SlickRiptide

Sorry for the derailment, Michelle.

This is a game about superheroes, not a comic book simulator. Just because comic books rewrite their characters every time a new writer gets a hold of them or they rewrite history to sell more comics, it does not mean that we should expect the same shoddy treatment in a game world that theoretically has a rich history behind it.

"It happens in comic book publishing so we should expect it in our game" is the worst excuse there is for any action taken by the studio in their game development.

But that's just the Arcanaville Corrollary at work - Eventually, in some universe, Batallion will succeed at eating the Well and then we're all SOL in every universe.

Where's Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion when we need him?

The extremely silly implication of all of this is that the Rikti Well is OUR Well as well because the Rikti are US. The lore (apparently) is that the Rikti once fought off Batallion. That means that Rikti are in danger again because Batallion has now come to a dimension where we are not so able to fight it off. Which means that if Batallion REALLY wants so badly to add our Well to its collection that it just needs to find some dimension where all of the humans are primitive and/or peaceful and then absorb the Well unopposed by anyone who can mount an effective defense and we're all screwed.

Actually, the really silly thing is that this is basically the plot of TORG. Maybe the studio should be working on a TORG MMO.


Having just finished John Scalzi's _Redshirts_, I found this to be particularly LOL-worthy, heh.

Questions 1) & 2) of the survey are questions that the studio already knows the answer too. They have reporting mechanisms that can answer those questions and many more, and compile the answers across the entire game; not just a few respondents on the forum.

Questions 3) & 4) are opinions and cannot be datamined, though they might possibly be guessed at based on the answers to 1) & 2). If those are interesting questions then giving weight to the respondents on the forum is the only way to come to a conclusion about the answers.

Statistically speaking, a small sample can, in fact, reflect a large truth. It all depends upon the question being asked, how concise it is, and how many different respondents there are.

What IS true is that we represent a subset of the players - those that are willing to post on forums. How closely that coincides with the general player base is going to depend on the information you're trying to gather.

The Well of the Furies that we have today bears small resemblance to the Well that Marcus and Stefan dipped their hands into back in 2004 (that being the year the game launched, not the literal in-game year that they received their power). The characterization of the Well as a cosmic dimension-spanning entity is inconsistent with the original characterization of it as a passive "battery of human potential". In fact, the Well was originally a dodge and Pandora's Box was the real power source. Later, it turned out that the BOX was the dodge and the real source was the Well after all.

Now, you can wave your hands and say, "That's not inconsistency, it's just that <handwave>we now know more about it than we knew eight years ago</handwave>."

There's no particularly good way to refute that because it says that we players were never given the whole story and so anything the devs decide to toss at us lore-wise is perfectly okay because they're just "expanding" on the old content.

This, of course, is why I tend to go into Standard Lore Rant #3 about how the devs hoard all of the lore they have in order to promote the existence of this very situation where they tell us the smallest amount of history necessary for the current content and so nothing they write is technically a contradiction of existing lore; it's "actually" an expansion of existing lore instead.

It's not that Statesman "realized his potential", it's that he found a magic box and released super powers into the world for the first time since mythological days. Except that it wasn't really the box, it was really The Well, and the potential was actually there all along. Except that the Well actually created this situation and brought Marcus and Stefan to itself because it needed a champion. Except that it's sentient and really wanted to find the person it could use to take over the multiverse.

Let's not even get into the silliness that is Doctor Brainstorm, the Origin of Powers, and Power Proliferation.

You see <handwave>we're just learning more about it is all</handwave>. It's not REALLY inconsistency. It's just that Statesman lied and then lied again and then the Well itself lied and Mender Silos lies when it suits him and Prometheus is almost certainly lieing about many things. That's okay, though, because a lie means that the truth is never an inconsistency.

This is a cheat and a dodge and an excuse for writers and mission programmers to be non-commital and justify whatever they feel like justifying after the fact instead of binding themselves to their established history.

It means that no matter what we players think we know about anything in the game, that we never can really have faith that we know the whole story. It can change at the whim of a writer with a "good idea". That's all well and good for a game about conspiracies where you know up-front that you don't know the whole story and that what you do know probably ought to be questioned. This is a game about super heroes and villains and it's supposed to have a solid history.

It means that we can never know the answer to a simple question like "What year was the Faultline Incident?" because committing themselves to it would be taking away some of their own freedom and laying themselves open to actually be inconsistent.

So, is it inconsistent? No, technically, it's not. The consistency is that we've been lied to repeatedly about the nature of the Well and the Furies and the Gods and we are continuing to be lied to and dodged. The people doing the lieing and the dodging are the writers of the game, and we're supposed to just smile and say "Wow, that's neat! I can't wait to see how the next lie is revealed!"

Pardon me; "I can't wait to see next expansion of the existing content."

You can take your pick about which statement is actually more correct.

