Samuel_Tow

This just in: I agree completely, and you bring up an interesting point.

For a while now we've been saying that we want the Well of the Furies to be A source of power, not THE source of power. From what I'm reading in regards to future storyline progression, it seems like the writers are lawyering up. OK, so the Well of the Furies is just A source of power. Which would be good, except all the other sources of power are Wells, too, just different ones. Yes, in the purely technical, "letter of the law" sense that is different... But it really amounts to the same thing. The point of wanting the Well to be A source of power is so that I could add in my own, personally-devised source of power. To open up the potential for more sources of power only to rigidly define them, too, sounds to me like missing the point by a mile.

Moreover, I agree that all this effort to explain EVERYTHING in the game through the same one plot device is getting old, and getting old fast. It's ruining otherwise interesting plots, and it's ruining potential future ideas because we know they'll be tied to the well in some way, too. But the truth of the matter is the Well is a one-trick pony. It works as the source of power behind one storyline, maybe a couple. But as the source of power behind the whole game, it's nothing more than shooting yourself in the foot.

The simple fact is that the Well of the Furies is more trouble than it's worth. It takes time, effort, possibly money and a LOT of customer dissatisfaction to ret-con EVERYTHING as deriving from the well, and all of this for what? The Well and its family and friends as the source of everything and anything is a crappy story. It takes this vast, multi-fasceted, wide world and reduces it to a single gimmick. The Well as a concept is not bad, if it were contained to its own storyline and restricted to INTERACTING with other stories, rather than DEFINING them. The Well as the basis for everything just ruins the story.

As far as I'm concerned, an old SomethingAwful quote works very well in regards to the effort being put into ret-conning everything to stem from the well, and the benefit this leads to: It's like someone said "I'll give you this sack full of rats, but only if you let me kick you in the groin 10 times." It's not worth it!

This is a VERY good point, and brings up quite neatly the "Jekyll and Hyde" approach to game development that City of Heroes has been going through for years, almost as though no-one's quite sure what it is this game should be "about" and we're constantly tossing new things at the wall and seeing what sticks. To put it bluntly, City of Heroes is the one single game that has inspired more creativity in me than all other games I have ever played combined, and by a very wide margin. The simple reason for this is the amazing character creator that only keeps growing more amazing, and the presence of a Description field which forced me to think about my characters as real people with a real backstory, rather than "toons," as it were.

So, on the one hand, City of Heroes inspires people to create their own characters and their own stories by providing very powerful tools to do so... And then on the other hand, it shoots that inspiration in the knee by IMMEDIATELY thereafter running people through very intrusive, very presumptuous story arcs like Dr. Graves and Twinshot, clearly built with a specific character type in mind. Launch content notwithstanding, it just goes downhill from there, culminating in the Well of the Furies being ret-conned into our stories as the source of our powers all along. I'm ashamed it never occurred to me to ask this question before, but: Why give us so much freedom of character creation if you don't want us to create a wide diversity of characters?

City of Heroes' story, especially recently, has been the single biggest drawback to its massive, powerful character creation toolkit, and THAT is at the root of most of the complaints. You teach us to be creative, you let us go wild and make all of these weird and wonderful characters with wild and unusual storylines, but then when we get into the game, it turns out most of those characters don't fit the storyline. It's like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, where I'm allowed to make my character allergic to magic, thus making the game unwinnable when I have to equip a magic pendant to find a plot-advancing ghost.

What really gets my goat - and I'm just now realising it - is that the character creator offers me a great deal of options that technically don't work with the storyline the game presents me with. And that's hugely disappointing.

Very well said. There needs to be a distinct difference between my characters taking part in the City of Heroes storyline and the City of Heroes storyline becoming part of my characters' backstory. The truth of the matter is I DO want my characters to interact with City of Heroes lore and canon, because despite how much I criticise it, it's still very good. I want the Steel Rook to pit his own autonomous battle drones against the War Works robots because it would make for a really cool battle of technology. I want Brutticus to fight the Warriors because she appreciates personal strength through training and dedication. I want Mage-Killer Po to fight the Banished Pantheon and the Circle of Thorns because she hates mages and wants to rid the world of at least the bad ones. Where it makes sense, I very much want to involve my character in existing storylines.

That doesn't mean I want to involve existing storylines with my characters. Though the Steel Rook may make sense to take on the War Works robots, I wouldn't want to put it in his storyline that THAT'S where he's getting his technology. While it would make sense for Brutticus to want to show the warriors true physical power, that doesn't mean I want her to have a romantic relationship with one. While it would make sense for Po to fight the Circle, I don't want it to be the circle who turned her from a common house cat into a monster. Just because my characters take part in a story as an <insert name here> protagonist, it doesn't mean I want to keep that story as part of their CV.

I don't need my characters in particular to change the game world. I'm fine taking part in a story where a generic undefined player character changes the status quo in a predetermined yet general way. Moreover, I specifically DO NOT WANT the game world to change my characters, except in the most general, unspecific way of making them "stronger" without defining what shape that extra power takes on. I am NOT FINE with a storyline trying to explain my character's powers, backstory, personality or genealogy, or indeed one that even tries to reference those.

As far as I'm concerned, our interaction with City of Heroes canon should be a one-way street. Our characters can act on the world, but the world cannot act on them. If this is limiting from the perspective of writer convenience, then that's just how it's going to have to be. It's not an insurmountable challenge by any stretch.

Wow... OK, scratch one more for the "English is not my first language" list. I honestly did not know that

Aw!

It's useful that, in all our arguments and criticisms, that we never forget this. Our development team is one of the most interactive ones I'm aware of outside of the indie sector where "the development team" consists of one person to code and one person to draw pretty pictures. Sure, sometimes we have to armwrestle them on hot coals with a swinging guillotine overhead to get our point across, but to give credit where credit is due, these guys do listen. Hell, JUST Dark Astoria is a major step in the right direction. Sure, the Well is all over it, but in a much less intrusive capacity that I've seen, and the zone seems to suggest there are other means of gaining Incarnate-level powers without drinking from the tap, as it were. And that's just based on what already exists.

