Samuel_Tow

If you're talking about the "multi-quote" functionality of the forums where you can reply to multiple posts all at once, that's achieved by clicking the little multi-quote button under all the posts you want to address. This "tags" them to appear as quotes whenever you create a new post in the thread, and they will appear in the order you tagged them in (as opposed to the order they're in in the actual thread).

If you mean how to split a person's post into two quotes, there are a couple of ways, and both involve writing your own tags. Quote a post and look at the opening and closing tags. For instance, for the post I'm replying to, the opening tag is "QUOTE=SuperOz;4100601" in square brackets and the closing tag is just "/quote" in square brackets, which I typed in by hand. My advise is to copy the first tag along with its brackets and just paste it in front of where you want to quote from. Then get to the end of what you want to quote and write "/quote" in square brackets to end the quote there.

If you don't want to do a lot of copy-pasting, you can use just the key word "quote" in square brackets to open a quote box, instead of the full "QUOTE=SuperOz;4100601," but then you'll lose the source of the quote. See, what the above means is, essentially, that I'm quoting "SuperOz" with a link that traces back to post #4 100 601 on the forums, which can link across threads. I prefer to keep this, as it's easier for people who want to read the full post I quoted to follow the link and do so, as opposed to wondering who said that and where.

Sadly, this seems to be the case, and that's very well said. The game's recent developments strike me as exactly style over substance. They're always raising the stakes, always tossing loud, bombastic explosions our way, always reaching for the highest of high drama, and... Forgetting to add much of anything else. I forget who it was that said it's all climax, no downtime... I may be paraphrasing. But it is, and that - to me - is what ruins the story.

Almost every good story needs downtime so as to allow the power and emotion of its story room to build. Human emotions are not as quick as one might thing. When we're exposed to something horrible, for instance, we are rarely immediately horrified, even if we're upset by it. It's only that evening, the next day and so forth when that something horrible keeps popping up that we begin to realise how deeply it has effected us. Similarly, when we're faced with something happy and uplifting, we may smile for a minute, but if we're dragged away to do something else immediately, that's all we'll remember from it. It's not until we see this happy thing again the next day do we remember how nice it felt.

The simple fact of the matter is that the audience's own mind is the greatest storyteller of all, because that's what makes it real to them. People anticipating a nail-biting climax, a heart-warming scene or a gut-wrenching disaster will always do a far better job of psyching themselves up for the experience than you'll ever do actually trying to take them through the experience with the story proper. It's not the first drop of the rollercoaster that's the scariest, it's that split second right before it happens when that sheer drop ahead fully sinks in.

That is, all of the above counts if you can get people to care about the story. Because if your audience cares, then you don't need to shock them, you don't need to surprise them, you don't need to disgust them. You still can if you feel it contributes, but you don't HAVE to. All of these can add to the experience, but they can't MAKE the experience if your audience doesn't care. Just like throwing in many explosions does not make an action movie good, so throwing in a signature character death does not make a story good if it cannot carry the emotional weight that brings. If the story hasn't earned the drama, then it comes off as manipulative, and used in place of proper pacing and presentation.

We NEED slower storytelling. That doesn't have to mean slower gameplay, mind you. You can still break the stories down into shorter arcs, you can still keep some missions short-ish, but you CANNOT skimp on a story's screen time. Rob a story of too much of its "little things" and you rob it of its heart. Then all you have left is the chapter index.

Sometimes I feel like "voting with my money" and refusing to buy a pack even if it meets my absolute minimal requirement for things included into it. The Circle of Thorns pack was exactly like this. They had the pieces, and they just didn't put them in for God knows what reason. I didn't buy that pack because I wanted to make a data point by not doing so.

Again, though, the Roman pack is different. This has a HUGE set of clothing items as well as a lot of shields as well as a brand new item. It's a big pack. I dare say it's too big to release all at once, so if they want to split it in two, I'm fine with it. I just wish they'd tell that to my face instead of making up excuses.

