Teeth

That is odd, though I'm not sure what would have worked better. Something tied to SG bases would make sense (e.g. a Mission Computer option), but then some people would miss out. You could perhaps make a case for using the various stores (although it's questionable with many Natural heroes) or Vault Reserve (which is even worse), but that could be significantly more inconvenient in some cases.

At any rate, I think there's a difference between (1) suspension of disbelief for gamey elements and (2) dubbing in your own story over the actual content, so I question the relevance of much of that discussion.

Neither does Martial Arts in CoX. Dragon's Tail is the only good move you don't have by level 18.

It does if you expect me to need to hand-wave. Unless something villainous on my part is more than just hinted towards, the general theme retains the "light in the darkness" feel of a good person working in a corrupt environment. If blandly stating "real life" as an example of this isn't clear enough, there are plenty of examples in entertainment. The first thing I think of is Russel Crowe's character in the first half of American Gangster, where the rest of the police force being corrupt thugs does not reflect poorly on the protagonist, it highlights him. You'll also notice he doesn't just bust out a machine gun and murder all the law enforcement in the entire area; he actually works around them until he can do enough good to surpass them.


This is just as true for most villains, though. Are you some sort of outcast seeking some sort of nonspecific revenge? Nope! Mercenary thug. Megalomaniac? Nope! Mercenary thug. Anarchist seeking to topple society? Nope! Mercenary thug. They could just as easily have called the game "City of Hirelings," but the acronym was taken already. If you go out and read some "Villain" back-stories, you'll notice that most of them are going against the implied theme as well. The saving grace here is that the theme remains implied, which doesn't require any real hand-waving.


Really? o_O Maybe you do fewer large teams and repeated SFs than I do, or set your mission difficulty lower, or something like that? I often have a checklist of contacts I want to hit that's only half to 2/3 of the CoV content, and I don't normally even fill that without Ouro.


Other than skipping a few contacts, I'm not ignoring anything.


It's a good way to provoke attacks by Longbow. Also, if some Villains are knocking over the bank anyway, I may as well make sure as few PPD get seriously injured as possible. (Mostly, though, it's to provoke Longbow. Strictly speaking, I don't have to keep the money, either.)

Also, as mentioned, that's the single hardest part to justify. I don't see that one outlier as crushing the entire experience.


Ret-con? Go read their official backstory! They're like the Hitler Youth combined with Al-Qaeda! Ms. Liberty goes around duping "zealous, idealistic young people" into joining an organization that's a hair's breadth from earning the U.S. a bunch of U.N. sanctions, then sends them unprepared into a foreign country for use as cannon fodder--it's explicitly stated that most of them don't survive their first encounter with a Villain--just to stoke her ego battle with her uncle! I feel bad about the ones you fight below level 10 (which is fine since I don't have to kill them), but after that you fight a bunch of extremist invading foreign terrorists who habitually use high school girls as bullet shields (which is even a bit soft, since actually a lot of them are being eaten alive by zombies and stuff like that).

Again, that's canon!

I do. Just as long as...

...you're not making your patron any stronger. The immature back-and-forth fighting in CoV isn't getting anyone anywhere, but you rescue a few hostages and save the world a few times in the process. I like to think of it as the "hysteresis curve of villainy."

I'm not just doing whatever they ask, though. I do get to choose my contacts. This isn't real life, and there's no slippery slope.


Unless going for Ouro badges, I don't think a character is ever going to see even half of the story arcs on one run to 50.

Also, in my specific case, my proper villains have done most of the "evil" arcs already (via previous research). Doing the blander ones will actually be new to me.


You don't have to ignore it. It doesn't matter to me or my character whether or not Silver Mantis had her fun and money, I just wanted to beat down some Sky Raiders. It doesn't matter whether Ice Mistral is in or out of Sirocco's favor, I just saved the whole world from the CoT. It doesn't matter whether Black Scorpion succeeds in making anti-Ghost Widow weapons or not, I still furthered self-destructive infighting in Arachnos. It doesn't matter whether the mob casino got money for me beating Carnies, I still stopped a bunch of soul-eating psychos from running amok (and it's not like I won't be beating down that same mob personally in the near future).