I didn't get a chance to see this insider's look, but if that IS happening, then that's great news. Me being a cynic, I'd like to see it before I believe it, but if we can reign the Well in from being omnipotent and all-powerful and the source of everything everywhere, then we'll have struck down by FAR the biggest offender in terms of railroading storylines. Everything else is workable by comparison, and while I will never stop banging on about "brownie points with the Spiders," just fixing the well will be more than enough to keep me happy.

Like you, I'm prepared to be as patient as I need to be, so long as I know the future will bring fixes to the storyline. One of the reasons I say so much on the subject is I worry as much about what the story is NOW as what it will turn into a year down the line. I discussed "intrusive storytelling" with someone in-game earlier today, especially on the subject of dialogue trees putting inappropriate words in our characters' mouths, and it transpires that most of these are fairly new missions, newer than dialogue trees by a lot. Dean McArthur, for instance, has an arc with true dialogue TREES that offer a range of responses and a range of character types that can be played out through those. That's as opposed to Dr. Graves story arc, which only ever offers a single dialogue option, and it always seems to make me dumber for having said it. I say all of this to illustrate why I worry for the future - that's not what I want the game to become.

If what I'm hearing and seeing actually transpires, though, all... Most of my worries may well be put to rest. We'll see.

This might make for a good set piece, actually. Recluse walks into a trap, then the Obelisk starts draining his powers. And just as it looks like he's about to go down, he asks "Just how much power can that Obelisk of yours handle?" BAM! Four towers drop from a transporter and Recluse reveals that he has made his "Web" portable. Instead of having his power drained by the Obelisk, Recluses machine overpowers it and attempts to drain Wade of his.

If we had had Recluse turn face before and spend some time helping the heroes, that might be a pretty creative coup to do a turn back to heel AND strike a major victory to put him back on the map.

IVy is an interesting example, actually. She's very clearly a robot, but her dialogue is written almost like she's a ditz. She's an endearing character, if only because she's so positive

Well, I see a couple of problems, but both of them are technical. Let me show you them:

First of all, a click power starts recharging as soon as you fire it off, irrespective of how long it lasts. By pushing T9 God Modes into being toggles, you actually effectively bump up their recharge by an extra three minutes, the duration of the power's effects. This could probably be balanced around, though, and the primary reason these were made to recharge in 1000 seconds was so people couldn't make them perma. With a power that starts recharging only when it expires, that's physically impossible irrespective of its actual recharge.

Secondly, I'm not sure it's possible to put a crash at a toggle shutoff event. God Mode crashes are typically timed to occur three minutes after power activation, but they don't need to know when the power's effects end. Off the top of my head, I can't recall a single toggle power in the game that has effects AFTER the toggle is shut off. I do know, however, that some toggles have "shutoff effects" in terms of graphics. Rock Armour sort of crumbles, it doesn't just fade. So maybe that's possible?

The biggest problem with a long-duration toggle is that if you click it too fast, you could click it on, then accidentally click it off, thus forcing a very long recharge without getting any benefit. When I tried playing Radiation Emission, I did this to the enemy-toggle auras all the time. Now, if the toggle is cancelled before its animation time has played out, it doesn't actually trigger, so if these God Mode toggles are given sufficiently long activation times - say one or two seconds - then it's possible for them to absorb a few misclicks.

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All of that said, if it's at all possible for T9 God Modes to be made into toggles, I'd support that. Being able to drop out of a God Mode when I wanted, instead of having to eyeball whether I can take that next spawn and if waiting will have me sitting on my hands for 60 seconds would be a huge boon. Definitely something I'd want to see.

Part of the reason I'm as aggressive in my dislike for the Incarnate lore and the Well of the Furies, though, is because in this case hindsight really should have been 20/20. We had this entire whole debate about City of Villains and how our characters are never allowed to be anything more than Arachnos lackeys, including the outright insulting suggestion that we're collecting "brownie points with the Spiders," a rather disgusting reference to kissing Recluse's ***. The developers' response to this was leniency, including Matthew Burke and later on the Time After Time story arc, which is essentially one big middle finger towards Recluses' helmeted face, and a very good way to put us over strongly.

My question, though, is why make the same mistake again? I get that the old writers left and new writers came on board, but most of those people say they were players before they were developers. Were they not present for the year-long discussions? Did they not see the old content's flaws and the fixes made to it? Once upon a time, I said that for all the gloating Jack Emmert did for having learned valuable lessons when he sold City of Heroes to NCsoft and made his own "spiritual sequel," he learned exactly the WRONG lessons, and the resulting game kind of shows that. This is exactly how I feel about the Incarnate system - our writers looked at legacy content and saw it lacking. To be fair, it kind of is. But they proceeded to take away all the wrong lessons about what makes for exciting storytelling.

I get that not everyone hates this "specific" approach to storytelling, but this is where choice should have kicked in. I can see that the writers have heard our pleas, and a lot of what's come since I19 has been playing down the Well's all-encompassing nature and even sometimes hinting at another way to gain Incarnate powers entirely. And I appreciate it. I just don't get why Going Rogue had to make the exact same mistakes City of Villains did after years of fixing those mistakes in the first place.

I'm pretty sure someone will correct me, in turn, with an alternate interpretation. I just know much of the complaints were about content more so than story. The complaints that were about story were more about there being none of it than about the story not involving us closely enough.

I'm actually hopeful that the story might go into a softer approach, actually. I don't see the Well going anywhere, but if it isn't rammed down our throats, then it'll be easier to explain around. I'd be happy with a compromise like that. Have the Well still be a "thing" in the story, but just don't have every plotline centre around it. It'll be a bit like the Arachnos lackey thing. Sure, we know what the story wants us to be, but when we spend 40 levels not really being reminded of it, it's easy to live with that problem.

That bugged the hell out of me, as well, but thankfully, it's not a major plot point. After it was done, I was like: "OK, that happened... Moving on." It's a one-time thing, it fits with the story and not much would have changed had it not happened, so while it may be too specific, it's inoffensive in being specific. Now, one can argue that Katie's "giant *****" attitude for the rest of the zone's storyline is a direct result of that possession, but it's easy enough to argue that the Apparitions followed you to her location, rather than that you literally brought them in. Besides, the caption dialogue in that mission is so confusing and plays out so much faster than I can read it that I to this day I don't fully understand what happened. Unnamed caption boxes for the win?