I want it to be known that I don't mind being nickel-and-dimed as long as that's through things I actually really want. Sell me cape and aura unlocks, sell me the Roman gear, sell me the Rularuu weapons, sell old stuff that's been taken off the editor for no reason. I'll buy it, just like I've always said I would. I mind being nickel-and-dimed only and solely when Marketing are trying to sell me something I don't want, and are looking for reasons to make me feel like I need it, so I'll buy it even though I don't want it. The Super Packs are a prime example. I don't want consumables, I do want costumes, so they're bundling their consumables in with the costumes in a manner not dissimilar to how my mother used to hide my medicine in tasty food. Ugh!

Sell me stuff I want and I'll pay for it, but be honest with me. Don't try to twist my arm to buy crap I don't want, and don't try to sugar-coat it when you feel something should cost more than we expect it to. Let US decide what we want to buy.

Paragon Studios Marketing has done more to alienate me from this game than anything Jack Emmert ever said or did. It has alienated me more than ED, the GDN, more than Inventions (and I ******* HATE Inventions) and so on. I don't know who's in charge, I don't know who's making the decisions, but this trainwreck of a marketing campaign has gone from one disaster to the next, seemingly incapable of making a right choice to save their lives.

I have beyond given up on Marketing to care at this point. I've accepted the simple fact that they're here to make money off of me, and are not above using the ugliest, dirtiest, most underhanded tricks to do so, and failing to hide what they're doing. So if I'm told that they're holding off these weapons for my own good, I don't believe them. If they release a weapons pack with everything in it later this year, I won't be in the slightest surprise.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. It's too late for me to care that someone's trying to manipulate me out of my money, especially since it's clear for all the world to see that that's the case. Because "marketing" is black magic. You can't approach the customer like a rational human being looking for good service, oh no. Because if you do, then you can't scam people. So you have to find ways to trick your customers into buying crap they don't need, like trying to make people buy consumables by bundling them with things people actually DO want to buy.

You know, just for once, I'd like the Marketing department to stop acting like the Wizard of Oz and just level with us. Tell us what they're planning and why they're planning it, what they hope to achieve and what their concerns are, involve us in the process and maybe we'll work something out that benefits everyone. But no, that can't happen, because we can't know the kind of strategies being played out to part a fool and his gold, can we?

Whatever. Upon reviewing the Roman pack, I've decided that there's enough stuff in there to be worth 400 points, and the stuff that's not in there will likely show up in another pack later down the road. As such, I see no reason to not get it. But if I do buy this pack, it will be DESPITE Marketing's best efforts, not because of them.

Not for anything other than Smooth/Bare there isn't. No sleek option for Large and Banded (no Animal Fur option for them, either), for example.

This Eastern European player agrees with your sentiment

According to David, hey may or may not help enhance Penny's psychic powers.

You are right, however. The quote/unquote "face junk" may be a shot at being iconic, but it just comes off as a gimmick, especially since it's face plates AND face paint AND it doesn't seem to relate to the rest of her costume. And I don't know about anyone else, but to ME, it seems to lack the style and badassery of Adam Jansen's sunglasses implanted directly into his face.

I hate to keep ragging on the work of a legitimately good artist, but sometimes I feel that David is a bit TOO good for his own sake The artistry, skill and detail in that costume is amazing, but there's simply so much of it that it comes off more as an artist's grab bag of ideas than as a cohesive, self-contained whole.

It's like trying to tell one cluttered college dorm room from another. Sure, if you charted ratio of old pizza boxes to empty beer bottles and plotted the location of old laundry, you could develop a very unique profile for each one. But when I look at your research, all I see is a bunch of messy dorm rooms.

The "face junk" could honestly served to be an iconic piece to set Penny apart... If I could tell what it was. And I can't. I see a pair of face plates with a geometric shape I can't describe (and I have an Applied Mathematics degree) and a couple of face paint stripes I can't explain. If Penny wore some kind of cool shades, or maybe larger visor, or even some kind of large forehead-mounted contraption that I could look at and go "Oh! This must be for her psychic powers!" THEN you could take her out of her clothes and she'd still be recognisable as Penelope Yin.

Can I say that now? Take her out of her clothes? She's not 16 any more, right? She's over 18 at least... Right? Oh, man...

