james_joyce

Or hey, maybe I can go in a James Joyce costume. Big fat striped tie and some small round glasses... I'll need that pimpin' hat, though. And work on my Irish accent.

That would be a relatively ironic way to get past the dress code, at least.

Edit: n/m, any respectable Joyce costume would go with the eyepatch motif:

'cause **** the po-lice.

Word. Dress codes are terrible. Jeans & t-shirt for me, and if they don't let me in then **** 'em.

I'm talking less about the player's character, since they have script immunity - they need to be able to ignore orders for game play purposes, and they can't really have Cole's regime coming to arrest them for being a traitor.

I'm talking about characters the player encounters while doing missions in Praetoria.

It's the Mojoverse!

Actually, yeah that's a better analogy.

As I've conceded. The Crusaders have gone way overboard. My only question is whether it's at all realistic to expect a resistance movement in a regime like Cole's to be able to restrain themselves so they don't go overboard. I'm skeptical that it is.

I find a couple things disturbing about your characterization of dictatorships here.

First, you seem to have the implicit notion that if the government declares something to be a crime, then it is a crime - your only quibble being with the severity of the punishment. So if the government declares that speech critical of it is a crime, then it is indeed a crime, and we can talk about what the most just punishment for that is. On the contrary, I would assert that political speech is not a crime, and that if the government asserts that it is, they're wrong. There's a meter for just and unjust laws - they're not arbitrary. We can talk about how we define the metric, but it's not ad hoc.

Second, you seem to have confidence that a dictatorship will apply the law even-handedly. So you may disagree with a punishment or a law, but at least you know that if you don't break it you're safe. But actually dictatorships don't work like this - there are so many laws that it's impossible to be law abiding, which gives the regime an excuse to punish anyone they want at any time. This is especially true when subversive thought is a crime. They may want to make an example of someone, or there may be some strategic or personal gain for someone in the regime for punishing you. But the law is essentially ad hoc - they can do anything to anyone at any time.

Compare this to the above description. I've already conceded that the Crusaders' actions aren't justified, or at least are highly dubious. The question is, are they tyrannical? Lets say that a Crusader does what you say - he approaches a random citizen, and demands assistance or death. Moreover, is it true that, "the Resistance takes it a step further than the Government?"

Consider that Cole's regime already encompasses within it what you're saying about the Resistance: join us or die. That's something common to both sides. It seems that the random citizen is under threat from one or the other. What happens, though, if they join the Resistance? It seems to me that although it's much more dangerous, it's also much less tyrannical. And the only reason it's dangerous is because of persecution from Cole's regime. Consider that when you're in a Resistance base, you can freely criticize Scott, DeVore, or Belladonna without having to fear retribution from them. You can go where you want, choose to follow or not follow anyone's orders, choose to take whatever risk you want, without fear of anyone other than Cole's regime punishing you for it. They'll even help smuggle you out entirely. It seems you're much more free, although in more danger. So I don't think the claim that the Resistance is even more tyrannical than the state holds up. They might be crazier, but they're far less tyrannical on balance.

Because their position is the default position - that of non-aggression and self defense. Think of it as the political null hypothesis. The state is making the positive claim, so to speak - they're taking aggressive actions against individuals, which requires justification, which they've failed to make.

The demand the Resistance is making is for the cessation of aggression against them. This is as opposed to the the state, which demands compliance with their aggression. Whether or not the Crusaders' methods are just is something I'd consider open to debate -at the very least, they're highly dubious. But they have the more just position, and "allegiance" to that position entails a reduction of tyranny as opposed to its increase.

To go back to my mafia analogy, if I were to demand, with threat of force, that the family of the mafia stop supporting their family's mafia activities, this is not morally the same as the mafia demanding protection money from local store owners. One is straightforwardly aggressive, the other is in the pursuit of self defense though the means are morally dubious.

I'll try to explain, but it probably won't line up exactly with Golden Girl's opinion.

Suppose I'm walking down the street when a man pulls a gun and demands my money. It's a mugging. Let's say I resist, wrest the gun from him, and shoot him. I'm guessing no one thinks this is unjust, and no one thinks I've committed a crime. Why not? Because it was the man who initiated force against me, and I was defending myself.

Now suppose I open a local business, when a man comes in and demands protection money. He wants me to pay some amount of money every month or else he'll wreck my property. I decline, and when he comes back with his thugs to wreck my property I defend it and kill them all. Assuming the situation was clear, I'm guessing still that no one thinks this is unjust or that I've committed a crime. Again, they were initiating force and I was defending myself.

Assume I report the incident to the police, but it's clear from our interaction that they're bought and paid for. They're not going to help me.

Now suppose another man enters my store and tells me that because I killed his men, they're going to kill my family, and then if I still don't pay the fee, they'll kill me. I call my wife and kids and tell them to go hide somewhere. I follow the man back to his house, and then I go all Ghost Dog - I break in, kill him, and read his address books and phone logs to find out where the other mafia members live. I go to each of their houses, assassinate everyone inside, including wives and kids, and burn them down. Is what I did just? Did I commit a crime? I think most people would say it was not fully just, and that I did commit a crime, but with reservations. I don't think anyone would say that I'm being tyrannical - they would say that the mafia were being tyrannical, but that I reacted disproportionately.

