Questions concerning the Rogue Isles

The "hot pursuit" doctrine regarding superheroes and supervillains is, indeed, a massive stretch. When I first read it, I thought it was openly deranged. But now that they've written more game story, including alternate timelines, I see what they're getting at, and why they did it. Excuse me while I wax philosophical here (and while I quote TV Tropes to start):

From an artistic standpoint, the authors of this game world faced one nearly insurmountable obstacle: The Status Quo is God. They wanted to set the game in a world just like our world, but with superheroes. But if there'd been superheroes since the 1930s, would the world really have turned out just the same? The same WWII, or similar enough that you'd have to squint in 2003 to see the difference? The same Cuban revolution, the same Vietnam War, the same Cold War in general? If you answer those questions "no" then you're up against the problem almost all science fiction games have: you have to start your game with a long, dull chunk of expository text that nobody reads but the 5% of us who are roleplayers, just to tell people who their characters are.

So to make the game commercially sellable, to make their art accessible to a larger audience, they made the decision that very early in superhero/supervillain history, a decision was imposed on the world by its most powerful and popular superhero: supers are above normal law. All of you who aren't supers are governed by your normal laws, your normal political processes, your normal economy, and so forth. Those who are super are above all of that: they cross national borders at will, ignore any laws they want, and are judged solely on their motives and results, and only in the court of popular opinion (if that) and in each others' opinions. 5.9 billion "normal" humans go about their normal lives. 0.1 billion supers live as if they were on an entirely different planet.

It's not at all surprising that a classics major came up with this solution: this is how the Olympian Gods lived and worked. They bribed, cajoled, and tricked humans during the chaos of the Archaic Dark Age that followed the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations, with an aim of setting up new, law-abiding, peaceful, moral societies ... while themselves continuing to wage open and covert war on each other, robbing each other blind, mating like minks with each other and with any other species that caught their fancy, and generally behaving in ways that they themselves would harshly punish if they caught us doing it. Why? Because blood, not ichor, runs in our veins. Because we do not consume ambrosia and nectar as our food and our drink. Because when we do it, it matters, because we're mortal, and fragile. They are neither, so they can live by different rules without facing the same consequences.

In the City of Heroes universe, what's the alternative to privilege (private law) for supers? In the City of Heroes multiverse, attempts to impose human law on supers always ends with it happening the other way around, the supers rule the humans with an iron fist. Whether it's the Reichsman inheriting Hitler's mantle of leadership, or Nemesis ruling his brass city in the Shadow Shard and seeking to conquer all universes, or Tyrant declaring himself benevolent dictator of all surviving humans, or Lord Recluse (the most "liberal" of the bunch!) setting up a rudimentary balancing act of supers-against-other-supers while, frankly, over-ruling them all at whim because he can.

To me, this makes the City of Heroes multiverse one of the most frightening dystopias imaginable, one whose philosophical premise is that if the gap in human ability levels widens at all, the weakest 99% of the human race can only become the top 1%'s cared-for pets or driven slaves, as in Walter John Williams' Aristoi, like non-Sparks in the Foglios' Girl Genius. It would improve my opinion of the game if Portal Corporation were to find even one parallel dimension in which, on the day after Brass Monday, The Statesman used his power and prestige to bully every super-human who wanted to fight crime to join the police and submit to the local police chief, who wanted to fight for their country to join their country's armed services and serve under the authority of the commander in chief, in which superpowers were treated like any other implement of force wielded by a human being.

But that's not the world that Paragon Studios wrote.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

What arc is this from?

Ms Liberty has personal issues that go beyond "not believing" in Recluse's government. There must be other governments that she doesn't agree with as well, she doesn't send terrorists to sabotage their infrastructure and harass their citizens.

While this would make an interesting parallel dimension, it would make for a terrible game. You can't spell MMORPG without RP.

Arachnos are villains. They don't pretend to be anything but.

The Sky Raiders are terrorists and mercenaries, and are totally irrelevant to this discussion.

Longbow, on the other hand, are constantly portrayed as "the good guys." Our heroes are forced to swallow their rhetoric. Our villains are forced to fight them because they are "good" and we are "evil."

And this is the only time heroes are allowed to so much as question Longbow's motives and procedures.

I made it up. Feel free to repeat it as if it were fact though. It would amuse me greatly if it caught on.

Rgh. Wish I could find a copy of this bit I wrote, which had a reporter from the Rogue Isles (undercover) sending back stories from Paragon - one of which put a similar twist on new heroes and Longbow in the newbie areas. My "reporter" wrote about Longbow starting an attack on some Hellions who were just standing around - attacking the gang members with automatic weapons and a flamethrower, of course. The gist being that this excessive force was done very blatantly and openly to let these new "heroes" know what would happen to them if they didn't toe the line.

See my Guides and Tutorials

It'd be an unpopular game for at least one other reason. Players hate taking orders from NPCs.

RRRRRRIIIIIIIIGGGGGHHHHT Brad. That's why we get all of our missions from NPCs in every MMORPG.

We're literally always taking orders from them

and I've even attended some of those parties, too...

But only if we go up to them and ask for a job. And we can always turn them down. Not even vaguely how police or soldiers work.

The absurdity of this was obvious in the last MMO to try to create the fiction that player characters were in the military, Tabula Rasa. If Tabula Rasa had been like a real military, when you logged in, it would have told you where to go, and what to do, and if you hadn't done it, your character would have been deleted, or at least suspended for however long you were sentenced to punishment duty. Because they knew that subscribing players would never tolerate that, they instead created this BS idea that "logos sensitives" were a special rank that was outside of the normal chain of command, gifted psychics that actual military officers had to beg or bribe into accepting assignments, while still in military uniform. It was the fakest thing I ever saw.

But inherent in almost all superhero fiction, going all the way back to Superman, is the idea that superheroes are above the law. There are literary and historical reasons for this that I don't feel like going into at this time, but suffice it to say that when they wrote the "hot pursuit" doctrine into the game's backstory, when they made national borders and national laws irrelevant to any superhero chasing a supervillain, they had ample comic book and gaming history precedent for writing what they did ... even if it's one of the scariest ideas in the history of literature.

I think the devs are working on that right now too

GAH! Do you never question yourself, EVER! There ARE no "good-guys" and "bad-guys"! Especially in the real world, but specifically in-game. Everyone has their own under-handed plans and noone's motives are 100% pure.

"be optimistic and don't think about ANYTHING"

It's the American way!