Yeah, the aura missions are just stupid, but that's the best the team could come up at the time. Auras are just this kind of... Abstract concept that's too far dependent on your character concept for a one-size-fits-all unlock method, so it's a compromise. How would you write them, for instance?

The cape mission, on the other hand, is just insulting. Hero-side, I can kind of see how heroes might not want to wear capes out of respect for Hero 1, but villain-side, Recluse apparently forbids his "Destined Ones" from wearing capes. Honestly, that sentence feels like it got autocorrected. Though, I admit, it would be funny if a villain bought a bed sheet, tied it around his neck, and then Arachnos soldiers arrested him for wearing a cape without a permit. Take that, willing suspension of disbelief! Not like you could tell, actually. Arachnos soldiers attack us on sight anyway.

However, all three of these situations - possession, cape and aura - are fairly harmless. They show up in one mission and are never brought up again. You don't go through a story arc where your aura heart pump machine malfuctions and you have to have it replaced, you don't get arrested for wearing a cape like I said above, you don't go through a whole arc trying to remove the apparition from yourself. If you want to pretend they never happened, the game's story will not argue with you about it.

In fact, with the ability to buy cape and aura unlocks these days, even that problem isn't that big. If I were so inclined, I can just not run the cape and aura missions and yet still have access to capes and auras. I could be involved in canon if I wanted to, or not involved if I chose to not be. Everybody wins, and Marketing makes a bit of money off it, to boot.

It's not a question of how much you can notice them, it's a question of how they're rigged into the powers system. Costume changes are are a power command inherent in the upgrade powers, and that makes customizing them complex, especially since what costume changes into what is an interconnected series of logical checks.

I wouldn't. One of the best thing about Mastermind henchmen is that as you level up, they start looking much better and more impressive. Thugs punks look like crap at the start (as well they should), but look like rebel fighters by the end. That transformation is not something I want to give up.

Just because there's no label when in the short info text doesn't mean the effect isn't there. Open any status protection power's Power Info tab and look at the effects it offers. Actually, look at Plasma Shield off of City of Data:

Status effect resistance reduced the duration of status effects. In this case, a 103.8% resistance would reduce, say, a 30-second sleep down to ~14.72 seconds.

Status protection, on the other hand, directly counteracts status effect magnitude. I believe players natively have a -3.0 magnitude to every status effect, which isn't enough to be single-held by most minion control effects, especially AoE ones which are mag 2, but is enough to be held by lieutenants and up with mag 3 status effects. A status protection of -10.38 puts you at I believe -13.38, meaning that you'd have to be hit with at least five separate mag 3 holds to become affected. About the only thing I've seen do this is a large spawn of Tsoo Green Ink Men all doing Whirling Hands at the same time.

Oooh! Damage aura! Roger, now I see what you mean. Somehow, I read it as a click single pulse and it seemed pointless. As a damage aura, I can definitely see it as a good idea. Sorry about that

Huh... Separating status protection and status resistance in different powers while putting status status resistance in an earlier power. That's not a bad idea at all. Well played

How do you figure it doesn't make sense? Nuclear fission's output accelerates as that very output increases as neutrons ejected from split cores impact adjacent cores and cause them to split. Nuclear fusion only ever occurs in high-energy environments, such as when elements are exposed to extreme heat, or rammed into each other at extreme speeds. It seems to me like a radiation user would gain more power the more power he generated, not the other way around.

Furthermore, it's not the stat decreases that worry me about the crash, it's the unresistable stun. No other power in the whole game stuns you when you use it, not since that was taken out of nukes. You're proposing a T9 power that does less than either Unstoppable or Overload, yet crashes harder, leaving you completely inert for five seconds, to be killed dead. Even if this power made me untouchable for three minutes I would still not support the hold in the crash.

All toggles are suppressed when held, except those that offer status protection, and even then only the status protection buffs are the ones that don't suppress. The change to make toggles not drop when held was done for convenience, not power, and the point suppressing toggles was to make characters as weak as they were when toggles dropped without actually dropping toggles. Status effect protections remain active just as a means to escape from the hold, rather than to survive while being held.

I didn't see the 50% resistance, largely because you didn't list it in the power's stats I take that back, such a power would be quite useful.

However, I don't agree with the hold just the same. First of all, you'll never see mag 60 knockback in a power, that much I can promise you. Do you have any idea what distance that means, or how many enemies will get stuck in walls thanks to broken ragdoll physics? Secondly, not all enemies can be knocked back even with mag 60, an not all enemies that can be knocked back spend more than half a second being knocked back. Finally, even if your idea is to scatter enemies across the map, not all maps have enough room to scatter enemies across. Finally, I can all but guarantee that people aren't going to stand around enemies when their T9 expires. They're going to run away.

Why do you need to make this so complicated? Why do you need to build in a hold that could be crippling and then work in a system to overcome it inside the same power? Why not just get rid of the hold and have the power function like a conventional T9?

You tried to read my mind and failed. Unless you want to argue that anything "more solid" than what you've proposed is better than anything else in the game, then I don't appreciate the straw man. Please don't insult my intelligence.

The simple fact of the matter is I refuse to turn proper god modes into mini-god-modes. Unlike Nukes, there's more than enough merit to having and using powers like Unstoppable and Overload to make them a meaningful choice. Like Tenzhi, I too feel that some melee sets only ever truly feel awesome when they use their T9 god mode. So much so, that this period of near unkillability is something that I've used as a staple to a few characters' powers.

More people take and use One With the Shield and Strength of Will because they take less thought to use. Turn them on whenever don't worry about them. With T9 God Modes, you have to pick your timing to use them and then be aware of when they drop, but the massive boost in performance they offer has turned the tide of battle nearly every time I've used them.

I don't want to mess with T9 God Mode powers any more than I want to mess with T9 self-resurrection powers just because you have to die to use them. Each has its own utility and its own use.

