Would Anyone Play a Longbow/PPD AT?

Apparently forgetting that the Vanguard employ villains...

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. They might hear you!

To be honest, I'm kind of disappointed that every faction introduced since CoV has been morally grey. Moral ambiguity is good and all, but we need to counter-balance that with clear-alignment organisations. Sure, Arachnos is puppy-kicking evil and the PPD are puppy-petting good, but the rest... Vanguard, the Menders, even the Midnighter Club are squarely "grey."

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Yeah. This is my issue with a fair few games and movies as of late - moral complexity is only complex if you do it for a genuinely interesting storyline, not simply for the sake of mixing things up. Avatar bugged the frak out of me due to this: oh look our story is really grey and makes you think because humans are evil!!!!!!!!

Oye. It's depressing when the basic black/white storyline becomes something new and exciting.

Well, the "humans are evil" approach to storytelling isn't morally grey at all. It's about as black-and-white as it gets. Outside of the few specific humans on the good side, "humans" are still drawn as very much cackling evil.

Personally, I've always been a fan of "humans are evil" stories because they play on our preconceptions of good and evil. It doesn't blur the line between them so much as fools us as to which is which. There's a difference between moral ambiguity where good and evil are so much alike they end up being interchangeable and moral misleading where good and evil are very much iconically different, but the story tricks the spectator into believing they are the wrong way around.

I especially like these when they rely on "wrong symbolism." Something that came up in discussion recently was the impression a spectator would get from seeing a cadre of knights in shining armour attacking a monster. A casual observer would see a fight of good against evil, but a crafty storyteller would turn it into an exercise of zeal and intolerance against the misunderstood and hated. You don't have to be ambiguous about it, you just have to present a carefully-crafted first impression that just happens to be wrong.

Just as a random example, the last level of Braid, stupid as the rest of the game may be, is a good example of this.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

See that armour? THAT is what I want. That and freaking arm-mounted chainguns.
How can that NOT be cool? You cant make it in game yet, and its bad*ss..../want

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Whereas I think the "good is actually evil!!!!!" approach is hilariously over done these days and has ceased to have any impact beyond a resounding Meh.

But, eh.

I was just thinking the same thing as I read the thread....if I could have access to that I would welcome a story locked AT hero side...I have a PPD themed character already but I would so love to see the armour...!!!

You said "more content," and I can't argue with that.

Hmm, that would be interesting actually. Some young level 20 hero, fresh out of the portal from Praetoria, runs into a Longbow recruiter. Accepting his missions sets you on a multi-arc storyline involving working for Longbow. And if you stray from your heroic path, you get kicked out.

Player characters don't just hop over to the Rogue isles to harass its citizens. They don't set up secret bases all over foreign soil. We go to the Rogue Isles once in our heroic careers, and that's because Recluse has a WMD. (The RWZ arcs don't count because we're helping).

I don't see Vanguard or the Midnighter Club as squarely "grey." Their goals are clearly noble. They work with known criminals, sure, but when you're trying to save the world, you work with what's available. So they're a little grey but not nearly so much as Longbow.

Neither Vanguard nor the Midnighters are morally 'grey'. Vanguard is a UN organisation with the sole purpose of fighting back the Rikti. To that end they recruit anyone who is on the same level as them, at least concerning the Rikti.

The Midnighters are a hero organisation who need numbers to swell their ranks in order to fight off whatever great evils they sense coming our way (Rikti, Nictus, 'the coming storm', magical threats...). They also recruit anyone who is willing to work with them towards that end, wether it is for money, knowledge or ideology.

Both these organisations have clearly 'white' goals and they don't commit any 'black' acts, well not against anyone who's not a threat to this world anyway. So even if parts of their memberbase might be a bit morally ambiguous, their actual actions as an organisation are not.

Nor do Longbow.

The Rogue Isles is international waters, which is precisely why so much crime happens there - even the United States has its dirty little backroom deals take place there.

But, eh. Whenever Longbow come up Hero players will always run into the thread screeching about how awful the organisation is, never mind the powers they're using on muggers. Or the numbers cut down, for that matter. Just bugs the hell out of me to see such inconsistent indignation.

No, but the PPD do. Multiple times. Plus heroes keep barging into Grandville to beat up Lord Recluse. But this is all RP quabble that anyone can spin either way. I don't want to get involved in it because there's no winning that particular point.