The difference is in who initiated force, and who responded in self defense, and it's the same question when regarding Loyalists vs Resistance. The Resistance are defending themselves against the aggression of the state, who has declared them to be criminals for arbitrary crimes, including literal thought crime. But instead of buying into the idea that the state has the right to enforce arbitrary laws as most people do, they resist the state's aggression - but it's not like resisting a mugging. It's like resisting the mafia. The state will pursue you in order to assert its own power. You can try to simply hide, and many do, but that in itself is a form of concession - they've succeeded, in a meaningful way, in asserting their power over you. Or you can try to fight back, and with full moral justification, even to the point of killing those who pursue you, like the Praetors, the Powers Division, the Seers, and the PPD. After all, if any of those groups found you, they wouldn't hesitate to kill you, or at least kidnap you and put you through the corrupt legal system, probably ending in your death. It's self defense against what is essentially a super-powered mafia in a corrupt state.

The Crusaders, however, take it one step further. They kill people who are not pursuing them, like hospital residents and random citizens. Just as with my disproportionate response against the mafia, this shifts them from a position of self defense to one of aggression. But it isn't a tyrannical position - it's simply aggressive rather than defensive.

Someone like EvilGeko argues, and I don't completely disagree, that the overreaction on the part of the Crusaders is understandable and inevitable, because it's very difficult to respond proportionately to an aggressive institution that isn't responding proportionately in kind. The state had no problem, for instance, "disappearing" Wardog's family for the arbitrary crime of teaching an unapproved curriculum. In resisting an institution like that, how can you be expected to respond in a way that doesn't go too far, if you want any chance of successfully defending yourself? The state has, in essence, declared a war of aggression on its own people. In a war situation, those who attempt to act in a fully morally justified way are at a strong disadvantage - one of the reasons why war is so abominable.

But you don't have to agree with that in order to see that the Resistance is not tyranical. They're reacting to the initial aggression of the state. They may be reacting out of proportion, but they are the response and not the initial cause.

Occam's razor doesn't dictate anything - it's not a law. It's a heuristic.

This is also a misuse of it. It says that you should postulate as few new entities as possible when proposing a hypothesis.

In this case, the state is making the positive claim that it is capturing and killing individuals because they're dangerous. But the burden of proof lies with them to show that. By foregoing a public trial, they have failed to do so.

One of the most dangerous views the public can hold of the state is that the people it imprisons and kills without trial must have deserved it, or else they wouldn't have done it. If the public perceives the state as approaching infallibility, there's nothing stopping it from becoming a runaway tyranny - a process that has clearly already taken place in Praetoria, national emergency or not.

No, the undercover options don't change your morality, only the alignment missions do. The concept of going "deep undercover" means choosing the alignment you're spying on to keep up your cover on that side. I haven't played all the arcs, but as I understand it the undercover options are things that happen covertly - you betray the Resistance without them knowing. Alignment missions are public knowledge - you do something that shifts your alignment in their eyes. Going deep undercover implies that you're willing to keep up your cover even though it requires you to do things harmful to the side your actually undercover for.

Like I said, I could be wrong because I haven't played all the arcs. But that's the way it seems to me so far.

You go "undercover," by calling the opposing faction leader at the appropriate time, which changing certain missions' objective. However, if you're doing missions for the "extreme" end of the faction, you're going to have that side's badge - so for instance if you're doing Power arcs "undercover" you're going to have to have the Loyalist badge, and so be considered a Loyalist and actually be locked out of the Resistance underground base. This is what each faction leader refers to as going "deep undercover."

So the answer is, I guess, sort of?

England???

My guess? $8 for a Corona.

MIDTOWN, YEEEEEEAH!

The one in San Diego was free. I doubt there's a cover charge.

Oof... oh man...


I'm just gonna sit this one out. :\




It's really difficult, though.

I think a lot of our disagreement here stems from a difference in preference, and a difference in opinion about where the fun in this game comes from. You enjoy the process of finding your way to your objectives, and I don't. Or at least not in the ways that this game presents that challenge.

I think most of what you said above is correct. I didn't mean to overstate my case when I talked about not having much time to play. What I meant more precisely was that when I get on to play, I want to have fun as quickly and as frequently as possible, which leads to the can of worms of what is fun. There's two ways to answer that, one is personal preference and one is based on ludology. Without writing a treatise or pretending to know more that I do, it seems that our impasse comes from our difference in enjoyment of the process of navigating a complex space per se. You enjoy it, I don't. Your observation about obstacles in games comes from ludology and is, I think, completely correct. Of course games aren't games if there aren't any obstacles or challenges.