People always tell me that I should give the Architect more credit and that there's some good stuff in there. If you do that, let me know. I'd honestly play it Any story that has interesting characters and exciting events (above and beyond just hitting things in the face) definitely gets my vote.

That was more or less what I meant. There's nothing in that costume that's uniquely identifiable with Penelope, unless you go down to the specific detailing and minute item placement. But like you said - putting this costume on another person or rendering it in a stylised caricature like most webcomics would make it unrecognisable, because there's nothing truly recognisable about it.

Again, I challenge people to describe the costume to me in a few words, and describe it in such a way that it doesn't describe a whole bunch of other people's costumes without much word-twisting. I don't think you can, because there is no one thing and no one small group of things that are uniquely identifiable about it.

Batman is a good example. I've seen him in the comics, I saw him in the movies, in the cartoons, in the various game he's shown up in and I've seen mock-ups of his costume used by regular people all over the Internet. His costume is always different everywhere it shows up, but it's always uniquely identifiable as his own regardless of exactly what its finer details are. Busy or simple, professional or fan-made, it IS Batman's costume. That's what I want for Penny, as well - something that's memorable when you stop looking at it, and right now the most memorable part of her costume is her belly button, because she's apparently the only person in the world who was born with one.

Honestly, even something as simple as having us interact with these characters on a more regular basis would probably suffice. Think about, say, Doc Delilah. We spend all of three missions working with her, and all of one with her actually in it, but in those three missions, her unique personality traits really shine through. The way she speaks, the way she treats others, the way she reacts to Castillo hitting on her, even the way she fights are clues to the character behind the hat and the glasses.

The Freedom Phalanx really need this kind of exposure BEFORE we start killing them. Remember what the Crey scientist said about Executable #6? "It forms opinions and defends them passionately." I want to see the Freedom Phalanx form and express opinions. I want to see them make arguments in defence of those opinions. I want to see them take action in the name of those opinions. This is what informs me of WHO these people are.

The Spoony One asked this question about Twilight: "What do Edward and Bella actually like, aside from each other?" He couldn't find a single thing, aside from Edward apparently likes baseball? So what does Positron like? Does he maybe secretly wish he could have become a school teacher, instead? What does Sister Psyche like to do when she's off-duty? Does she maybe just enjoy knitting as something to do with her hands? And what of the Statesman? What does he do when he's NOT the Statesman? Or is that goofy mask glued to his flat face?

Here's my problem with killing the Statesman as some kind of shocking swerve - we have no reason to care about him. He's barely in the game that has his face plastered all over it like smilies stickers. Having his character killed is less like killing a person and more like knocking down a statue, because he as the personality and character of one. For all I know, anyway. Because the only way the game has treated the Statesman for YEARS is as an icon, an ideal, a "thing." That's all we know of him. Giving him and his brethren more humanity didn't have to mean killing or maiming them. It could have been as simple as exploring their characters. Because to be human doesn't just mean to have flaws. To be human means to have a personality, and I don't know what any of theirs are.

In simple terms, we should have been exposed to the Phalanx so we could learn their quirks and grow accustomed to both their strengths and their weaknesses. We need to KNOW these people before we can care whether they live or die. And it may seem like an ******* thing to say that we don't care about the fates of strangers, but the simple fact is that the easiest way to make us care is to get us to know these guys.

BEFORE you start killing them!

The problem with The Last Airbender is how it was approached. Shyamalan tried to take an entire animated series season and squeeze it into a feature-length movie. I don't care how good of a director you are, this simply can't happen, especially with something as rich in history and nuance as Avatar: The Last Airbender. The only way this could ever be filmable is if you either split it into many movies, or otherwise drop out a LOT of it, and I'm not sure either of those approaches could produce a decent result, anyway.

The thing is, the animated series was as good as it was (good enough to merit a theatrical release movie) in large part because of all the little things it provided. The humour, the characters, the outdoors camping, the developing relationships, the varied environments and cultures. What Shyamalan did was essentially toss out all the "little stuff" and just retell what comes down to a plot synopsis. And people who hadn't seen the cartoon were left wondering why they should care.