Vanguard are written more as hero content, granted, but they ARE a morally questionable organisation because they employ convicted murderers, complete monsters and general jerkasses, to whom they proceed to hand over weapons, armour and future tech on the sole merit of combat prowess. They have excuses, obviously, but that doesn't make their actions justified, merely acceptable given the circumstances.

The Midnighters themselves, while largely portrayed as Lawful Neutral, still end up working with villains and sending said villains to steal artefacts for them. I know Sheldon has her reasons, but asking me to break into a bar, beat people up and take her artefacts back, especially considering the people I'm beating up have done nothing illegal, is not clear, obvious good. In fact, I was utterly surprised when she asked to speak with my villain the first time.

Generally, any content that is co-op is going to slide into moral ambiguity just by default. That's one reason people have been asking for an end to the co-op content. It can't be allowed to be heroic enough because it seems odd from a villain's perspective, it can't be allowed to be too villainous or heroes would refuse to participate, and it ends up being just bland. In fact, the entirety of the Vanguard storyline carries itself through on fact and revelation and almost never on the strength of its narrative. The scant few moments that DO manage to shine, narratively speaking, are decidedly heroic.

In fact, Vanguard content feels like a bunch of hero arcs that were adapted to villain use by throwing in Levantera, otherwise known as the Mender Tesseract fangirl.

As far as "grey but not nearly so much as Longbow," the more I listen to it, the more it sounds like bad blood more than anything else. I hate Longbow as much as everyone else, if for no reason other than because some double brain decided to stick them in EVERY SINGLE MISSION post 30, villain-side, but their presentation is largely positive in BOTH games. They protect civilians, the fight crime, they guard labs, they swoop in to save the day. Granted, there are more than their fair share of Longbow traitors and double agents (seriously, did we need THIS many?), but then the Vanguard have the Rogue Vanguard who did much more damage than that one Longbow jackass who sold stolen tech, the Midnight Club have Darryn Wayde and the Menders have... Well, everybody.

Again, this sounds like bad blood. Miss Liberty butts into Vanguard business which, because we work for Vanguard, makes her our enemy and WMD spends the majority of the game badmouthing practically everyone she lays eyes on. Thus, what I feel we have here is the "Hardcase effect." That is to say, an entity generally regarded as undesirable and bad because of a few specific, isolated instances and a general ill attitude.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

When do the PPD show up in the Rogue Isles and harrass people? Abyss sends you after some squid cops who are chasing a criminal (which I believe you are allowed to do, according to international law in the CoX world), and flat out says they're out of their jurisdiction, the ones guarding the schoolbooks Phipps sends you to destroy are volunteers, and presumably off-duty, and....where else do the PPD show up redside?

We go into Grandville to beat up Recluse because he has a WMD. We don't go taking potshots at random superpowered citizens while we're there, we don't set up bases there. Besides, Statesman is the kind of self-righteous jerk that Longbow holds up as an example.

Name me one military on earth that doesn't employ complete monsters and general jerkasses.

I view merits as a "reputation" reward, that has more to do with dedication to the cause than combat prowess.

They also are being crammed down both heroes' and villains' throats as "the good guys." Since their introduction they have unnecessarily been everywhere. They shouldn't be guarding labs or saving the day, we have police for that. And yet we didn't see a single police officer lift a finger in defense of Paragon City and its citizens until months after Longbow was stuck in everywhere.

I tend to reject anything that anyone tries to force me to accept. Usually it's because they're too enamored of their own creation, despite said creation being lame.

When the founder and leader of an organization butts in where she has no business being, that doesn't speak well for the organization as a whole.

Yeah, so if "real" comic heroes do it I guess that makes it ok?

uhhh yeah...it's a comic book world our npcs will do comic book things...it should be kinda expected that recurring comic themes show up int his game somewhere.

You're trying to argue reality in a fictional world. If "real" comic book heroes do it and are still judged heroes by the narrative, that's precedent enough. And if you'll note, the City of Heroes narrative treats Longbow as Heroes practically every time. You may disagree, and you are within your right, but if anything is ever unquestionable in a game, it's its disembodied narrative. This isn't given by any one character whose integrity you can question. It's given by "the game." And if you start questioning the game, you're basically re-writing it, which is outside the scope of in-canon discussions.

Furthermore...

You quoted two PPD appearances red-side, admitted that both cases were outside of their jurisdiction, and you ask where they show up? I'm confused.

