UberGuy

This confuses me. Why is degree to which one is evil a function of whether or not you can execute your evil intentions without help?

Mako is a metahuman, presented as one of the more powerful beings in the game world. Ultimately, in any world (real or fictional), superior might trumps enforcment of rules, including behavioral standards. Mako can sow death largely at will because there are limited numbers of people/beings/organizations who can stop him, including Lord Recluse and Arachnos.

Phipps is not, as far as we know, a metahuman, so he lacks this degree of self-empowerment. But his lack of ability to brush aside behavioral norms through sheer might own does not lessen the degree to which he is evil. If he did not have Arachnos at his back he would certainly achieve less, but he would still be a terribly and willfully evil individual. He would just have to hide it better.

Original Hamidon, as in the person, seems to fit what I understand to be a sociopath. The Wikipedia definition is...

Presumably, at some point Hamidon Pasalima was passable as person with normal societal mores. He became a progressively aggressive environmental activist until, eventually, he expressed his activism in the creation of The Will of the Earth virus and his transformation into "The" Hamidon. At that point he no longer cared what happened to humans as long as he could stop them - to him, humans are a problem to be overcome. It seems he has a preference for transforming them into Devouring Earth creatures, but he certainly doesn't mind killing them as collateral damage. And from the perspective of their friends and family, transformed people are about as good as dead absent a means of reverting them to their human forms. (Presumably folks can hold out hope that transformed loved ones can be reverted, but until that happens, the people they cared about are still gone from their lives.)

Whenever Hamidon first stopped caring about humans as individuals, he certainly became evil. It's not the type of evil where he rejoices in pain and suffering, but it's evil nonetheless.

That actually reminds me. As an organization they're more diffuse than most of the examples of evil we're talking about here, because they practically lack a clearly visibly leader, but in terms of inflicting uncool fates on people, the Circle of Thorns have to be up there. Yes, Nemesis is responsible for the deaths of millions of people via the Rikti War. Hamidon has killed many people and shattered huge numbers of lives. Lord Recluse has ruled atop a pit of despair, violence and slavery for several generations. And Tyrant tried to enslave the very minds his entire metropolis' populous to create a perfectly pacified society, and did something utterly terrible when faced with failure.

But for all the evil that these folks inflicted on those they oppressed or who were simply collateral damage, the things they did to their victims ended in the worst case when the people died. The exception is Hamidon, but as far as we know, once people are "devoured", they don't suffer - they're happy with their new state.

But not the CoT. Oh, no. When the CoT take your body, they cast your soul into an eternal void. They don't kill you. They damn you to eternal nothingness.

This is a setting where the lore explicitly assumes an unspecified afterlife. Everyone has a soul, and it goes somewhere when you die. (Souls that don't or can't leave become ghosts, which we see and sometimes fight many examples of.) So by dismissing souls into a void this way, they aren't just effectively killing the person (by removing their personality from the living world). They're barring them from whatever afterlife they would have warranted for all time, and replacing it with an endless sensory deprivation tank. Now, depending on your assumptions for this unspecified afterlife, for evil people, that might actually be something of an upgrade. But the same assumptions would lead one to expect this to be a horrific injustice to the souls of innocent, or at least fairly ordinary folk.

Several story arcs about the CoT tell us that soul might end up stored in a crystal. If not, it ends up cast into the void. (Sometimes being stored in a crystal just defers being cast into the void.) It seems likely that only interesting souls are kept in crystals - souls the CoT think will somehow be useful later. The everyday people whose bodies we see the CoT stealing in, let's see... King's Row, Steel Canyon, Perez Park, Founder's Falls, and even Portal Corp in PI (and that's ignoring the ones in the Rogue Isles)? None of them probably warrant being stored. So the most ordinary of bystanders? To the void with them.

If only that were true.

There are people who actively revel in harming other people, and doing it for the simple sake of doing it. That you think such people do not really exist does explain why you prefer to measure "more evil" by the number of people affected by evil deeds. I know such people are real, though thankfully rare. It's common to find them in places where the other sort of evil - what I like to refer to as "callous evil" is systemic, because they're allowed to carry out their sadistic ways in service to whatever power structure puts them to use.

Both are evil - the people who enjoy harming others and the people who knowingly employ such people. But of the two, I would reserve the deeper hatred, if ever so slightly, for the people who actively enjoy bringing harm, rather than those who think they need to bring harm to achieve power, profit or whatever.

In my opinion, that just means that Phipps has a sanctioned channel for his evil. It's not at all clear that Arachnos specifically asks him to be as cruel as he is. Phipps doesn't just hire you to do evil things - he revels in them. He often goes on in glee about the anticipation of things he will do as he gives you instructions and then again when you complete them when/if you do it. While his job for Arachnos is brutal and Arachnos is evil for even wanting someone in the role Phipps fills, he takes explicit glee in what they want him to do, and takes his soul crushing to a personal level that it's unlikely Arachnos specifically needs him to.