The parallels here, as you say, are evident. The SSAs suffer from being rushed, and I don't mean in terms of release schedule. They suffer from being rushed because they simply don't have nearly enough screen time to tell even half the story they're attempting to convey. The result is that all we ever get is essentially the titles of each episode and the plot synopsis of the story so we know what's going on, but there's never any meat on the bones, as it were. This is not a story, it's the summary of a story. To be honest, playing through the SSAs feels more like I'm reading the souvenir at the end of a story arc, rather than playing through the story arc itself.

O noes! I might spend a week without a filler pack littering the market! Whatever shall I do?

When Freedom was first announced, one of my biggest concerns was that they just couldn't keep up with the pace they were promising. People were telling me that "Oh, you're so negative! We'll get what we used to get for free AND MORE!" I asked people then as I ask people now: Where is the manpower for this going to come from? Sure, for a while they managed to feed off content they'd stockpiled to dole out in pieces, but then what? Who's going to make this new content who wasn't available to do it before? Are they hiring? Nope, not to any large extent. Are the existing developers going to be pulling double duty? Well, apparently.

But why is this even needed? Way back in 2006-2007 when the City of Heroes team was down to the "Surviving 15," we got almost no new content at all, and what we got was the bare essential low-hanging fruit. Sure, these were hard times, but you know what? When we got new stuff, it meant something. When we got new stuff, it represented a lot of work, a lot of time and a lot of dedication. It represented a lot of quality. Sure, the development team was limited, but what they put out, they worked their ***** off for.

These days... Not so much. I mean, I know the team is working harder than ever, but they're being pulled in so many directions and rushed so much that what they end up producing always comes off as rushed, unfinished and essentially a half-***** effort. A lot of the time, it IS just that. This pace of development does not seem sustainable to me. It WILL burn these guys out (and we aren't helping), and it just ends up producing unsatisfactory results.

If they would start adding new stuff to the Market only once every two weeks instead of every week, I'd applaud that. If they started releasing SSAs half a often but with twice the missions, I'd cheer for that. If they stopped rushing everything out the door to meet an unreasonable deadline and instead focused on delivering a solid, quality product, I would pay for that. Pay extra, pay double, pay whatever it takes. I want to support this studio, but NOT on mediocre performance like that, ESPECIALLY when it's their own self-imposed limitations that are causing it.

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The SSAs had the potential to be amazing. The core story at the root of it all is very, very solid. It just wasn't told very well, and I honestly don't know who to blame any more. I do know, however, that if these stories were given more screen time to play out naturally, as opposed to coming off like the cliff notes of a much more interesting story, they would be a lot better overall.

Custom maps, custom enemies and complex scripts help make a good story into great gameplay. They do not, however, suffice to make a poor story into a good experience.

I'm not trying to sell a gimmick here, that's just how I speak. It's insidiously difficulty for a foreign speaker to ever nail a native pronunciation for everything. It's easy to fake in a written medium because grammar, spelling, sentence structure and so forth are a form of knowledge that can be learned, whereas speech is a skill that needs to be trained.

I'll do what I can to be present

This. There was nothing wrong with the old way of handling missions. I have nothing against adding to it, but replacing clues, briefings and basic storytelling with all the new-fangled clutter which doesn't do a much better job but gets in the way of the action is not adding to it.

As for a more thorough reply:

I've always felt that City of Heroes should be able to work on two separate levels - story playthrough and just killing stuff. That is to say, the game should accommodate a player who just wants to kill stuff and doesn't care about the plot by letting that player go ahead and do that without constantly interrupting the action. The game should also provide plenty of story to go along with the action so that a player who actually is interested in the story can pause for a moment and explore it.

Briefings, debriefings and clues are an excellent device for delivering exactly the kind of narrative that's conducive to being enjoyed by those who care and skipped by those who don't. Unlike captions and NPC dialogue, clues and briefings can be read at the player's leisure, so a player who doesn't read fast enough (like me) can delay reading until there's enoigh time to get into it. Unlike cutscenes and dialogue trees, a player doesn't need to read a single world from clues and briefings, aside from the ones coloured orange to indicate a timer or another catch, so a player who doesn't care or already knows this stuff can skip it.