The obvious follow-up question to that, then, is "Why does our setting need to be so complex and so scripted?" Someone at some point must have thought this was a good idea that brought some kind of benefit, so what benefit is it that overrules what I feel is City of Heroes' greatest strength - the freedom to create? What did villains gain by being written as pawns of Arachnos, for instance, that they wouldn't have gained if that plotline weren't introduced into City of Villains?

I do - campaign for greater freedom and less specificity in regards to assumptions about our characters' origins, personalities and motivations. Failing that, if these MUST be assumed, then I suggest campaigning for greater choice. If word MUST be put into my mouth, then give me a choice between acting like a retard, acting professional and possibly acting goofy. Don't lock me into a dialogue vector that has one and only one response to every conversation screen and has no reason to BE a dialogue "tree" to begin with.

Unlike writing fanfiction for a book or a movie that's out and unchangeable, we're players and paying customers of this game. We're not in the wrong to ask for more options and more storyline paths past the same plot point. I have no illusions that anything whatsoever that I come up with has to fit with everything at all in the game. That'd be stupid. But I feel justified in asking for moderation, such that at least SOME of what I come up with fits with at least SOME of what the game has to offer, such that I can sort of bob and weave in-between stories that don't work.

Forcing all characters through the same one plot point just seems... Unnecessary, in this regard.

You heard wrong, then. I was there for those complaints, and they largely focused around the Incarnate system having no backing to it, like it's just another loot system. What people had been asking for years was more stuff for their 50s to DO, and what we got with I18 was more stuff for people to EARN while still repeating old content. We were promised there would be "Trials" to run, just not right at the start. But like I1 upping the level cap and people exclaiming "So, I have four more power choices to take the powers I intentionally skipped before? Um... Thanks?" so people responded to the half-Alpha slot with: "Great, more loot that I can get by farming the ITF anyway? Pass!"

The reason to hold back Incarnates was less to do with it lacking story and more to do with it lacking content. And though a few people - myself among them - did want to see some kind of storyline explanation behind the Incarnate system, I don't think the Well of the Furies is what we were asking for, at least not in how it came out.

Now, obviously, I could be wrong, but the thing is... I feel we needed the Well to explain Incarnates about as much as we needed Dr. Brainstorm to explain why my Scrapper has fire-based powers. It's neat to have that there as a news article if you really wanted to get into the story, but it REALLY should be kept out of major storylines. If the Well were JUST an "in" on the Incarnate system, but the rest of it didn't bring the Well up as much, I wouldn't mind. I might not like the idea, but if it's just one mission, then eh. I can deal with it.

The problem I have is that after the Well of the Furies, the game seems unable to explore storylines OTHER than the Well. Before it, I can follow all manner of esoteric storylines, from people creating scientifically-based vampires to the history of an 14 000 year old civilisation, to a corporation's lack of ethics, none of them having to all harken back to the same plot point. Post Incarnates... I can fight an alien invasion that the Well is involved in, or I can fight an eldritch god that the Well is involved with. It is my profound feat that EVERY future Incarnate storyline will have to feature the Well in some way, not only rubbing it in my face, but actually degrading the storylines that get told. As an Incarnate, can I just fight an alien invasion that threatens Earth, or can I only get to play if the Well of the Furies is secretly behind said invasion? Can I please go play in the sandbox without the Well necessarily looking over my shoulder?

I don't disagree with you, and that's what I'm doing, more or less. Like with Arachnos Patrons and their Patron powers, I'm trying to think of ways to spin the Incarnate powers such that I can claim I just spontaneously developed them and they weren't given to me. You've seen Stardiver, for instance. It would make tons of sense for her to have the Pyronic Judgement power just because she holds within her body the power of an active star. It would make sense that she could unlease a miniature solar flare at will, right?

But again, just because I can look the other way and ignore much of the storyline, that doesn't mean I shouldn't argue to have the story restrictions loosened up a bit. The last time we made a concerted effort to complain about a restrictive storyline - that we were painted as Arachnos lackeys - we got a response in the form of Mathew Burke. Sure, it wasn't a big change, but at least it gave us an out if we wanted to avoid pledging allegiance to Kalinda. I'm hoping this happens to the Well in time.

*edit*
By the way, those last two posts constitute the better part of my entire morning

Then you need to look harder. You seem to see freedom and control as two sides of the same equation, where both need to be balanced against each other. You can't have freedom without the control to forge the path for that freedom to take, as it were. That is simply not true.

Ruthless Samael actually put it the best, I think - our ability to redefine things that are defined for us has nothing at all to do with our ability to define for ourselves things that were never defined in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, making the game so very specific is what's robbing us of our freedom by making us have to have control, where this was never needed before.

I'll give you an example - if I want to claim that my character is a French secret operative working in Paragon City on joint assignment, I can. Why? Because there simply is nothing said in the game about France, so I'm free to assume that still exists. I don't need control over canon of any sort to do this. So I make this character, play her for six years and then it's revealed that France ceased to exist in 2002 when the Rikti bombed Europe into the stone age and then the place was rebuilt as a single, unified state. Oops! Well, NOW I need control over canon just to enjoy the freedom I used to before, and it's a freedom I used to enjoy without needing to control anything but my own actions to achieve.

Then you've misread the complaint entirely. No-one's asking about "the freedom to act like a villain" because no-one can give a clear definition of what "a villain" constitutes. Since the day CoV went into Beta, I've been having the same argument with people who feel that being a villain means murdering civilians for sport. Villainy is too broad a concept to pigeon-hole into any one subsection and have it stick, so what people have been asking for is variety in the tasks given. Give us tasks where we work for ourselves, tasks where we're lackeys for others, tasks where we pursue insane global agendas, tasks where we're just out for money and tasks where we kick puppies for giggles. Give us a broad variety of tasks like this, then let people pick what they do. Or don't give us a wide variety and simply give us a collection of rather generic missions that we can re-interpret as we see fit.