The only thing I'd argue about, then, is about whether a maze game is appropriate for this format, or whether it's executed well when it does happen. I think you bring up a good example:
It's true, it's not complicated, but it is frickin' huge. The problem is that it doesn't do anything with the space. Having a cave full of bad guys to punch is fun, but there's a limit to that after which most players are going to want some variation. There's a principle, which I think is correct, that states that it's good for players to have forced, productive down time and variation in their activities. We could create a map that was as big as Paragon City and fill it with enemies, and tell the player to kill a boss which is somewhere random on the map. Without other indicators, finding him will take quite a long time, and without other gimmicks most of that time will just be spent beating up spawn after spawn of the same enemy group. Now, I really enjoy defeating spawns, and that's a large part of what this game offers - but it has to take place within certain reasonable constraints so that it doesn't become too repetitive. The size of the map and the variation of the encounters are factors in ensuring that players don't get bored of doing what is this game's core strength.

The central question to this discussion as I see it, then, is - does a semi-complicated map with dead ends and long forking paths provide the type of variation that helps relieve repetition. The way this game implements it now - especially on things like the Atta cave map - I would say no. The reason for me is that I don't find any enjoyment in the maze per se. If you put me on a lab map with branching elevators and I take the wrong one down to the end and have to double back, it's exactly the same to me as if it were a linear map with an equivalent length. The map wasn't varied, there were no additional challenges, and worse still, I spent at least half that distance not even killing bad guys, becasue I cleared them all on the way there. If you enjoy navigating that space per se, then I can understand why you'd want more maps like that. But for me it detracts from the actual game of defeating spawns, completing objectives, and progressing an arc.

One way in which non-linear maps would be enjoyable to me is if there were interesting objectives at each path's end. For instance, I have to defeat 5 bosses, and they're spread out along each end of the Atta cave (I forget how many ends the Atta cave actually has). Note, though, that these can't just be named bosses that are otherwise unremarkable, but should each be interesting and unique. It should also be clear that those bosses are distributed in that way - I know ahead of time at that point that I have to visit each cul-de-sac of the map. But what I'm not interested in is having to find them. This game would need to elaborate on the "find them" game for me to enjoy that as an activity - for instance, a clue game where I can try to determine where to go based on evidence, and a consequence for looking in the wrong place.

So I didn't mean to imply that the game should be made easier, or that I want to bypass obstacles because I don't have enough time. What I want is for the game to focus on and improve its core strenghts and clear away common secondary elements that the devs aren't focused on polishing. I would put the "maze game" at the top of that list, because in its mediocre state, I think it detracts from the core game. Do a couple things really well instead of doing a bunch of things poorly. I think the new maps and Praetoria in general demonstrate that the devs are doing that, because maps have become more linear while missions become more interesting and diverse, and while stories improve and become more engaging.

If I remember correctly, you also prefer the large, repetitive blocks of Paragon to the more cramped and variegated streets of the Rogue Isles, because you prefer your environment to feel like a real city. I vastly prefer the Rogue Isles' design philosophy of smaller zones where landmarks are more concentrated (even though the RI have other problems). I think we're just playing the game for different reasons - I'm playing it for the game play, and you're playing it, perhaps, for RP or some similar reason.

But having established that we simply have different tastes, I want to address one of your implications above, because you're conflating several concepts here that I don't think should be conflated.

One, you say you dislike maps that are, "simple, brainless, straight corridors." The implication being that branching maps, say the brown or pink caves or the old lab maps, are "complex" and "thoughtful". I disagree. They require more time to navigate, not thought. It doesn't require any thought to wander down a hallway, find a dead end, then wander back. It just takes more of my time. This is similar to AV fights we've traditionally had in the game. They're not challenging, they're simply time consuming - your character can either do it or you can't, and that's determined before the fight begins based on your power sets, enhancements, and temp powers. There's no thought, and it's not a puzzle - it's just time (obviously this has changed a little with more recent boss fight introductions).

You say this philosophy lead to boring Praetorian lab maps, but those lab maps, IMO, are not boring because they're linear. Consider if they weren't linear - say they had elevators and long dead ends like the old lab maps. Would they be any more interesting? Maybe you'd say yes, but on the contrary I'd say they were even more boring than they are now. If you want to make the lab maps interesting, it doesn't have to do with making them into kindergarten-level mazes, but with putting interesting things in them - decorative elements, environmental obstacles, interesting room layouts, etc. The lab maps aren't boring because they're linear, but because they're monotonous.

Consider the new underground maps, which are some of my favorites. Each map potentially consists of a pretty large variety of rooms. You can follow the old subway tracks, you can go down the ramp through the high ceiling'ed tunnel, into the empty resistance base room, into the room with the cargo ship, into the room large column'd room. It has variety, and many of those rooms (at least to me) are visually compelling and have interesting terrain that subtly change the encounters there. It's completely linear, but it doesn't really feel linear. I'm going down ramps, doubling back at the bottom of stairs, and jumping over subway tracks. But because it is linear, it doesn't waste my time.

As I said previously, this isn't a maze game, so putting pointless mazes into the game doesn't enhance it. I don't have a lot of time to play, so when I do play I want to be able to accomplish something, and that's impeded if I spend my time trekking down a long hallway and find nothing there.

It's a different of preference, but I feel like most players prefer what I'm saying. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know.

What did you have in mind?