The reason I say this is because arcs ARE enjoyed on both levels. When an arc first comes up and no-one has played it, people who care about the story will run it for the story. It is vital that on this first paly-through, the arc delivers a solid enough story to engage, inspire and impress. That's the story play-through. However, when the arc ages and people run it multiple times over, the "spark" in the story wears off, and even I'm tempted to just just click the text boxes close, because I already know this stuff. I like the action, I like the enemies, and I just want to keep moving forward and punching dudes in the face. That's the "just kill stuff" bit.

City of Heroes is not a movie nor a comic book. It is a game, and one based on replayability, too. Its storytelling needs to be paced like a game's story. If it's not, then said story grows really old really fast. People often tell me that I think too hard and I should lighten up, but what choice do I have? When I run the same damn story for the fifteenth time, how can I NOT over-analyse it? How can I not but see all the minor, niggling flaws? And I'm not the only one replaying past content. The game is DESIGNED around it. Content should be built, then, with that expectation in mind.

Ask not what people will think of your story the first time they play it. Ask what they'll think the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth time. Because that's the kind of game you've made.

That's why you don't set super heroes down to turn hamster wheels or lead law enforcement. You set super scientist down to think up the tech that moves the world forward and then TEACH people how to use their tech to make their own lives better. Give a man a fish and he's fed for a day. Teach a man to fish and he's fed for life.

Besides, stories that specifically set down to examine super heroes trying to reshape the world intentionally go out of their way to make that the wrong choice, otherwise there's no story. It's like Yahtzee's interpretation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. "Would you" asks the game "enhance your body with machines?" What do you mean "Would I?" I already wear a wrist watch. And spectacles. And own an iPhone that I'm in the process of duct-taping to the side of my head.

A story where super heroes came together, produced a better tomorrow and everyone lived happily ever after, the end... Is a story that has nothing to offer above a theoretical science dissertation. It is not, in and of themselves, a human story. It is a story of technology. So you colour it. You add controversy, you add trite philosophy, you add "the human condition" and you invent reasons for why no good deed goes unpunished. Because no-one would read a book about how a bunch of people tried to do something good and it pretty much succeeded. You could always inject villains that try to mess things up, but then that's not a book about super heroes trying to improve the world any more than any other regular super hero book.

The Powerfpuff Girls have an episode like that, too. Suddenly, it turns out everyone relies on them for everything. Cops wait for them to arrest criminals, firemen wait on them to put out fires, people make stupid demands, like walk my dog, fix my car, open my jar of pickes and so forth. So the girls stop helping and people learn to do things for themselves. I know the Powerpuff Girls is not exactly high literature, but they are - believe it or not - the kind of super heroes I grew up with.

I'll buy that. I mean, it'd be kind of a plot railroad, but at least it'd make sense. It uses established in-game concepts to provide a reasonable explanation for why counter-measures to this threat can't be applied.

Even better, let's work off precedent. The Rikti had made "mass teleportation assaults" in populated city areas multiple times throughout the game's history, so the technology to do this clearly exist. And it's not just alien technology, because so very many Paragon City technologies are reverse-engineered from theirs.

Recluse routinely deals with the Rikti. Blitz has spies within Arachnos proper. Who's to say one couldn't have procured the technology to mass-teleport nuclear weapons into large metropolitan areas with virtually no warning and no chance to react? That I would buy, and it would make sense for why he's a threat.

So why hasn't he done this? Because he's not an idiot. As the Longbow agent says, at best he can nuke one city, but he'll get his own Warburg nuked back to the stone age in return. He dies, his dreams die, the end. The only reason this hasn't happened yet is because Arachnos seems to be keeping the situation under wraps, and they're "dealing" with it. If Blitz launches a nuclear assault on an independent nation, he becomes an enemy of the entire world, and even he's not dumb enough to do that. But he CAN use it as a threat.

