TheDeepBlue

You mean Paragon Studios.

A bit of dryness is good as long as its well-written and pertinent. It lets the stuff that's supposed to be exciting actually be exciting.

I believe Dr. Aeon is writing Who Will Die.

We could, but it might be a good idea not to draw conclusions that make us look like imbeciles.

If it's self-serving in any way, it was an idea from marketing, not the writing team.

Well, he's quickly running out of Coles. Steps have to be taken.

1) ...which depends on the orange numbers our powers generate, and how far down we can push the red numbers the enemy generates.

2) Do you feel the same way when you're leveling your characters?

3) I would argue that it means more than if your powers didn't do 33% more damage.

Your failure to appreciate raw power does not mean that it's useless. Relative power depends on its inclusion or exclusion.

I keep hear that players are tired of ambushes and Nemesis plots. What's the point of putting more in other than for the sake of variety?

I'll have to disagree. I've got no problem seeing the 'badder' guys try and rise above their station and then putting them back into their place. It draws a nice comparison between the wannabes and the folks (us) who should actually be going places. Enjoying the way this story plays out is a matter of taste, though.

You can only use the 'wiped clean' comparison because of Zwillinger's bad analogy. Yes, it was bad. It also doesn't apply, because we did not lose any of our previous power or experience at the beginning of Incarnate progression. We've only been gaining power. That's factual, and I'm not sorry.

At this point I'm sure someone will mutter something about guard towers, prisoners, and civilians. Nobody knows how powerful the guard towers actually are, or what was done with the BAF prisoners beforehand; I could speculate, but this has been debated squarely to death. The TPN civilian issue is extremely poorly explained, storywise and mechanically, and is the only thing I've found jarringly disagreeable with Incarnate progression so far...and not so much that the Incarnates are being forcibly weakened, but that the civilians are apparently made so strong.

No. The Freedom Phalanx got wiped at Terra Volta at the onset of Apex's Task Force. They are, or were, the most powerful hero group in the CoH universe. Now they are playing catch up with our characters.

We're not at that point yet.

There's still time.

...though, I hear there's at least one mission in new DA where you have the option of denying all assistance.

I haven't played though any of it myself.

Whether or not something is 'necessary' is relative to someone's goals and standards, and the technology to change the game world based on a player's actions already exists.

He meant his character may share some of the same beliefs and opinions that Wade does.

In the past, many people have held the opinion that CoH was/is not a comic book MMO -- that is, an MMO that plays as if you were reading a comic book -- but was/should be an MMO that had the comic book genre painted over it as a theme.

I'd guess that the difference has to do with the player's role, perspective, and progression through the world and story...as in possessing a comic book universe and attempting to make an MMO out of it (like one of those other games) and possessing an MMO and attempting to apply a comic book theme to it.

He doesn't say 'your past incarnate version' he says 'past versions of you', and only after referring to the past versions of Statesman again to compare. There may or may not actually have been a past version of your character, that's up to you, but Wade's trying to cover up his frustration by twirling his evil moustache (goatee?) and making a clever quip.

If I recall correctly, this is how it's always kind of been. Humanity sustains the Well. The Well spits stuff back out to humanity.

I think I might've said this before, but given what the Well is, its attachment likely isn't to biology, but to culture. There's more room for association there.

I believe Prometheus states that you may or may not be the successor of a past Incarnate; if you aren't, you're likely to represent a concept which humanity hasn't had an Incarnate of yet. The player is in the best position to decide what the case is.

I was under the impression that it was taking orders from 'higher up', so to speak, not 'down below'.

I mean, if anything.

Hm, I'll grant you that she's got that bad habit, but that's like saying someone is carefully placing a raging bonfire into someone's path and claiming the victim didn't suspect a thing as they walked face-first into it.

That's absurd.

If you're claiming that you couldn't have gotten these sorts of things without a constructive argument and similar forum support instead of peppering threads with contempt and antagonism towards the development team for years, then I'll have to say I don't believe you.

The developers have already stated that they don't value nonconstructive criticism. Because of this, if you ended up getting anything you wanted, then it certainly wasn't because of any 'forumrage' you've made, no matter how much you've convinced yourself that it has.

I'm sure some folks are very irritated that Golden Girl never lashes out nastily or drips with cynicism against people who don't share her viewpoints in much the same manner as those people behave themselves.

Other people who actually pay attention may notice that she doesn't always agree with some of the things the developers do, but her criticism is generally constructive.

Case in point,

Ah, you just made me think of an interesting facet of the canon that could use clarification: in the Origins of Power arc, we started to understand that there were spirits among mankind who taught mankind things in exchange for devotion, and these ended up being called gods like Teilekku and Leghubu. Recently, however, we learn from Prometheus that beings such as Zeus and possibly other members of the classic Greek Pantheon whom are also called gods ingame were among the first Incarnates to exist among humanity.

So is this a conflict, or are regular humans on the outside of all these matters just mashing the two groups together? Might be prudent to bring up at some point.

Well sure. But even the ingame explanation says that every non-Incarnate super lays claim to power without help or even permission from the Well. They don't even have to know it literally exists.

omg, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm saying we won. But we didn't do it by marching to the Rikti Homeworld and trying to fight there. If we'd tried that method either time, we probably would have wasted a lot of resources and manpower, and probably lost.

It was Pandora's Box? :/

I think that's covered in the...most detail in the Origins of Power arc. Keep in mind that CoH is not really the first age of super-powered beings on Earth, and I think we can agree that the reason we give the age that name is because there is a proliferation of said super-powered beings, not necessarily because they immediately started to exist again.

Oh, no you didn't. Are you sure you can really be a part of this discussion? Or do you really just want it to be over with that badly?