Neither of these requires control over canon. So I can't kill Arbiter Daos when he asks me to betray Ghost Widow. Fair enough. Then give me a reason to betray her that's not "Because Daos said so." So I can't have my own evil empire. Fair enough. That doesn't mean you can't give me missions where I try to build one. Dean McArthur and Leonard have a great arc in this regard, and I wish to see more like it.

But that's not what we're getting recently. Instead, what we're getting is a very specific vision of what a villain would be, and it's not a villain I enjoy. It's the stupid, brutish thug just out for the money, but who will help out against a greater foe. Run the Dr. Graves arc some time and note the kind of words I'm forced to say, and the size of idiot I'm being forced to be. Why was this necessary? Why was it necessary to put words in my mouth when they KNOW these words won't fit all but a small subsection of villains? Why not go with something less-defined and more open to interpretation? Instead of "I have a mental time bomb!" why could my line of dialogue be "Tell the Dean what Dollface told you." Sure, it's still stupid, but I can at least sell the mind control without coming off like Blond and Blonder in the process.

I have no idea what you're talking about. If my character were a vigilante who'd murder people instead of arresting them... There are plenty of Vigilante tip missions to do that have just that in them. Problem solved! Again, it's stupid to go into a specific piece of content that doesn't fit your character and complain it doesn't fit your character when you can simply not do it and choose one that fits, instead. The problem arises when that's not an option because the piece of content which doesn't fit is the bottleneck through which you HAVE to pass if you want to progress.

Let's go back to Stardiver. Stardiver cannot speak. At all. The only way she can communicate with people is through basic emoticons like O_o and ^_^ and Q_Q. So when I went to run Keith Nancy's arc just because I enjoy fighting my double and was presented with a dialogue tree, I closed the window and went to pick a different story arc to run, instead. I didn't have to rewrite anything in my head, I just picked another story which did not ask me to converse. I needed no control over canon to do this, just control over my own actions. And I didn't even need to rewrite anything in my head. I simply picked an arc where what's on the screen matches what's in my head. Again - problem solved.

And you're simply wrong in that assertion. You don't need to control canon in order to have choice, unless you're unrelentingly stubborn. And speaking as an unrelentingly stubborn kind of person, I have to say you exaggerate. I played through Mass Effect, for instance, and was very clear that the whole story is scripted from beginning to end, where my actions only change specific cutscenes here and there. This becomes quite obvious when you realise your choice of response a lot of the time range from "No, but thank you for asking." to "No, not really." to "Not just no, but HELL NO! Eat **** and die!" It's all variations of refusing, so the plot is still written for you, but you can still define WHO your character is by choosing HOW you make that decision.

You ask for control that's not necessary for freedom to discount freedom as impossible because it's impossible to have the kind of control that's not necessary to have. That's almost a textbook definition of a straw man. And again - I'm not saying you're malicious about it, but intentionally or unwittingly, you ARE creating a straw man.

Freedom and control are not the same thing. I don't know if you're American or not, but if you are, I dare say your constitution and your declaration of independence might have something to say about trying to tie the two together. As a point of fact, trying to use the two words interchangeably is starting to become irritating, bordering on offensive. Please, never do that again.

Moreover, this what at you're doing here is an even more massive straw man. You paint City of Heroes in the same light as something like Virtua Cop, and you couldn't be farther away from the truth. Neither City of Heroes nor City of Villains nor indeed Praetoria are exactly "on rails." None of these sides of the game have a storyLINE, they have a storyplane. What this game's story constitutes is a lattice of different storylines going in different directions, crossing over under and around each other, converging and diverging and presenting what is, for all intents and purposes, a large persistent world that has no one set, mandatory line of progression.

As a point of fact, what you criticise the game for - being on rails - is precisely what I criticise the newer storywriting approach for, because it wasn't always like this, and it never needed to be like this. Pick any of the legacy Launch contacts and try to tell me which storyline they're part of. Unless you cheat on your notes, you won't find an answer to this question, because there IS no answer to this question. Things are happening in places all over the city, and by picking specific story arcs, you get a specific view of specific events, but there is no one overarching storyline. You can build a bigger picture of the fictional world, but this is an entity with depth and breadth, not a mere linear story.

I could, for instance, level up to 50 and never know who the Sky Raiders are, just because the path I took through the story lattice didn't take me across the specific storylines that they're involved with. Or I could level up to 50 and deal with the Sky Raiders nearly all the damn time, even when I'm far out of their level range, but completely miss anything to do with the Rikti, to the point where the Rikti war may as well have been ancient history. And the best thing is... I can pick my own path, and chart it such that I avoid all the things I hate and hit most of the things that make sense for the character. AND not repeat too much, to boot.

That's not a rail shooter, not even close. I'm not sure if you're insisting it is out of spite or if you're genuinely incapable of seeing it as anything more, but it's not a rail shooter. Maybe that's how you see it, and that's fine, but I take slight when you tell me I shouldn't be able to see it as anything more, and if I do, I'm somehow wrong, which is what I get out of your continued insistence on presenting freedom and control as being the same thing.

They don't. I've played through story-driven MMOs and story-driven RPGs, and the fact of the matter is they offer significantly LESS freedom than City of Heroes does on a bad day. Much as I may like Mass Effect, I can only ever play one version of Shepard, because I can only ever play through one set linear story, and the Shepard I invented is the only one that I would like to see run through that story. City of Heroes doesn't have one set story, so I can make a nearly limitless number of characters, because I can fit that characters' experiences to the concept I had in mind, instead of trying to fit the concept to the set experience. It's the same reason that, much as I love Saints Row: The Third, I'm only ever going to have one character in it, because that's my interpretation of what character makes sense to do and say the things the game has me do and say.

So? I didn't come here to look for a GM-driven RPG. I came here for a loosely-defined setting that lets me create a wide variety of characters, a "sand box," if you will, to which I can bring my own toys and play with them for a while. City of Heroes is not D&D, and I don't want it to be. To me, City of Heroes represents freedom. The freedom to create, the freedom to imagine... The freedom of inspiration. I don't need other people or the game to acknowledge my inspiration. I just want them to keep out of my way.

