Venture

We did not fail. We won. It simply isn't worth playing a second time, at least not with a melee. I did it again with a Peacebringer, who stayed in Nova form and blasted BM from the air which wasn't too bad, but wasn't very exciting either. To contrast, that team got MoApex in one shot. The prior team was hung up on BM forever.

We get it. We just don't care.

"Progress" is not the issue. There is no "progress". What I actually get out of any City activity is what I get out of, say, streaming eps of Battlestar Galactica off NetFlix, which is mostly what I'm doing with what used to be gaming time these days (it doesn't really stand up well on a second viewing but that's another forum). That is entertainment. The virtual (i.e. fake) shineys aren't important. What matters is whether or the experience (not the XP, the experience) is any fun. Turns out, most people don't find being blasted into minestrone every few seconds to be fun. Go figure. I haven't done these encounters myself -- the entire Issue being sufficiently uninteresting in appearance that I couldn't be bothered to try it in beta -- but seeing as how my main is a KM/SR (actual build) I expect from what's been said here that he will be about as useful to a League running one as if he hadn't joined at all.

To compare and contrast, I still go on mothership raids even though the reward isn't exactly stellar. I've taken the aforementioned Scrapper on one Apex TF and I'm never doing that again with any melee AT, not for Notices, not for anything. It was just a horrible pile of instant deaths. (It didn't help that some idiot managed to color his Rad debuffs to the same color as the insta-death patches.)

So, how many times would you run Lambda/BAF if you didn't get shineys for doing so? Based on what's being said here I suspect for most players the answer is "zero". And that's what you need to know to tell if they're well-designed or not.

The power is broken at the conceptual level. Short of doing it over (won't happen) any future changes fall into the "gluing feathers on a rat" catagory.

Amazingly I've already explained why this approach is invalid in this very thread.

Maelstrom and his entire backstory didn't exist until GR. If "Primal fired first" is the new "Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia", then this is a retcon, the freaking end, no saving throw.

No one can because if Primal fired first, Praetoria has casus belli to retaliate. Which, may I point out, would be a repeat of the Rikti storyline, just one more shrimp to toss on the barbie.

Of course it is. The difference between a "border incident" and an invasion is whose PR lackey you're listening to. Which is moot in any case, because the actual issue is whether or not Tyrant had casus belli. Praetorian attacks on Primal were shown as pre-emptive strikes originally; if that's being changed it has a pretty serious effect on the storyline.

"Evolving" is forward progress in the storyline, not changing established material for the sake of convenience.

Whether or not "it makes sense" is not the point because it will always "make sense". Any new statement about the game's lore can be added as long as you're willing to change the existing lore sufficiently; that's what us Philosophy students call the Quine-Duhem thesis in action. The point is that it's bad, shoddy work and I've already explained why.

AFAIK, all of this is fanwank.

Easy, when comics/books/etc. conflict with the game, the game is right. If TPTB declare the comic is right here, it's still a retcon.

Semantics.

The issue isn't whether or not the retcon can be explained. You can "explain" anything. The issue is that you need to.

A revelation is something that was true earlier but not yet revealed (but ideally was hinted at so it doesn't look like a complete buttpull). A retcon is something that was not true at the time but changed after-the-fact either to resolve an error or for an author's convenience. The first can be considered something of a force majeure and forgiven. The second, not so much.

Yes, there is. If past lore is always subject to change, then there is no past at all. Before this, Praetoria invaded Primal first. Now Primal invaded first. Wait a bit for a new guy to come in and it will be "revealed" as a Nemesis plot. Who cares? If creators want their audience to take their work seriously then they have to take it seriously in the first place, and that means playing it as it lays instead of indulging in revisionist history.

I'm not motivated enough to watch the video, but if they're retconning this it's pretty disappointing. The original arcs made it clear the Praetorians had bases on Primal before Primal even knew Praetoria existed.

On Test, the Ubelmann arc was changed to this. After a massive hue and cry on the forums, it and much of the rest of the retcon were rolled back to forms that can still be seen in places in-game. (Did they ever fix the Atlas Park GIFT guy who says Atlas died in the 50s?)

Why it was done (and now mostly undone) is open to speculation, but it wasn't a "storyline development". It was a retcon.

...and then he proceeded to lose the fight.

So he's responsible for three of the factions people go out of their way to avoid fighting in the low-level game?

Actually they are not. If a hero causes the death of innocents in a comic it is almost always a major plot point. This time it is handwaved away a few panels later.

The audience is required merely to suspend disbelief, not hang it by the neck until dead. N.b. that in the very next storyline, the aforementioned "jury duty" debacle, a hero is charged with murder on the grounds that a spell he cast to disrupt a cell phone inadvertently blocked another super's Medicom beacon. Murder, not manslaughter, despite the fact that there was clearly no intent, just one of the story's many mistakes. If the author is going to ask us to "suspend our disbelief" on "collateral damage" he could at least do so consistently.

If you are arguing that the Blue King characters are more likable than the Top Cow ones, I've already conceded that. My point is simply that this does not mean the Blue King ones are somehow well-done or exemplary in any way. They're just not despicable like the Top Cow series' portrayal of the Phalanx.

Such as?

No. They were bad. Weak stories. Poor dialog. Wildly fluctuating power levels. Numerous plot elements that simply....



...did not make sense. War Witch torches a building through inept use of her powers, getting innocent people killed, and she gets off with "oh, my bad. Let's go punch someone." (Frostfire did the same thing except he only killed one person and they threw the book at him!) The whole "jury duty" storyline Fails Law School Forever. Kheldian lore was abused like a red-headed stepchild. That's just off the top of my head as I'm not motivated enough to subject myself to a re-reading just to complete the indictment.

Yes, and how much of it actually made it into the game? The factions we originally heard about, for instance, are almost entirely unlike the ones we actually got.

That's damning with faint praise, as the Phalanx characters are near-universally reviled. More to the point, the stories were complete garbage.

Looking at the Blue King comics, I think it is safe to say that Rick Dakan had nothing to do with any positive aspects of early City.

The characters aren't that complicated or smart. This isn't Wuthering Heights.

It isn't. I think you'll find that of those having an opinion on the Freedom Phalanx characters, the vast majority will fall somewhere in the stated spectrum. I don't think I've spoken to one person with a positive view of them. (That's person, not character...I've got a character who thinks Statesman is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Of course, she's a teen hero still in high school and she's never met him.)