You don't have to ignore or hand-wave the contact chatter because it doesn't reflect negatively on your character's motivations in the first place (assuming, again, that you skip a few things like Stone Cold or Doc Buzzsaw).


My point was and is that there is very little hand-waving if you pay attention to which arcs you do.

As already pointed out, most character-specific examples of that text need to be ignored anyway (unless you really do only ever play characters who have psychotic voices whispering orders in their heads and who can't ever cover up or lack hair because it's mentioned a couple times). The "selling yourself out for money" bit is a particularly weak part of the alleged villainy we engage in, since a very large fraction of the game's story is written on the premise "you just saved the hostage/country/world from some sort of pointless spite-driven annihilation, but money changed hands at some point, so you're basically Hitler."


Stone Cold goes on my list of things to skip on a hero. Doc Buzzsaw is unlikely to even unlock, so she's easy to avoid.

Most CoV content follows one of three patterns:

1. Outright save someone or cripple an evil plot, but get paid for it. Contact explicitly reminds you how evil this makes you.
2. Outright save someone or cripple an evil plot, but do this at the request of a card-carrying villain. Contact explicitly reminds you how evil this makes you.
3. Enact elaborate plan to embarrass a big-name hero to no practical end and without doing anything resembling lasting damage. (Darla Mavis' arc and the Recluse Strike Force are good examples of this.) Contact gloats at great length as though they've actually accomplished something.

The first two rely on the notion "acts of good are inherently evil if even one bad person is involved, even if it doesn't do him any good." The third is a pointless display of immaturity by your contact and little or no effect on anyone else.

My hero isn't so sanctimonious that she'll refuse to hurt the Mafia because the Evil Empire is involved, nor do I have trouble justifying a task done for the Evil Empire if the target is the Mafia. Your own characters' motivations aren't forced to be anything specific by the story, most of your actions aren't inherently evil, and most of the things that have bothered Samuel_Tow have been petty chatter by the contacts that doesn't even try to relate itself to player character motivations.

Odd, that's never worked for me. I thought it looked out of place, but it's never done anything...

*checks*

It works in this version, though. Thanks!

This was one of the main things bothering me (as I somewhat agree with Samuel_Tow's dislike of hand-waving). Most of my heroes hate Longbow, though, so it's easy to explain as a ruse to draw Longbow out for a fight. (My villains are less bothered by them, incidentally.) The Kidnap side quest would be hard to justify... but wait! There's no reward for that one. Even my puppy-kickers skip it.


Judging by the Spring Break warnings the US State Department is pushing at my college (which is only a couple hours from a drug war hot spot in Mexico that is seeing a lot of grenade launcher usage), people aren't very bright about this. In principle, though, I agree with you.


Try. They try. The Devs intentionally avoid forcing (overarching) motivations on our characters, which helps play heroic redsiders; they tried to make us do villainous things, but they tended to fail. Kidnapping citizens for the Vahz was a well-written redside activity because it assumes nothing about your motivations and yet makes you a villain regardless (unless you're into hand-waving).

Most arcs do not fit this mold. Paper missions virtually never do--they don't even try to tell you that you did something unpleasant to the innocent civilian you rescued from the Council or that you put the powerful artifact to evil uses after you stole it from the Circle. Also, you just saved someone's life or stopped the Circle from killing dozens, which is why people who love playing puppy-kickers aren't happy about the writing in CoV.


