architect, and we've seen the possibility to go with a helper (e.i. someone who helps you, not someone you have to help) in place of a regular contact, and those work reasonably well. They're just ALL player-made.

Let me give you the one example I know of where developer-made content has this - Tavish Bell. During the course of one of his arcs, you begin to notice Crey is up to something. When he sends you on a boring time-waste of a mission, you lie that you're going to go, but instead break into the Crey facility you first went to rescue and make off with their secret project, only for Tavish to say he's sorry your mission was unsuccessful (you don't even go) and to say someone broke into their lab, but they couldn't call you to help save it. Oh, the irony...

But that mission has the right idea. You have a contact, he's trying to give you missions, but the ACTUAL mission is something completely different, written as your character deciding to do it on his own. Good idea, good writing, nicely played. Now we just need more missions like it

Well, choose your own adventure style gameplay is fun, and it will most likely be in Going Rogue (it ought to), but I had something more proactive in mind. In choose your own adventure, you make your own choices, but you're still presented with an event to choose how to react to. I was sort of more looking at missions that don't come from somewhere else and are then handed to you, but rather missions you come up with to do on your own.

Finding a clue that leads to a bigger story is an acceptable "reaction" as far as I'm concerned, because you were still out there actively doing things when it landed. Having to visit a contact and ASK for an assignment, however, crosses over into reactionary territory, even if all the contact does is tell you what's happening. Ideally, I wish we could have some subsystem that made it at least SEEM like out characters are coming up with their own ideas, not just reacting to circumstances.

Again, paper and scanner missions are a step in the right direction, as they marginalise the contact giving them, but they're still reactionary. "Hey, this happened! You could go interfere with it if you want!" That's as opposed to "You know, today I want to build a death ray. Where are my blueprints? Igor! Get my spanner!"

Not to be confused with Pots and Pans.

Here's something interesting that has been bugging me for a while now - we all like to talk about how villains aren't villainous enough but, barring killing civilians, no-one can really agree as to what they should be able to do. Personally, I want to leave off the GTA nonsense and focus more on the plots villains weave, either for greatness or for destruction, and I'd like talk about what we could conceivably want to let them do so that they could feel more SUPERvillainous.

But that's only half of it. Here's something even more interesting - shouldn't we really give heroes something to do that would make them feel more like heroes and less like call girls? I mean, yeah, it's cool they always do the right thing and answer the call whenever it may arrive, but give 'em some credit! Some of these guys actually have functional brains with which to make decisions, maybe even take initiative. But since they can't act unless ASKED to act, they kind of don't get to do much on their own. So why can't we give them the ability to make plans of some sort, even if they're something as simple as plans how to be more heroic?

Enter plots and plans. This isn't a suggestion, since I don't actually have a good enough idea to suggest in enacting this addition, since "plots and plans" is about as generic and non-committal as it comes. Instead, this is more of a question for you, guys. If you wanted to make your heroes and villains more proactive, which path would you take? What would you add to the game to make it so?

Now, I'll go off precedent. There was a thread in suggestions recently that talked about villains wrestling control of, say, an island and building their own evil lair on it a few steps at a time as they went up through the levels. I can't find the thread right now, and I don't want to get into the specifics of in-game implementation, so let me just sign off on that and call it a good idea. It is.

But what else can we do? What about heroes? Can't they have something in that vein? While super heroes can and do have bases, they're usually legal, or at least aren't taken by force from someone else. I suppose we could have heroes acquire their own island base of operations by kicking some hapless villain out of his lair, but that's a bit... Iffy. Let's have them build something. But what? Maybe have an instanced neighbourhood that's overrun with crime that the hero can occasionally go into and help rid of street thugs, rid of corruption and help rebuild? Say, transforming something that's a cross between Boomtown and Kings Row into a little slice of Atlas Park with no crime and happy living? That'd certainly be satisfying, at the very least, and mark a sort of personal achievement that's difficult to attain in the game as it is. That way, each of us can be the proud and respected hero of our own small corner of the world.

Moving away from real estate, let's look at something I and others have mentioned a lot over the years - self-serving missions for villains. Now, one of the BIGGEST complaints I've seen levelled at CoV is against Arachnos and how the storyline writes us as their fanboys. Almost the whole time, all we do is get ordered to go do this and that, and with how the contacts system is set up, there really is no good way around it. Or is there? Read the briefings and note that most of the "railroading" comes not from the contacts system, but from the actual writing. All of the missions present us as yes-men for our contacts, and very few (like putting one over on Tavish Bell) play with it at all. Oh, sure, we have paper and mayhem missions, but those are really for the villain with very little perspective and imagination.

So why not have a series of HELPER contacts, or even a few contact-less arcs that are written as though they originate from your villain, himself? They could even come in a few basic patterns where you pick, say, the item you want to steal (the crystal ball, the blueprint of the space station, the Pink Panther diamond, etc.) and have an arc about preparing for that. Or why steal? Why not plan to, say, poison the water supply for all of Mercy Island. Not that anyone could tell, but it's still a noble effort. Just something where your contact doesn't say "Go do this and I'll pay you." but rather "Here, I have the information you're paying me to gather for you. Do with it what you like."

I sort of went that way with my villain arc in the Architec, where everything is based on what looks like it makes sense, things you might as well do and so on and so forth without a contact actually telling you to do anything. It's harder to write, certainly, but the opportunity is there if you look for it. I could talk more about that approach if anyone's interested.

Heroes ought to have something like that, themselves. Their scanner missions, though appropriate for the kind of missions one would get off a police radio, are REALLY reactive. "Oh, no! Something's happening! Really Cool Dude to the rescue!" Why do we always have wait for crime to happen before we stop it? Why can't I look around, realise there's nothing going on and, instead of sitting on my hands waiting for something to happen, decide "Hey, now's a good time to go follow up on that lead I had!"

There is a LOT of leeway to work without an ACTUAL contact if you think about it, and simple things like information kiosks, dead drop mailboxes or even cell phones can provide that give the impression that we're giving rise to events while still having a traditional contact stand-in giving us traditional missions. To go along with the example, you decide you want to follow up on a lead, so you head to a police computer and do so, getting information on it as a briefing, with your action and decision implied by your taking the mission. If the briefing says "Hey, it looks like this warehouse might be a front for the Family. It might be a good idea to check it out!" and you click "Check out warehouse." you have already implied that, yes, it every much IS a good idea to check it out. When you then find more clues from the guy in charge of the warehouse and come back to the police computer to verify, you realise you've stumbled onto something big and follow the bread crumbs from there.

This is about where my imagination (or rather, where my preparation) ends. I can't really think of any other ways to make us feel more proactive at the moment, but I'm hardly the smartest guy around here, and I'm sure guys would have better ideas than mine. So what do you think? How can we go about doing that?