While I can respect that attitude, you seem to be foisting it on everyone else here in this thread. I HAVE written fanfiction, myself, and it's a past time I enjoy greatly. To me, it's an expression of my love for the source material, which I know in depth and which I would like to expand on. To me, that's simply a fun aside.

What would happen if I brought Samuel Tow over to the Chunin Exam and had him fight Orochimaru? Hmm... Well, first of all, how would that transfer happen? Well, I brought Sam to City of Heroes, which has dimensional travel, so let's just say that that takes place in another dimension. OK, that'll work. What about power levels? Well... That's not nearly as easy to explain, and it depends on what kind of story I'm looking to tell, doesn't it? What about continuity? Meh, I can fit that in somewhere where it doesn't interfere. Why bother? Why the hell not?

A couple of points:

1. Yes, they can. That's what the armoured torso is - a different geo using some of the same textures, all of the same patters, all of he same shoulders and some of the same chest details.

2. You mean cleavage? Yeah, I suppose that might need a new geo for each neckline. Or we could maybe use chest details for that. Please excuse my phrasing here, but what if the breasts and the material around them were a chest detail themselves, pasted over an ironing-board-flat torso, such that the interaction between fabric and breasts is contained within the same object, rather than having them try to interact with each other?

You're mixing apples and oranges here. On the one hand, you're arguing that player characters can't impact canon in a meaningful way, which this being a persistent-world multiplayer game, they can't. Not in any truly meaningful way. But at the same time, you seem to be arguing that players - as entities separate from in-game characters - can't have an effect on the plot of the game, and that's provably wrong. Numina, the character, was created by players as a contest, I believe, in early Beta at some point. Aside from that, we've never really been given much control over canon, but our voices ARE being heard and acted upon in the developers' own interpretation of what they think we want to see.

When the revamped Maria Jenkins arc was added to the game, it was immediately apparent that all accompanying signature characters made it a point to almost plead with us to please understand that they're not here to steal our spotlight, and this is our story. This is almost word-for-word what I and others had been saying on the forums for years prior, and though I didn't expect our arguments to end up in the game as-is, literally out of the mouths of the NPCs, I still hold that up as proof that the writers did at least know what we were saying. The result of this is... Subject to interpretation, shall we say, but I appreciate the effort just the same.

You see the ability to impact canon and the ability to stay consistent with it as the same thing. They aren't. Our ability to impact canon is largely restricted to our voices as players and paying customers, whereas our ability to stay within canon is down to our characters' actions. You're mixing player and character here, and you end up creating a probably unintentional straw man. Specifically, that it's impossible for a player character to stay consistent with canon without having control over this canon.

You, my friend, speak like someone who's never written fan fiction, or at least never with any degree of research. Staying consistent with canon you cannot control is not impossible, it is merely a question of picking the right canon and knowing it well enough. It's not that hard, and all those of us who argue FOR concept but AGAINST limiting canon do this every day. We find ways to explain our way around stumbling blocks and argue around apparent contradictions, because we simply know the canon involved well enough to know which parts of it can stretch, and by how much.

The argument here isn't for the development team to give us more CONTROL, it's for them to give us more FREEDOM. Having content which does not work to actively restrict the breadth of concepts that can take part of it is not rocket science, and it does not require player control over canon. In fact, the game used to have that back in 2004-2005, and it did this in the simplest way possible - by not writing stories that relied on player characters exhibiting certain properties.

Actually, go through most of the City of Heroes Launch content and note how the stories are written. It is assumed your character communicated with the contact in some way, but it is never specified how. It is assumed you are capable and powerful, but it is never specified what that entails. It is assumed you chose to complete these missions (else why start them?), but it is never specified why you chose this. The contacts simply take the clues, process them and give you the next leg of the story. If you want to "role-play" more happening along the way, you are free to do so, as the story is pretty open-ended.

In the very simplest of terms, canon can be inclusive without granting users direct control over it, and unless I misunderstand something fundamental, you seem to be arguing that you can't have one without the other. Content doesn't need to be tailored to every specific character, thus we don't need to have the ability to the game's story to match our own. We just need enough headroom to where our own story can fit within existing canon without bumping into things.

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On a very separate note, there's a self-contradiction that I want to reconcile with. For years I've argued that I wanted to be the star of my own story, and that City of Heroes storytelling should be "about" my characters, yet here I am now, saying I want my characters to be guest stars in an ongoing story run by someone else. This isn't just me backpedalling, it actually does bother me that I managed to contradict myself.

The solution to this, as I see it, is that I want to see stories that use my character as a protagonist and put him over strong, treating him with respect, but that these stories don't loop back on top of me and influence my character in return. What I want is for my character to have the ability to advance the plot (through a pre-written plotline), but without giving the plot the ability to advance my character but in the most general way, speaking in terms of storyline and concept.

Example: A story needs a protagonist who can fight zombies, robots and wizards, both one after the other and all at the same time. Any character of mine who is "strong" enough to do this can fit the bill, because all the story requires is capability, regardless of its nature. Once the story is done, my character is made "stronger," but it is left up to me to define what that means in storyline terms, while in gameplay terms he just gains a combat level.

I don't need to control canon, and at the same time, canon doesn't need to control me. If written well, we can get along peacefully.

That's actually a pretty good point. In a world that has become heavily entrenched in time travel, that actually works pretty well. Thanks!

So why not just make that a separate upper body that's identical to the existing one, but has the "monoboob" design, instead? I'm pretty sure most textures and patterns will still fit, though I imagine chest details may need to be repositioned.

"Past versions of me" actually concerns me. I hope it's just a quip and not a storyline where we meet the past version of my space alien from another dimension who was never on Earth until a few years ago. And before we start raising giving out red cards, here's a simple example: What if my character is Praetorian? Can we actually argue that a character whose entire history is based in Praetoria - the way the Praetorian storyline is being sold - could have a "past self" on Earth? How would that work?

Now I'm interested to know... Are we talking just basic similarity, like there were people who were "like" me in the past, but in a symbolic sense? Similar overall power structure? "Chosen" like me?