I'm not aware of any hard and fast dates for the Faultline Incident. We can make a few assumptions and deductions:

According to recent developer commentary, Penelope Yin as she appears in New Overbrook is intended to be 18 years old. That content was released in 2006 and given the aging that Penelope has undergone in the current signature story arc, it seems that the date of the opening of New Overbrook can be more or less pegged to be the same timeframe.

Penelope looks up to Jim Temblor and Annette (Faultline and Fusionette) as older sibling-like figures. (This is one of the factors that helped convince many that Penelope was supposed to be much younger than eighteen.) Presumably, Jim and Annette are 20-22 in 2006, by this reckoning.

Jim was a boy but probably a pre-teen or early teen when his father destroyed Overbrook. This comes from judging his accounts of his memories of the Faultline Incident, as well as from the fact that he is older than Penelope and she was living in Faultline at the time and was notable for making deliveries for her father's store ("Many of the heroes who had their bases in Overbrook prior to it's destruction had tales of strange things happening shortly after 'Perilous Penelope' swooped by on her scooter to drop off a delivery from her father's store").

If we figure that Jim is 20 at the time that a hero begins the New Overbrook story, then have to figure that he was maybe 14 when his father destroyed Overbrook. I can see a 12-year-old Penny making deliveries in a safe neighborhood. Ten-year-old Penny is not out of the question but would be pushing things just a bit. Even in a neighborhood full of superhero bases, you'd have to question whether that was a safe thing for her father to be employing her to do.

At any rate, the date we end up with is roughly year 2000 +/- two years.

The plain fact is that the studio prefers things vague, even matters of established history like the Hollowing or the Faultline Incident. There isn't any official timeline outside of the timeline in the "about the game" section of the official website. Oddly, in the case of Faultline, there isn't even a backgrounder that describes the zone and its history.

The studio is content enough with this state of affairs that they've let it be this way for the last eight years.

Wrong, and you only have to look at how most of the industry is moving to a hybrid freemium model to see that it's wrong. That attitude is very 2008 and it was pretty much wrong back then too. It's just there weren't enough extent examples to definitively prove the wrong-headedness of it. SOE didn't convert from an all-subscriptions model to an all-freemium model because every single one of their games was DOA. They did it because the games that they converted to freemium began making more money than they had been making as subscription games.

Also, there is no City of Heroes 2 and never will be, IMO. There's no need for it, and if EQ2 and Lineage 2 have proven nothing else, they've proven that sequel MMO's tend to cannibalize their "parent" more than they generate new business.

If that was really true, then freemium as a model would fail, and clearly it is not a failure in the general industry. It would mean that the studio would have to follow a different revenue generation strategy than "let's break the game up into a set of 'systems' and then charge for access to those systems".

Freedom is almost a year old now, and I suspect that if we see any tuning done to it that we'll see it targeted to happen after that magical one-year milestone. In the meantime, the game is what it is.

I do think that the OP has some valid concerns but for now s/he has to just suck it up or play something else.

I think the real question here is whether the invention system ought to be a service that costs you money.

I thought it was an interesting idea at first, but over time I've watched how that decision has impacted the gameplay experience of new and especially returning players. If it was indeed a good idea then the invention license would be seen as a motivator to sign up. In practice, this really doesn't seem to be the case. It appears to be a de-motivator, and I can see why it would be a de-motivator. Inventions are way more integral to a character than incarnate powers are. From the standpoint of existing players, they aren't going to feel "optional".

I don't know how much revenue is generated by invention licenses. Maybe it's a lot and that alone is justification enough. There are already so many other limitations in terms of inventory, incarnates, and character slots that I don't see that limiting inventions as well is really all that necessary. This game is the most alt-heavy game in the biz, and I'd think that the best way to get a returning player to subscribe or at least spend some money in the market is to give them a full game experience and encourage them to desire more character slots for alts.

A great deal of the Freedom setup is a big experiment, and I think maybe it's time to look at the results of the experiment and make some adjustments.

However, I'm just a player. I don't know the financials of the company. If they're making 20% of their revenue off of invention licenses then clearly that's actually working for them, no matter how much of a demotivating factor it might appear to be to some players.

Also, to the OP - One of the intentions of this setup is that you can't use inventions so you turn around and buy the inventions off of the market instead. Those sets ARE usable no matter your invention license status, as I understand things. They also scale with your character, or at least some of them do, so you don't spend money on something and then outlevel it right away. Then if you make an alt and you want to transfer the purchased set, you buy some unslotters and then mail your purchased IO's to the alt.

That's part of the intention. How well it's realized in practice I can't say.

Matt, Melissa and maybe one other dev are all on-record taking the position that killing Statesman was a sign that Paragon Studios had "grown up" and left its old Cryptic Studios legacy behind.

It's difficult to read that as anything but "We're killing Statesman because he's Jack's old character and we don't want to be associated with him any more." Especially after Sister Psyche got axed along with him.