Moreover, it's completely false that he only is "evil by proxy" on the basis of having the player characters do all his dirty work. He has you kidnap people, but he orchestrates their torture. You rescue a Fortunata spy, and he personally has her killed to "keep things tidy" - something your character has no knowledge is coming. He gloats about what he's going to do with a mother and blind daughters that come to him as the proprietor of Haven House. Yes, you poisoned them, which is unquestionably evil, but it wasn't clear that you'd be handing them to him as a result - killing people or making them very sick is bad, but giving them to Phipps is almost certainly worse.

There's no question that willingly associating with Phipps is an act of evil. All the things I've described above mean it's clear the man is a sadist of the highest order, and after you do a couple of jobs for him, you should have no doubt that continuing to do so will blacken your soul by association. However, I consider him the most personally evil character in the game's lore.

Most other villains we see have ulterior motives of power, and a number of them are even the sort that makes them believe what they do is for a greater good. I would put Nemesis, Lord Recluse and especially Tyrant in this category. There is no question that these characters all do evil things, and all of them have done evil that affected millions if not billions of people, making the scope of their evil acts very large.

There is a question of whether "more evil" is defined by quantity of harm done or the nature of the intent. Personally, I consider Phipps more evil than any of those three, because they commit evil out of callous indifference to human life - their goal is not specifically to cause harm, but they cause harm as a means to end. Phipps' goal is specifically to cause harm. Yes, that harm is a means to an end for Arachnos in order to maintain control of the Rogue Isles, but Phipps does the job for them because he enjoys it. For him, it's an end unto itself that he has the excuse to do because Arachnos needs that means, and to me, actively enjoying the harm makes him more evil, even if he affects less people total than, say, Nemesis. If I ran Hell, they'd both be in the deep end of the fire pool, but Phipps would be deeper.

Peter Themari is similar in this regard. He seems to revel in twisting people to evil. His scope is a bit smaller than Phipps', and he doesn't seem quite as gleeful about it, but he clearly enjoys watching other people's lives fold underneath them so that they turn to evil - and him. It's not just a means to an end, he clearly considers it at least a partial end unto itself.

Oh, my. It took my brain a moment to figure out what this was, and then I got a very hearty laugh out of it. Thanks for that.

You just answered your own question.

Why? Keeping up with an MMO like this can be a tremendous investment in time. I'm not complaining - I do it because I like this game so much. But it competes with everything else I have going on in life, and even if I appropriately file it below more important things, I still wish I had time to play it more. When I can't play it any more, I'll still wish I could, but I'll finally have a solid reason for bumping the priority on the other things I'd like to do someday, that aren't very important, but that I would have done by now if I didn't spend several hours almost every night playing CoH.

To get me to want to invest this sort of time again, the game would need to be really, really awesome. Because CoH was the only MMO I ever had any serious interest in playing, if anything could draw me back / keep me playing, it would probably be a sequel. But to do so, it would have to share a lot with the existing game. And my past experience with game sequels (MMO or otherwise) doesn't convince me to set my expectation high on that front.

I don't have a main. I have a bunch of characters I play. Also, I don't make characters who meet a concept. I make characters' concept based on what AT/Primary/Secondary they are. The first point makes porting my existing characters to a new game impractical. The second point makes porting them into a new game that doesn't share extremely close mechanical similarity to this one impossible. I would have to start over in a new MMO.

CoH is my first and only MMO. That I liked it and played it so very long took a combination of things (some of which are not features of the game, such as a large number of real-life friends who started playing it with me) that are very, very unlikely to reappear in another game. Certainly a direct successor is obviously more likely to score as a viable replacement for me than any other game, but overall, I think the changes in other things mean it's very likely that when it someday shutters the servers, I will not replace it with another MMO, sequel or not. Getting where I am with CoH now represents a future time investment that I really probably could not afford to reinvest in a new game.

It's not just you, but no, I believe not many people here liked Champions.

I view it as something with some good ideas that its designers either did not really know how to do right or that their design team lacked the resources to do right. It is very, very far from what I would consider an awesome MMO.

When people ask about / pine for $THIS_GAME 2.0, I think that's usually what they are thinking of. They want all the good things of the current game with all the sucky things fixed or changed. But the odds of the sequel being mechanically different mean that, most likely, you'll just get a game that's linked by IP and theme, but that has its own distinct list of good and bad things.

There's a great quote that I got from someone's sig here on the forums a long, long time ago, which I think is somewhat relevant.

"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses." -Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers

People often think the best answer to making things better is always to start over and rebuild it from scratch. Sometimes it is. But you can't ignore that building anything, from an automobile to an organization to a set of game rules, involves costs and constraints that limit what you can deliver. The choices you make as you design and create it will reflect trade-offs that let you deliver the end goal within time, budget and (hopefully) vision. It's those trade-offs that give a product its high and low points.

When we ask for a sequel built from the ground up, we don't know what will be traded in and out. It might be a great game, but it won't necessarily be this game with all the warts removed. And that represents risk to its acceptance by and success with the existing community.

