SlickRiptide

It gets downright schizoid when the game starts trying to have it both ways.

In SSA 2.2 we have Doc Harding (the archaeologist, I don't recall his actual name) say "Ooo, you work with the Freedom Phalanx? You must be Big Damn Hero! Of course I'll follow you out of this danger." and then we have Positron, in the exact same mission, saying "Gosh, $Character, I don't think we're up to this. I'm glad we have a Big Damn Hero like you around." Meanwhile, the heaviest lifting they've had to do during the entire chapter is to help me with Ghost Widow, which didn't take much of anything, really.

If the message is supposed to be that the public still thinks of the Phalanx as Big Damn Heroes but the Phalanx themselves know the truth that you are the Biggest, then the message needs some more work.

Many people use the same username/password combo on all of their games and even non-game activities for convenience. When a password breach occurs at a game company in that case, you need to change your password everywhere, not just at the game that was immediately affected, unless you happen to have a good enough memory that you don't duplicate usernames and/or passwords around the internet.

I've had the fun experience of having a game company suffer a break-in and then two weeks later, my email account is suddenly being used as a spam relay because it had the same username and password as the compromised game account.

The rogue and vigilante stuff sounds intriguing. I'm happy that they're finally doing something with Hero Corp though a "wetworks" style of mission seems a little out of character for them at first glance. Still, the whole point of Hero Corp is that they "may" be shady in any number of ways so why not in a cloak and dagger way? Nice also to see Wyvern getting some in-characterish love.

Overall, I-24 promises to be something great as long as it live up to its promises.

At least one of those guys in the "moon" shot was some kind of space pirate. Didn't I read a while back about an upcoming costume set with that theme?

Hmmm... So, where the "Like" button?

The Gadgeteer:

Several years ago, I proposed an invention-oriented archetype I called The Gadgeteer. It was a mostly pie-in-the-sky suggestion at the time. The game's internal systems have evolved radically in the intervening years, and with the arrival of custom-colored pool powers in I-24, the feasibility of potentially realizing the idea is great enough that I felt like revisiting it.

Summary: The Gadgeteer is an archetype that derives its powers and possibly even it's power animations from crafting and equipping special IO's and inserting them into its enhancement slots.

The unenhanced powerset would effectively be a blank slate. The powers would do nothing at all without enhancements or would empower only very basic and low-powered effects. I will address the ideas that follow in the form of an archetype, given that an archetype can be created with inherent limits and abilities to help balance what might well be competely unbalancable (and hence impractical).

However, at it's most fully realized, what I'm really describing is a game sytem that could allow any player to custom-design their own powers. In fact, in the current version of the game, incarnate powers are just such a system. The Gadgeteer could be envisioned as an archetype that embodies the incarnate power creation system as its basic game mechanic, possibly in combination with special IO's that utilize the ability to make archetype-specific IO's to add new effects and modifications to the base powers.

Concept: The Gadgeteer was one of the more interesting templates proposed in the inital versions of City of Heroes.

The Gadgeteer is someone who does not have inherent super powers. Rather, his or her powers are granted by a "gadget": that is, a device, or an artifact or an object that acts as a source and a focus for the player's powers.

The powers would be embodied in the gadget itself, so that any exercise of the powers would involve some invocation of the gadget, whether that means pulling a trigger or waving it in an incantation or just holding it aloft.

It might also mean wearing the gadget as a costume element under certain circumstances. In any case, it would require that an assortment of gadget costume elements would be available as "weapon" customizations.

Mechanics: The Gadgeteer would acquire powers differently than a typical powerset.

The gadgeteer has a "tinkering" tree similar in nature and function to an incarnate power tree. The base function of a new power slot is determined by the root node of that power's tree. It could be that it would be completely neutral and undefined, but that would probably be a balancing nightmare.

More likely, the root node would have a base performance level determined by design or experimentation to be the most desirable at that experience level.

Note the possibility that there could be multiple kinds of Gadgeteers, such that a scrapper Gadgeteer could have all melee-related root nodes while a controller could have all hold/control root nodes.

For the purposes of discussion, I'll assume that we're talking about a single distinct archetype but it's entirely possible that it could be something that acts, instead, as an adjunct to any existing archetype, in the fashion of a pool power.

Unlike ordinary powers that have a fixed base performance level, the tinkering trees would allow a Gadgeteer to improve and even expand upon the base powers of the root node. The nodes of the tinker tree would be pre-defined, so there would be limits to these that would help prevent it from being completely unmanagable from a balance perspective.

Similarly to the incarnate crafting process, the creation and upgrading of the tinker nodes would require that a Gadgeteer acquire special salvage items, most likely through earning reward merits and/or alignment merits and using them to purchase the required materials.

If it sounds like playing a Gadgeteer would be a lot more work and micromanagement than playing a more typical archetype, then you're right. It would be. That's part of the point, really. The Gadgeteer would appeal most to the sort of player who likes to control as many details as possible and eke out every possible performance boost that she's able to acquire, even if that might mean lowering the performance in other areas of a power family.

In addition to the tinker trees, another avenue of customization would be the Gadgeteer archetype-specific inventions. Like similar inventions associated with conventional archetypes, these would carry the "unique" trait and they would take up a standard enhancement slot.