Yeah, that one was a HELL of a way to send me off the first time I did it. I'll agree with the others who find that helping Katie Douglass does offer a tender moment or two, just because she's written to be such a personable person, and seeing her right at the end is a very good sendoff. Seeing Tunnel Rat again is nice, too, especially how she's written. The whole time she acts like... The mole man from Atlantis, like this creepy old man, to be honest, but having her overcome her quirks right at the end and admit she's going to miss me was touching. I forget who else is there, but I wasn't disappointed, and I agree that it's just a single moment when these characters are temporarily taken out of the fight to act like genuine people for a change.

It also paints a VERY stark contrast to leaving Praetoria as a Responsibility Loyalist. Then, there's almost no-one there to send you off, because your either killed or alienated most of your friends by the end. Compared to the hugs and kisses sendoff of a true Warden, the Responsibility send-off is downright soul-destroying. Even the Power Loyalists get a much warmer sendoff than that, and they're supposed to be the self-interested callous prats. Ouch!

Aaron Thiery kind of ruins the Atlas Park storylines for me, but I agree on Mathew Habsy and his wife. It made me smile to find out someone thought to put his wife next to him at the end. Honestly, though, I'd have loved to see more of an exchange between the two at some point, just to get an idea of what their relationship is like when they're not struggling for their lives or overcoming great adversity.

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Honestly, if nothing else comes out of this thread, at least it's making me smile as I read through it, and that counts for a lot

So? When did this turn into a "we want to affect the world" argument? I don't. I've never wanted to affect the world at all. I specifically DO NOT WANT TO. Why? Because that means my actions would yank the story from under some other unfortunate fellow or, much more likely, some other unfortunate fellow's actions will yank the story from right under me. A decent RPG does not need to have player characters affect the world.

I see my characters here as guest stars. Their actual, real stories occur off-screen, and what you see on-screen is what they do in their filler episodes. The last time Stardiver and Lighteater clashed, they both left heavily damage and Lighteater went into hiding. So what is Stardiver to do in the meantime when no plot of her own is happening? Well, why not stop the Tsoo's attempt to take over all the gangs of Paragon City? That's still better than Son Goku walking the snake path for six ******* months, lemme' tell ya! And when Lighteater pops up again, I'll walk my story out of the game and play it out in my own writing, then bring the story back here when it's time for more filler.

Except we're not talking about in-game roleplaying here. We're talking about the creation and progression of character concepts within a fictional universe. If I were so inclined, I could turn around and write a whole bunch of characters in the Star Wars Extended Universe and have a ton of fun despite not being able to change the plot of the movies, but there really is no (good) game to do this in, and the games that exist aren't really very open to interpretation.

City of Heroes is better than this, in that it offers... Or at least used to offer a relatively consequence-free fictional universe where nearly anything goes and we have nearly limitless freedom, provided we can fit our characters within the existing AT system. Meta-game concepts do exist as storylines, such as Hero ID cards, hospital recilmators, difficulty settings and so forth, but those pop up in storylines so rarely that you can ignore their existence completely and you'll almost never have to sidestep a plot point.

Who gives a crap? Honest question here. You clearly don't by your own admission, and I don't remember the last time I've heard a person ask for his or her character to impact game lore. In fact, why even bother try to fit a character in the City of Heroes canon AT ALL? I apologise for saying this, but you're making a straw argument here. You presume that people want to impact events and be included in canon, then claim it's not possible, therefore the argument is invalid. OF COURSE it's impossible. We realise it's impossible, so we don't ask for it. Phasing tech can go some ways towards it, but that's putting jelly beans on a cake - it doesn't change nearly enough to make a difference.

Yes, I'm aware my characters can't be integrated into canon. I don't want them to be integrated in canon. I would object to my characters being integrated into canon. And I do object, because that's precisely what the Well of the Furies is - it's a one-size-fits-all way to put our characters into canon storylines, and that requires that our characters be punch-pressed into a predefined mould. We saw how railroading this is with the Project: Destiny storyline, we saw how limiting this is with the whole of Praetoria's "Power Division" and hardline alignment choices, and we're seeing it again with the Well of the Furies.

I don't want to be part of the game's canon. I'm a guest star, and I'm perfectly happy with that designation. As long as canon doesn't bother me, I'm perfectly happy not bothering it. Most of the characters I play are essentially fish out of water. What would happen if you yanked Grey Fox out of Metal Gear Solid and put him in City of Heroes? That's more or less the question I ask for all of my characters, because I conceive all of mine as a part of largely unrelated stories and then bring them over to City of Heroes without doing much in the way of ret-conning to fit.

And here's the real kicker - prior to the Well of the Furies, I really didn't need to, not by much. Sure, Arachnos is kind of a plot railroad, but at the same time, you can ignore them for the most part, right up until Time After Time, and you end that by breaking away from them. All the rest of the game treats Arachnos agents as any other contact. You can claim you're a sympathiser and work with Marshal Brass and Agent Kirkland, or you can claim you're a disident and work with Vivacious Verandi and Crash Cage. You can sidestep many plot points by essentially avoiding taking part in many plots, but there's really no going around the Well of the Furies, ESPECIALLY if you don't want to do endless raids like I don't.

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I don't get why you're even refuting an argument nobody made. People's beef with the Well of the Furies isn't that we want to be integrated in the story but don't like how it's being handled. Much more commonly, it's that we DON'T want to be integrated in the story at all, and instead retain the freedom that not having to kowtow to a plot railroad brings. City of Heroes pre-Incarnates provides many different paths through the levels, with no one choke point being mandatory for all characters, with the possible exception of the Midnight Club for technical reasons. Yet with Incarnates, EVERYONE goes through the same plot point of becoming an Incarnate of the Well. It's a storyline you cannot avoid, so you end up having to accept it or ignore it. And that really hasn't happened before, not on this scale.

Oh, that reminds me! Something Agent G says is actually pretty cool in that regard. It's less a "tender" moment and more of probably a comedic one, but I still like it. After the battle for the PCM is done, the world is saved and some laws of physics have been broken, the man who has thus far been deadly serious announces he's going to get a "shave-ice" from Yin's Marker, because Wu Yin makes his favourite.