Why? Hamidon won that war. Whether it was held in check by the sonic fences or it held itself in check out of a sense of fair play, Emperor Cole put the final nail in the coffin of Praetoria when he nuked Nova Praetoria. The only thing to do now is to evacuate the refugees as a humanitarian gesture. Any Praetorian resident who pulls a Harry Truman (the guy who bought into his own "I'll never leave my mountain" legend and died along with Spirit Lake when Mount Saint Helens erupted) is going to suffer the same fate as Harry, except that he might end up as a walking rock or tree instead of dieing outright.

As for what to do with the refugees, I'd say do what Cole ought to have done in the first place - find an unpopulated reality and relocate them there with the basic tools of survival and promise to check in on them occasionally, while remembering to actually do it instead of pulling a Khan on them.

From the standpoint of Primal Earth, the possibility of colonization of other realities has to have been discussed at various levels of national and world government since dimensional travel was first discovered. Now there's a reason to stop bickering over it and come to a consensus that offers both Praetorians and willing Primals the opportunity to forge a new world together.

It's mildly amusing to realize that Going Rogue was, in fact, the very first signature story arc and not an alternate gameplay reality at all. I agree - Let it die now. I certainly don't have any incentive to create or play a yellow character at this point.

That's a different kettle of fish, but that sort of writing is why so many players treat Longbow as a quasi-villain organization instead of the heroes that the Devs keep trying to present them as being.

See, this is what I don't get about the argument that Tyrant and his crew could or should be "redeemed". In the real world, we either execute people who do those things or we assist in the deposing of the government and allow the previously oppressed masses to execute them for us.

There's no "but he feels bad about it now and if he was just managed adequately then he could be a force for good". Fiction-wise, that sort of thing is how Morgoth got out of jail after trying to destroy everything the Valar created, and we all know how that turned out in the end.

"But Slick, this isn't the real world, this is comic book world and that kind of thing happens in comics a lot!"

To that, I say, "Tough noogies."

First off, this world we play in was NOT intended to be comic book world, despite the fact that the current management does in fact treat it that way. It was meant to be a version of what the real world might be like if real super heroes existed. That's why we have hero licenses and official status as deputy police officers instead of just having the comic book ideal of "it's genre, don't question it, that's not interesting".

Additionally, comic book publishers do things like redeem irredeemable villains because doing so sells comic books, not because it is high literature or anything like believable. Paragon Studios is not in the business of selling comic books. They're in the business of selling a world where the people think and act like the people in our world except that some of them have super powers and society has to deal with that issue.

Marcus Cole would not be put in the Zig. He'd be put on trial before a war crimes tribunal and convicted of being the worst kind of despot - the kind that tortures, maims, brainwashes and ultimately murders his own people. Was Idi Amin redeemable? Do you think that anyone actually cared about that question by the time he was deposed and chased into exile? How about Saddam Hussein? Should he have been "managed" and allowed a chance to change his spots? He was just in a bad place emotionally when he gassed all of those people and murdered Shi'ites in Iraq for adhering to a different religion and being general pains in his governmental ***. <sarcasm>With the right guidance, I'm sure that he could have been a force for good. </sarcasm>

Redeeming Marcus Cole or any of his crew would require such a strong story that I can't see it being pulled off successfully, and I certainly can't see it ending any way except with the death of the person being redeemed.

But that's the point I'm making. If the above is true and Matt has more or less made it official policy that the above is true, then what's the harm in just giving us the whole backstory instead of hoarding it like a chest of pirate treasure? Why do we have to guess the answers to basic questions like "Who actually founded Freedom Corp. and what was its original mission?" or even "Who currently runs Freedom Corp?" or "What state is it currently in now that its headquarters is so much meteor rubble?"

Galaxy Girl has the most extensive bio of any hero outside of the Freedom Phalanx, and she'd beat most of them out too if it wasn't for the _Freedom Phalanx_ novel. Even so, that bio amounts to a few paragraphs. The average NPC hero is fortunate to get more than a couple of sentences. We still know zilch-all about Hero Corp. and we only know anything about the Midnight Club because it became integral to the game environment. If you want to know what the background of the Midnight Club would be like (and was like in the earliest issues of the game) if it had not become integral to the game, then just ask yourself what you actually know, and can verify in-game, about the Dawn Patrol?

We have been told multiple times over the years that this world has this rich history and had that history hinted at in dribs and drabs as evidence of this supposed depth. We never get the actual history, though. The zone history plaques and certain exploration badges are the closest we've ever come to realizing most of what we know about the game world (and now Matt has assured us that what we do know doesn't necessarily matter anyway because that's old stuff written by somebody who doesn't work there any more and therefore no longer relevant). We're assured that there's a hearty meal here, but all we're given is snacks.

Basically, it's all frosting and no cake.

I realize that I do not represent the majority in caring about this and so I don't expect things to change. I just wish that the studio would see their way clear to once again hire a story content creator like Arctic Sun who does care about it and wants to put the effort into expanding it and elucidating it.