My contention remains that you are dramatically overstating this. I even checked the arcs on ParagonWiki before posting this, to make sure I wasn't imagining things. I wasn't; nearly every arc at every level has you fighting Arachnos, Longbow, Circle, Luddites, Carnies, Goldbrickers, Family, Council, Rikti, or some sort of monster (Coralax, Arachnoid, etc.). The only people I'd feel bad about fighting would be Scrapyarders, Legacy Chain, PPD, and Wyvern, and the rare ones I can't skip usually require very little hand-waving (which is to say that they're not usually preventing some cataclysm or protecting innocent lives from me--they themselves are normally the only good guys in danger). In general, though, even the puppy-kickers spend their time fighting off Nazis, aliens, robots, undead, demons, gangs, and other classical acceptable hero targets

Honestly, I doubt that you have many (if any) specific examples in mind. You're making broad statements about content that doesn't exist.

They're also the single worst choice for someone who hates running out of endurance!

My friend has a near-50 Elec/Elec Tanker, I recommend that. He can be as liberal as he wants with his blue bar and never run out, he has huge Resist and Regen numbers, the build has several cheap IO set bonus opportunities, and the build has a few "wacky fun" powers (especially Lightning Rod). Also, he can do respectable AoE damage. It's not the premier Tanker build, but it works well, and it can do handy things like solo-tank U'Kon Gr'ai (Rikti Raid GM).

(And this is partially-IO'ed, at level 40!)

Edit: And seeing few Controllers has got to be a fluke, even with Dual Pistols coming out last week. Over the last few months, it has been normal to see less than half as many Defenders on as any other AT. For example, peak times on Infinity most of last month had the following show in Search across all level ranges, fairly consistently (numbers are approximate, to within about 5 characters either way): 40 Scrappers, 35 Blasters, 30 Tanks, 35 Controllers, 15 Defenders, 10 Kheldians. This was actually worse for Defenders than it appears here, though, because there were never more than 3-5 above level 35. I remember one search I was doing for an ITF that showed 0 Khelds, 2 Defenders, and 16 Controllers.

That argument works as well for being opposed to Blasters as it does for being opposed to redside heroes. My suspension of disbelief has trouble describing how normal humans hit by my "long range missilerocket" are harmlessly arrested instead of being turned into chunky salsa, but it's not difficult to imagine my Dom--who can obviously use her powers to restrain--merely knocking out any PPD officers who she needs to defend herself against. The overall narrative actually works OK for a hero redside, and you can skip most nasty bits without missing anything or needing to powerlevel, especially with AE.

Little or no "dubbing in" is necessary to make most redside arcs heroic.


I actually dislike the CoV AT's, I prefer to specialize a bit more.


None of them have been completely forsaken by the forces of good, though.


Oppressed innocents in mass numbers and without a champion to protect them.


I don't understand this part. Why is holding people with Char not something that a Fire Dom is supposed to do, but it's fine for Controllers?


First off, this is a bad analogy. To answer the literal question, though, I tend to have to do this with food allergies. For some reason, a small percentage of the food service population gets really hung up over certain specific changes to certain specific dishes. If dish A and dish B have five (completely different) ingredients each and cost the same, there are waitresses who will defend the sanctity of ingredient 3 in dish A to the death. If I wanted broccoli instead of cauliflower in fried rice A and fried rice B has broccoli as an ingredient, I can change literally every other ingredient in dish B to its dish A counterpart, but no force in Heaven or Earth will let me remove the cauliflower from dish A. It's weird, but it happens often enough that I just roll with it.


Ouch, now we're cheating? That's harsh.


Those excuses are usually terrible (saving the world is evil because one of the six people involved was in a bad mood at the time? really?), and they tend to only apply to the motivations of your contact (it's not like I care why Black Scorpion wants to destroy Ghost Widow).

Maybe. I've never had a character complete every available arc, so I'm likely enough to miss him. Also, only his first arc is all that villainous; the third one could be, but even on my real villains (which my Corr and Crab are) I swear that guy is a double agent working for Blue Steel or something.