As I heard it, he was an Architect-using player before he was hired into Paragon Studios. As such, I'm sure he's more than capable of telling a good stories without needing custom resources to be manufactured for him. So management says they can only spare the resources to customise three maps. OK, roll with it, use the three maps in question, then add three more missions that use generic maps and write your needlessly complex scripts into those.

Look at it this way - you don't need EVERY mission to be special. When everything is highly-complex climax, then those climaxes start to lose their specialness.

I disagree. Not with our heroes and villains being the big stars, not at all, but I disagree that we had to make the signature characters look bad in order to make our characters look good. It comes off as incredibly petty, and it makes ME feel petty by association. It also nullifies the achievement to a great extent. It feels like a pity victory that I earned not because I was worthy, but because everyone else who was more worthy just didn't show up to the competition.

Much like there's no honour in fighting level 1 Hellions when you're level 50, so there's no honour in surpassing people who are not worth looking up to. If these guys are not built up to be worth my respect and admiration, then the act of surpassing them has no meaning. It is an empty gesture of pandering to my most basic emotions, and it's really just missing the point.

I never hated the Phalanx. I admired them BECAUSE they deserved their position by right. I wanted to become what they represented, myself. To me, dragging your idol through the mud so he sucks like you do is the exact antithesis of having an idol to begin with.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind using even out-of-game sources, like the history of Paragon City on the official site. Yeah, it's not technically in-game, but it could easily be. And even if it's not, it's still an official resource available on the official site, and it's not too much to read through. But having to read through a whole series of books or comic books written by people only loosely affiliated with the game's actual canon just to get the emotional context of what's going on seems like really bad writing.

Basically, if you have a reason to believe your viewers might not have a firm grasp on the complexities of your story because they haven't read the source of your inspiration, then you HAVE to include that into the story. If you can't manage to do all that in three missions, then make more than three missions. If you can't afford to make custom maps for more than three missions, then... Don't make custom maps for more than three missions! Hell, don't make custom maps for more than one, frankly. If you can't afford to make more than three missions so complex and heavy on scripting, then don't. It's not necessary that every missions be fiendishly complex or have some sort of gimmick.

It makes me feel sorry to say this, but the SSAs honestly come off a lot like The Last Airbender movie. They're almost all exposition trying to explain why things are happening and why we should care. Every character exists solely to deliver narrative and move the plot forward, every scene feels rushed, plot points are brought up and immediately resolved. And all of this because the movie tries to condense the entire first season of a show - 26 30-minute episodes - into a 90 minute movie while still hitting all the major points, having the full body of plot and replicating all the characters while stating their personalities and motivations in plain explanation.

The result is a hot mess that an uneducated viewer would be hopelessly lost in, and one familiar with the source material will be left to backtrack and piece together why that was a good idea in the first place. You can't bring up plot points in the same scene where they become relevant. You need to establish these things. Obviously, establishing "these things" take screen time, and the SSAs have precious little of that. You can't just tell me a person is sad, angry or stricken with grief, ESPECIALLY if I don't actually see this person anywhere in the story which is telling me this. You need to give me some context, establish this person's emotions, give them screen time to develop. The SSAs feel like they're trying to retell a novel in the space of a newspaper ad.

Actually, this is the "we need more bio space" problem all over again. Verbose people like myself end up with longwinded stories for their characters spanning many different chapters, involving many other characters and many complex turns of events. Condensing this down to 1024 symbols is impossible if you try to keep every plot point in, lest you end up with a bullet list of "This happened, then this happened, then this happened..." like I'm reading the Dr. Quaterfield TF Souvenir. The only way to have some semblance of style in that description is to leave out the information that can't fit so there's room to say actually talk about the things you left in.

The SSAs really do feel like someone tried to cram a full 15-mission story arc into each 3-mission SSA and still tried to keep all the plot points in, so we spend most of our time having the plot and people's characters explained to us via exposition, or at best depicted by VERY brief character moments. I would gladly pay for longer story arcs that had room to actually tell a story, even if they don't have custom lava in all of them.