It's at the same time goofy and actually pretty cool. Yeah, it's out-of-character goofiness from a serious character wanting something unexpected, like nachos or Pong or something. On the other hand, though, it also shows me a guy whose job forces him to be very serious, very tough and, as they say "be paid to worry." It's nice to see that there's a real person behind the sunglasses, and that person just so happens to like shaved ice? Well, to each his own, I guess.

I admit, I chuckled at Agent G's off-duty plans, but more than that, it made me smile. And that counts for a lot in my book.

While I can respect your take on what constitutes lore (and I mean that), I simply don't share it, personally. I don't see anything as lore unless it's in the game in the form of some kind of storytelling. Enhancements are not storytelling, they're a game element. No actual stories revolve around them, with the possible exception of the "continuing training missions" which are half meta-game anyway. Let me see if I can break it down with some more logic to it:

*If it's in a power description, it's not canon.
*If it's in an enhancement description, it's not canon.
*If it's in a tutorial mission, it's probably not canon unless it shows up somewhere else, too.
*If it's in an event, it's most likely not canon, unless adopted in non-event content.
*If it's in a mission to unlock content categories, it's only content if it gets brought up again later.

Enhancements only show up as game elements and parts of tutorial missions that have to do with enhancements. I don't consider them content. If the Well of the Furies only ever showed up in Ramiel's arc, I wouldn't consider it to be canon, either, since his arc is sort of a tutorial and/or content introduction/unlock. However, because the Well not only appears in most of the subsequent content AND has been ret-conned in preceding content, it has become pretty serious canon.

Before you call me pedantic (go on, I don't mind ), let me explain why I draw this distinction. I can ignore enhancements and still experience the entirety of the game story without having to blacklist any of it. If I want to ignore the Well of the Furies, I need to either blacklist a large portion of the game's content, or else just not read briefings. One of these things is easier to do than the other, at least for me. At the very least, having to self-censor less of the story is significantly less work. Accepting or denying enhancements takes no work whatsoever since the story never brings that up. Denying the Well of the Furies takes far more work as it's mentioned in far more places.

On the one hand, I want to say... Yeah, that's kind of the real trick to it. If you can get your players to care about your characters, then they will be much more responsive to the drama that surrounds them. All too often the story fails to provide people for us to care about, so it tries to compensate with turning the drama up to 11. But just because you can bake a in 30 minutes at 375 degrees, that doesn't mean you can bake that same cake in 15 minutes if you go up to 750 degrees. In much the same way, increasing the scope of the drama doesn't really get players more invested if they don't care to begin with. In fact for me, it's had the opposite effect.

On the other hand, though, I'm more than convinced you can have a tender moment between two characters the audience doesn't care about and still have it come off as a tender moment. Perhaps an unappreciated one, granted, but nevertheless... For me, what strikes me so much about Sefu's death isn't really Sefu's death at all, but rather Deitrich's reaction to it. As I said - that's when I felt her character transcended her original writing as the yelling but ineffectual executive and leapt off the page, as it were. I didn't care about her before that moment, but I've grown to respect her as a character since, not to mention respect the writing behind her.

Imagine the following - you're watching newsreel footage of the aftermath a great disaster when you see something as simple as a dirty ragged mother tending to her dirty ragged son out in an alley while rescue workers run about. You don't know who these people are, you don't know their names, you've never seen their faces, but this doesn't prevent theirs from being a sweet, tender moment. Obviously, it's possible that that's just me, but when I see something that shows me these are real people trying to get through a real disaster, going through real emotions, I'm compelled to care about them even if I want nothing beyond what I'm seeing. That goes for fiction as well as real life.

In a lot of ways, we tend to see super heroes and super villains as just a collection of powers and adventures, but this serves the iconise them to such an extent that they stop feeling like real people. To me, it is those simple, basic, tender moments that give the bombastic fiction and high drama the grounding I need to actually believe them in a visceral sense. It doesn't need to be a bombastic scene backed by a symphony orchestra. In a sense, it's the very simple things that define the very simplest of human emotions, and THAT is what gets me invested in the drama at hand.

Sadly, I've only ever run the Lady Grey TF twice, and both times we stealthed much of that mission (against my will, might I add) so I'm really not entirely certain what happens in there. However, based on what I've seen between Penny and the Clock King in Faultline, I can take your word for it. Penny seems like a good kid while the Clockwork King seems like a spurned monster who's given up on the world, but found someone who isn't sickened by him and is trying - albeit in an awkward, stilted way - to keep the relationship going and protect the girl from harm.

But again - this exchange happens in a loud, bombastic, flashy scene of combat, to the best of my memory done as a battlecry, and it really doesn't need to be this way. I get that the Clock King's role in that TF is a tragic one - he's putting it all on the line for this girl that may not really want his help out of sheer terror and desperation, and while that is a moving concept, the scale of the action scene kind of undermines it terms of affection. Loud action and explosions simply drown out the subtler emotions more often than not. I actually think the way Penny talks about him to be much more powerful, simply because here's a kid talking about an obvious monster like he's her friend, and she's neither stupid nor deluded about it. That's actually brilliant.

Master Midnight, yes. Good call on that one, by the way. And yes, he is a horrid insulting parody for the most part, but I found the end of his tenure to be quite well done, actually. He sacrifices his life for the woman he loves, even though he's well aware that she doesn't feel the same way about him. For all the horrible jokes he is the butt off, you can almost get the sense that Midnight realises how much of a failure he is, but goes with it anyway because... What chance does he have? To admit that the love of his life hates his guts? That seems to be the only thing keeping him going, and I don't see it.

But again, all of this happens mostly off-screen, and we have just the tail end of it, delivered as one loud declaration in the middle of a fight scene. To my eyes, this is something that should have been built up over the course of the guy's story arc. I'm sure there were a few D&D nerd jokes that could have been swapped out for character development, to give the guy some more personality than... Just a stalker fan, essentially. It's a good idea, but it just seems squandered on a last minute out of nowhere face-heel-face turn.

Not entirely. You can still customize your Jack Frost and your Animated Stone just fine. I believe the problem with Mastermind Henchmen is the fact that they swap costumes with henchman upgrades.