See, this is where I suppose the opinions of many players and myself diverge: they believe Natural Origin characters have no powers and succeed by 'being awesome!', and I believe that there's a difference between one guy who can break a plasma-vomiting mech in half with his bare heel and one guy who can't. You can call it training, motivation, force of will or self-discipline, but it's still power. 'Awesome' is not a sufficient definition of the source of a Natural Origin character's skills or more importantly what is responsibe for them, and therefore people mistakenly believe that there's nothing to steal. Unfortunately, 'awesome' is approximate to the official given definition of Natural Origin characters, which makes things worse for everybody who works with or looks at the canon.

What? There's no problem. I'm saying that we won the battles by fighting (and on our own ground, which helped), but not the war. I don't think Primal Earth was sufficiently equipped either time to take the fight to the Rikti Homeworld, and with sacrifice, wit and a little luck, we found alternative paths to victory. If we were in a different situation, we might be trying a similar approach with the threat from Praetoria.

So what makes things different this time? With the main force of the Battalion breathing down our necks, we're on a tight schedule. We can't wait for Cole to get desperate enough to push through the ranks of his own population, bringing the fight to our turf personally where he can be captured, but he's still holding on to all of the power we need behind all of Praetoria.

The concepts of the Origins and the Well are kind of at odds with one another at the moment, at least from a player perspective, and I never felt that the Origins stuff was elaborated on or dealt with in a meaningful or even sufficient way as much as it could have been. At this point I think the best way to resolve the apparent conflict (without ditching anything) would be to say that the Origins are a part of that 'something greater' that Prometheus has mentioned recently. They don't really seem to be the creations of any given species, after all, and even 'aliens' seem to have the same ones that humanity has...

I mean, that's what I would do.

I don't think anyone's disputing that. 'cept, you know, the more smashy-smash villains or folks with big chips on their shoulder.

yyyeahhhhh, I should have been a little more specific. I meant 'we didn't turn them into paste'.

When the world is being imminently threatened by things that can turn a city into rubble before anyone notices or kill you before you were even born, and you're lacking pertinent information on on either, the folks who appear to be relative experts on the subject and are offering to save your neck might have a little more clout in regards to what needs to be done. Things might change as time goes on and we get more information.

For one, those three are currently on our side against the Battalion...I mean, as much as they can be. Recluse, maybe for as long as there's a threat. Statesman...well, not for much longer. Imperious is kind of out of touch.

Secondly, yet.

This looks more like a problem with how we have to deal with the sentient cosmic cubes rather than the fact that the Praetorians actually got them despite us wailing on them in years past, which is the point I was addressing.

I think this idea was not emphasized quite consistently ingame. Yes, Prometheus does state that a Well appears for each species that becomes aware of its connection to 'something greater.' Yet, Prometheus also explains that a Well is a pooling of a species' ideas and creativity. Then, a Well's connection to a given species is not by biology, but by culture. It follows that if a being, any being, throws its lot in with that culture, it becomes connected to that species' Well.

I've known that Cole and Richter's reopening of the Well after WWI was responsible for ushering in the new age of superheroism since reading the first novel and having the scenario discussed by players and developers years ago. I will grant that it's not something that newer players might know offhand.

I wouldn't say that all PCs are 'power hungry' at the moment so much as 'power desperate' in light of Galaxy City becoming Galaxy Crater and what else we're told is on the way. Is there another way to gain this kind of power and become an Incarnate? Perhaps. Prometheus does say that the Well snoozes most of the time, and we know that Incarnates appeared during that time, so something had to have happened that wasn't quite the same as what current Incarnates are going through. We also know from Prometheus that humanity's culture shift has caused the aforementioned 'bonkers' behavior, so we can intuit that the Well likely used to be more concerned with the quality of someone's character when granting power.

PCs recently get 'hijacked' by the writers to agree with you that this whole thing is getting kind of hairy, even if they're one of those said 'most mad of villains', and to disapprove of Prometheus' plans to make humanity (and company's) Incarnates strong enough to turn the Well into their tool, seeing that as something that the Battalion does.

You'll remember that we didn't actually 'beat' the Rikti; we just cut off the direct route from Rikti Earth to Primal Earth. We didn't 'beat' them the second time either; we managed to show that we weren't responsible for the initial hostilities and showed that Hro'Dtohz was about to commit war crimes before he could send in the main invasion force.

So why don't we try and close off access from Praetorian Earth to Primal Earth? Because Ouroboros has been warning folks about how ill-equipped we are to deal with the Coming Storm; since altering the time stream hasn't appeared to work so far to prevent the Battalion from coming to Earth, some other method is required to prevent its destruction. Since the Well is putting most of the power we might need into Tyrant, we have to get it somehow...and rather than let Tyrant dominate Primal Earth and share whatever amount of power he sees fit to distribute, it'd be better to have control of it ourselves...

Pretty sure the Well hasn't said jack to us about Praetoria itself, it's been everyone else. But I suppose this is picking nits. What makes it a credible threat, then? Eh, superior technology and psychics, I suppose.

I think that's the same thing we struggled to deal with when fighting the Rikti, who you'll remember we didn't really beat in the first place. Also, the Rikti weren't Incarnated or anything, but people are trying really hard to blow that off as an acceptable reason.

I think the biggest blow to people's ability to believe that Praetoria is a credible threat is the aformentioned fact that its already being hemmed in by the Devouring Earth and, well, how big of a population can you really fit onto that island?

If the Praetorians managed to get their hands on some cosmic cubes, would you still feel the same way?

I'll agree that he wasn't built up to be a credible threat beforehand. Same for Desdemona.