Oh, yeah, those... Part of the reason the Tip mission sigs come off as such a mess is because someone had the brilliant idea of putting a linear story in what is an inherently non-linear system of progression. I'm told that if you had all the Tip missions for all four alignments and all level ranges laid out before you, you could chart the path of redemption or folly of each of the characters presented. I buy that as a though exercise, but that's not how it plays out in-game.

For one, these characters are never established. They're just some random people who show up to stop or help a bank robbery, and yet all of a sudden I'm supposed to care about them? O noes! Miss Shock is convinced that Mangle isn't evil, just misunderstood! Who the **** is Miss Shock? Have I seen her before? And who's Mangle? That one guy I broke out of jail in that one Mayhem mission I no longer remember doing? And I'm supposed to care about his redemption based on the words of someone that feels like I'm meeting for the first place? Or... Did I meet her before? Wasn't she the one that one villain of mine stole his cape that he never wore from?

The Tip mission characters feel like I joke I don't get because I's based on a reference I don't understand. These characters are treated like they're supposed to be at least somewhat famous, like we're supposed to know about them, but they're never established and they change so rapidly I can never remember if they're supposed to be heroes or villains in any particular tip. At one point, I thought I'd gotten used to Doc Quantum being a bad guy, since he shows up in so many missions. Then I ran a Mayhem mission with a villain of mine and Doc Quantum showed up to stop me. Huh? Is he a hero in this? Is that before he turned villain or... What the hell is going on?

I agree with your assertion wholeheartedly - we need a stable, static background against which we can develop our own identity. We need villains we can know, and we need heroes we can admire. We NEED this persistent, consistent world to give context to the stories told in it. When nothing is true and everything is permitted, then there's nothing to get invested into in the actual world. There's nothing to care about. I wanted my stories to be about my characters, yes. But I didn't want this to happen at the expense of robbing the world of its own story.

You make a good point. Introducing these characters to players and actually involving them in the world they inhabit in a way that would have them cross paths with us often would be a good way to give them characterisation. Lord Recluse is actually a good example of doing this without actually having the character show up in person. You don't meet the man until damn near the end of the game, but his presence is almost palpable all throughout the game nonetheless. You have people talk about him, you have people carry out his orders, you can see the results of his style of leadership. You get a sense of WHAT he is as a person. I just wish we could get more of an insight into WHO he is as a person, too, but that's still a good start.

The Phalanx, by contrast, don't have even that. The sum total of their characterisation up until the upper 40s is "they exist." The one run-in I've had with Miss Liberty where she isn't regurgitating form letter trainer dialogue made her sound like a pleasant, cheerful, nice person, though maybe that's just me being quick to judge. But that's it. I'm not sure I've heard the Back Alley Brawler utter a single word, and most of the old signature TFs suffer from the pre-Launch problem of impersonal writing, so they don't really send their personalities across with their mission briefings. Like every other Launch contact, they're an extension of the Mission Terminal structure Cryptic were originally going to go with.

In short, I have no reason to care about these people, because I don't know them. Even if we ignore that the only opportunities to get to know them come in the form of forced teaming, they aren't very good, either.

Manticore showing up to "help" the Shining Stars is an obvious exception, of course, as that does involve him in the story, but it involves him in a really disheartening way. It shows him to be an *******, a control freak AND it shows up the player in the worst possible way. Aside from that one off-hand conversation with Ms. Liberty, this is our first introduction to the Phalanx, and it's in the form of a jackass who sends armed thugs to shoot at people as a "test." And then he's smug about it. AND THEN we're supposed to feel honoured to have been graced with his presence and money. I know it's supposed to be an honour, but it comes off like King Jaffe Joffer offering Cleo McDowell money in return for the honour of his daughter in Coming to America. It's more insulting and patronising than it is endearing.

You know what I'd love to see? An open discussion with the Statesman on broad subject philosophy. Or maybe a conversation with Positron on technology's effects on mankind. Or maybe a basic chat with Synapse on the finer points of hitting on hot chicks. Anything which shows me what these people's dreams and aspirations are, anything which shows me what they think about when they're not fighting crime, anything which shows me the person behind the mask. Even if the person behind the mask is the same as the mask itself.