These inventions would allow the Gadgeteer to add specialized procs to their powers and/or control the way the power is displayed when it is activated. The latter would be quite interesting but is not currently feasible (that I'm aware of) without some changes to the inventions systems that would likely preclude such a function. Ideally, though, that would be one of the abilities - in essence, to apply a battle aura to individual powers controlling how the activation animation of the power is played out.

The rest of a Gadgeteer's enhancements would be slotted out like any other more conventional character would do so.

Conclusion: Taken to its logical extreme, this system turns the game into a "design your own archetype" game. Whether that's desirable or not is a different question but the potential is there.

The fact is that the building blocks for this already exist and it's likely that the studio has at least considered the ramifications of their technology, even if they've never seriously considered expanding on it in such a way.

I would very much like to see this sort of thing come to pass, however, and expand these systems from something available only to incarnates into something that anyone can build a character around. It's certainly a way to monetize the incarnate system beyond just subscriptions and package it into something that anyone would want to spend their Paragon Points on.

Am I the only person who repeatedly reads the powerset name as "Marital Combat"?

Come to think of it, there have been some times when I could have used that as a superpower...

Interesting. I can see where some of my controllers would appreciate having this secondary.

Skeletor is a tough call, because he's just a skull in a hood. That's a pretty basic costume and any Death-related character would be thematically correct in choosing the same look. In Skeletor's case, it would come down to his bio, his name, and just how closely he matched in his other costume elements.

However; as has been mentioned, the line in the sand is determined solely by the judgement of the GM who responds to a petition (or who accidentally happens to be in the right place at the right time to encounter your character). If you managed to get petitioned in the first place then you've probably already crossed the line, when you get down to it.

That's the thing, see. A petition is an active response by another player. Assuming they don't just hate you and are doing it maliciously, then your clone/homage had to be so close to the original that someone was prompted to stop what they were doing, consider the ramifications of such a clone existing (For players new to the game since Freedom, this can and has meant lawsuits from a comic publisher), and then decided to invest the energy into sending the petition and writing a sentence or two about why they sent it.

Instead of asking yourself, "What will the studio let me get away with?" you should be asking, "What will my fellow players consider interesting and recognizable without judging it to be an imagination-less copy worthy of reporting for endangering the game?"

Because of the Marvel Comics lawsuit back in the day, some players take the approach that any small percentage of homage is questionable and they automatically petition it on the theory of "shooting them all and letting the GM's sort it out". Most are more forgiving, particularly if the homage in question shows some wit and creativity as opposed to being a straight-up copy.

In other words, there's no guideline; you're dealing with human nature and if you insist on making a homage character then do it with the expectation of being examined and possibly genericed. You can't predict how any particular person will react, and the studio's minions are required to err on the side of caution because for them it's a question of legality and copyright/trademark violation, not a question of creativity or the lack thereof. For the rest of us, it's more a question of whether we'll point and laugh at you for your copycatting. If you can deal with THAT, then it's all good. ;-)

I agree with your assessment, Sam, but I'll say this for Arbiter Sands (not so much for Nocturne): Sometimes you just pick a character to evoke an emotional response from the player.

Arbiter Sands is one of those characters who is guaranteed to evoke a reaction from any player who encountered him during the Faultline Saga. My reaction to Nocturne was pretty much "Who is this?" whereas my reaction to going around the next corner was "Hey, it's Arbiter Sands! This should be good!"

There's a class of villain who is less an opponent than he is a foil; the kind of villain that respects your abilities and you end up respecting his abilities in turn so that you become a kind of peers. You see this kind of relationship a lot in spy stories, where the antagonist and protagonist exist in a world where negotiation is as much a survival trait as weapon expertise, so they learn to talk first and shoot second. Sands is the sort of villain who would say "Must we engage in this pointless brawling yet again?" and my hero might well decide to sit down with a pitcher of beer or a bottle of wine and "battle" with him verbally instead of physically. He's the embodiment of the concept that "just because we are enemies, it doesn't mean that we can't be gentlemen about it."

I think that the mission writer was shooting for an emotional reaction based on that perception of Sands rather than considering whether casting him in that role made a lot of sense from a story perspective.

I can't really say the same for Nocturne but you'll notice that SSA2.2 is a bit of a "Faultline Saga" reunion. The only primary character missing is Jim Temblor and he gets a mention even if he doesn't put in a personal appearance. This gimmick alone might account for the choices about which NPC's made guest-starring appearances.

In other words, your points are completely valid but your points ignore the influence of considerations that affect the story but are technically outside the realm of the story itself (like "Hey, wouldn't it be cute if we had a Faultline Family Reunion?").

In fact, with Doc Delilah being an archaeologist, I'll be unsurprised to see her make an appearance in the next chapter as well. With Arachnos involvement, Agent G would be easy to insert and turn the whole thing into one big grand Faultline extravaganza.

Centigrade.

You can't get much more evil than that.

What they didn't realize is that Zwillinger is in heavy with his bookie and he was actually referring to "fixing" all of the arena matches...

According to this Harvard Gazette Article:

Just FYI, Rednames - I renewed my sub yesterday. Not that I expect anyone to actually take me up on my "deal" but I'm holding up my end of the bargain anyway.

I like the welder's mask. I can see myself using that.