The point in that is not necessarily that it's a reason the designers' shouldn't create the sequel, but I think it's important for players to recognize what they're getting (or more accurately, what they might not be getting) when they ask for a sequel.

Edit: In case it wasn't clear, I was agreeing with houtex. I just used his quoted comment as a springboard for my post.

I honestly can say I think that would have had a high chance of being a disaster. In a best case scenario, it could have had this existing game's creative talent and designers setting its direction while being able to benefit from Marvel's branding. But I'm not at all sure the best case scenario would have been likely.

Just to give one example of why I think that could have gone badly (at least in retrospect), consider that it's extremely hard to separate this game's creative successes from the fact that its setting's lore was a blank slate, beholden to no other creators. While I hardly think CoH's success stems directly from its lore, the lore a game does have influences and constrains what things are done within it.

Consider what a negative gameplay influence it might have been if instead of a small constellation of founding lore heroes (in the form of the Freedom Phalanx and the Vindicators) we instead had dozens or even hundreds of Marvel heroes. I think that would have created a serious risk that our characters would have been portrayed as secondary characters with the core Marvel ones hogging the spotlight. People complained about that even with CoH's less significant trademark recognition investment in its lore heroes, so I think the risk would have been real.

Storm Kick did low-tier attack damage with Shadow Maul activation times, putting its DPA in the underworld. Shadow Maul does more damage than Broadsword/Disembowel, in an AoE, and doesn't pay the endurance and recharge costs that would normally entail.

So it completely makes sense to me that SK would be changed while SM was left alone.

Flurry, not so much perhaps, but Pool Power attacks have never been high on the list of things the devs seemed to give much focus to. I24 does seem to change that some, so perhaps Flurry can get some (needed) improvement there.

While all possibly accurate, that doesn't justify creating a whole new game, with all the other things that almost certainly means, just to fix that problem. No matter how badly people here might want improvements and fixes for bases, I have strong doubts that a case could be made that the game is bleeding subscribers/paying players because bases aren't better.

In any case, the problems they've described with bases are problems that can be solved with manpower and time, just like problems with power customization and other "might never happen" changes that have actually come to pass. Now, just because it's technically possible bases could be improved doesn't mean base improvements will actually happen, because those costs/investments might never be prioritized over other work that's considered more vital to the game's longevity, but that's not the same as "can never happen". But I'm leaning on those investments being cheaper than building CoH2.

This question comes up fairly often.

The short answer is "because that's what almost always happens" Of course, that version of the answer doesn't really explain why that happens. The longer version admits that there's no hard rule that says it has to happen, but the reality is, almost no game designers (lead or otherwise) who are given the resources to create a game from the ground up are interested in recreating an existing game property with new graphics and more efficient plumbing. They want to try new things, take new approaches, and essentially re-tool the assumptions that always acted as limiters in the original game. It's all but impossible that CoH2 would be our existing game system implemented in new software - it would be new software and a new game system, even if it was a sort of spiritual successor.

Consistently? No. But that's because I don't always get hammered that often. Sometimes? Yes, and in those cases, being able to recast it again in a hurry (as fast as I can given its animation time) is a big deal. Making it have a 40-ish second recharge on a high-end build would strip me of that ability, in which case those times I've needed to be able to do that would have meant I either was dead instead or at least needed to use green inspirations. And I like that it allows that for me.

You're wrong.

I would rather it remain interruptable than change to a 90s recharge.

I use it on numerous melees, and yes, I have to retreat to use it on several of them, which on occasion is impossible (trapped by slows or stuck behind foes and ledges when unable to jump). I'm OK with that. That means it has potentially serious conditional limitations. I would rather that than have it unconditionally be that inferior as an actual heal/sec. As it is, the activation time (ignoring interrupt) is immense, and so imposes serious limitation on whatever else you need to be doing if you use it as often as you can.

I really thought discussions about that kind of change to Aid Self died when Healing Flames was changed so that its base stats were wildly superior to the best-case heal/time of Aid Self.

Gotcha. Agreed.

They were given to us in a post by Synapse in the beta forums. However, they were proposed changes, and stated to be rough.

Testing is not yet an option, since, as far as I know, the changes have not been loaded to any test or beta server.

For example, even if PPM rates go up by 25%, I will be sort of surprised if they don't round the rates to nearby "nice-looking" numbers. I'll be surprised if they actually create 5.625 PPM procs, just because that's a funky-looking number. But who knows.

Thee PPM value doesn't have anything to do with the cap. Or rather, the cap applies after your proc rate is calculated off of the PPM value. So you could have a capped proc rate of, say 50%, and still have a "4 PPM" proc.

I realize that limits the actual PPM you get, but that's just how the system works. If it helps any, even the current system can fail to achieve its PPM "target" rate with a top-end chance of 100%. If you put a 4 PPM proc in a power with a 20s actual recharge, you aren't getting 4 PPM out of it.