Look at red-side and note where Longbow show up - Nerva and nowhere else. You'll also note that Nerva is not officially part of Recluse's Rogue Isles, and Longbow, being sanctioned, are well within their jurisdiction to set up bases there. If anything, Arachnos' presence in Nerva is illegal, but given that they're Arachnos, there's little point in holding them to task for it.

You're just begging me to bring in real-world politics with this one. I do not want to go there.

Name one military that employs alien werewolves, soul-sucking demons, convicted mass murderers, genocidal dictators, international criminals and eldritch abominations and I'm sure I can name several that don't employ people of questionable morality. Seriously, Vanguard taking in any villain that's made it to 50 is like the the US Army putting Saddam in charge of Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler, with Imhotep and Mola Ram in reserve. Don't most armies hold psychic evaluations, at least? I mean, I need to have signed documents for psychiatric health to get a job sweeping the streets around here. I have a really hard time anyone would take, say, Two-Face in the Army.

Again, this is why I don't want to get into RP debates. Everyone is free to view any aspect of the game however they please, which is why these debates are pointless. The only thing that can be argued is mechanics and precedent, and Vanguard Merits are given for Rikti killed. The more Rikti you can kill the faster, the more Merits you get. This is very much the definition of combat prowess. Dedication would require going above and beyond the call of duty, which our game system simply does not support, as it either lacks or ignores additional, non-mandatory objectives. And the narrative never even suggests that these are a badge of honour in any way. When Borea talks about them, the way she describes Vanguard Merits strike me as basically military rations.

Hence, the Hardcase effect. You dislike them because the narrative is botched and because of how they were introduced more so than because of how they are actually written. Longbow were introduced into the game in I6 along with City of Villains. Back then, there were no Mayhem missions. Three/Five paper missions would lead to an old-style bank robbery, usually of the LSSL. There was a grand total of ONE mission in Paragon City back then - distributing the Outbreak virus - and making a full, 1-50 faction for a single 10-15 mission was not, is not and will never be economical. Of course, now that we HAVE the PPD, it makes sense to update it, but development resources being what they are.

Basically, Longbow are shoved down our throats as the only heroes because they ARE the only heroes. Literally. One single hero faction existed in the game that went above, like, 20, and that was Longbow. For reasons unknown to me, the Legacy Chain and Wyvern simply don't have anything above level 30 and back in I6 there WAS NO PPD. Longbow was all you had, so Longbow is all you saw. This is perhaps the strongest reason for their omnipresence, and while I hate them for it as much as the next guy, I wouldn't try to vilify them over technical limitations. It'd be like trying to commit Angus McQueen when he tells me I stopped the second Rikti War, when the second Rikti War is going on RIGHT NOW. His content is old and his missions simply haven't been updated. Same with Maria Jenkins still insisting no-one has seen the Statesman in a long time when he's chilling out aboard the Longbow carrier.

And here I will agree with you. There's too much Longbow crammed in too many places and basically used as the catch-all for de-facto non-player good guys. I dislike this, but I don't try to justify my dislike, because this is a systemic problem, not a conceptual one. We need more good-guy factions and we need to ret-con some of the older content to include them. The Legacy Chain are a good start.

That's a matter of debate. First of all, I don't recall Vanguard ever being issued the exclusive rights to fighting the Rikti, nor do I believe such a move would be prudent. Secondly, if Vanguard let all manner of heroes and villains roam around the War Zone unsupervised (and, no, you don't HAVE to join Vanguard to be there, as you CAN'T join Vanguard until 35, but can roam around the zone 1-34), then I see no reason why Longbow shouldn't be allowed to hold their own operations, other than because Levantera has an axe to grind. If you listen to Gaussian, you'll see a much different view on Longbow. In fact, why does everyone treat Longbow like how Levantera treats them? Even Borea handles it a lot better.

And again, this not only has precedent in comic book history, but is in fact the status quo for practically any two organisations big enough to have their own name who share the same universe. SHIELD and the US Army are always at each other's throats trying to decide who gets to take pot shots at the Hulk next and it seems to me like the US Government can't seem to go a year without having some problem with Superman and people with super powers in general. Heck, the various hero groups and even individual heroes are constantly bickering and undermining each other, and that's mainstream comic books. You don't proclaim Tony Stark to be the bad guy just because he refused to turn in his Iron Man suit to the department of homeland security, or because he muscles in on US wars, can you?

Again, I'm not saying you should LIKE Longbow. I don't, and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't, either. But there's a step between not liking them and proclaiming them to be bad guys that I feel people take too easily. We let our dislike for the faction colour our perception of their action.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.