"No, really Lord Recluse! I tried to betray them, but the heroes were just one step ahead of us! You should keep me around because I'm such a puppy-kicker! I mean, look at what I did to that teacher that was 'educating' the Freakshow to embrace their crippling drug addictions for a good cause!"


Yeah, I bet. "Please save my brother, Captain Babyraper! He's a good kid, he just fell in with the wrong crowd! And I won't give you my badge mission until you do it! Oh, what's that? You're busy saving the world from the Circle of Thorns and stopping Rikti from kidnapping innocent people? OK, well, come back if you have time."


Edit: My character's biography:
This woman is a hero from Paragon City. She felt bad for the all the innocent citizens suffering under Lord Recluse, but nobody seems to be getting anywhere by fighting him. She was in Brickstown during some sort of breakout at the Zig, and on a whim she bribed an Arachnos pilot to fly her over at the same time as some thug he was supposed to transporting.

Some mercenary guy gave her some jobs fighting monsters, and now everyone is talking about a "Destined One." She's a bit confused about why nobody important seems to care that a declared hero is walking around in the Rogue Isles, but she feels like the citizens appreciate all the rescuing and gangbusting she's doing, so she decided to stay for a while.

Yes. lol nonAmericans. You can't have a server list merger for the same reason as CoV can't have consignment houses: If that happened, you might have fun on your own and not look longingly at Americans/CoH. You need to be reminded of your place in the devs' world!

Now stop posting on our forums and get back to your ghetto!

(For the record: I very nearly transferred my characters to the EU servers when they came out because I wanted Passport on my badge toon. I wonder if that option is still open...)

I looked at it like this at first; what amused me was that I normally find it unnecessary to even go this far. I missed that Vahz mission entirely, and the rest of my time is being spent saving Cap from the Bat'Zul, defeating the captain of the Sky Raiders, busting the mafia, stopping break-ins, and saving Sharkhead from the Leviathan. At higher levels I'll be rescuing Hard Luck's brother, fighting aliens and Nazis, and even beating on Recluse and the Arachnos patrons. "Steal" newspaper missions aren't hard to justify when the targets are dangerous villain groups, and "kidnap" missions never have had much in the way of kidnapping going on.

My contention is that purples aren't generally "available." It is virtually impossible, for example, to purple out 16 characters (split hero and villain) playing 5 hours a week, assuming you haven't been playing those same characters for like four years (which "altoholic" definitely implies). The only people for whom purples are "available" are the very serious players who have considerable time to invest in the game, which was intended by the Devs and is thus "working."

Also, the context of your statement seems to imply that you should be going for PvP sets; if purpling out a full server doesn't seem unreasonable enough for a casual player, how about fully slotting PvP sets on an entire server?

Basically, the problem here is that you're complaining about the lack of access to something that was put in the game on the premise that access to it should be restricted. That seems silly to me.


A fully purpled character should have enough global recharge and accuracy to stomp a proper 15, and he probably has more than enough recovery to do it all day. A couple of normal characters, working together, should still be able to handle him. As I see it, the real problem with PvP is that it's a chore; you have to go out of your way to find it, and the only rewards (other than badges) are recipes that are sufficiently rare to be relegated to use only for making money or making really hardcore builds.

It can be a fun way to kill time, but the people who are still here after this long of a PvP dry spell tend to be the ones that have fun doing other things, too. Other content can be done somewhat easily, and you always get something for it.

PvP is a hassle, and you only get badges and crazy-expensive recipes out of it; since those rewards are the two main things put in the game for people with a farming mindset, you basically have the situation that PvP is currently aimed purely at farmers. Since farmers have a lot of other things to be doing already, and since these tend to give more reliable results, there's just not much reason to PvP.

Exactly. You only need to do much farming if you want one or more purple sets (or lots of LotG, Numina's, etc.) But why would I want to Purple out anything, even partially? I'm not soloing AV's and TF's, and PVP is basically nonexistent.