Explaining the Medical Teleporter Away

Thankfully, Paragon City has a medical teleporter so that when you are Mostly Dead, you get teleported to the hospital for a Miracle Pill and are back in action, albeit with some debt once you hit level 10. We are told that the medical teleporter is "the only reason this city is not overrun." Well, with as often as I faceplant, I can see the point. But supposedly, all heroes are on this system, to prevent anyone from becoming Totally Dead.

The way the medical transporter system is described, it sets up problems for the notion of anyone actually dying and staying dead. There have already been such problems, as I shall describe in the following two spoilers, and then I shall pose my questions:

***SPOILERS START****

In one of the arcs, a transdimensional visitor never bothers to hook up with this system so that they are able to expire heroically and dramatically, but no explanation is given for why they failed to do so.

In the last issue of the CoH comic, most of the Freedom Phalanx finds that they, ahem, need a rez, which conveniently arrives, but nobody triggers the medical teleporter. No explanation is given that I recall, but a lot of characters have a lot of bad dialogue, the FP decides it stinks at fighting Rikti but are still a Swell Team and Synapse gets the Top Dog badge. It was a Very Special Episode. Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.


****SPOILERS END*****

So the questions are:

1) What explanation will be given for whoever of the Surviving Eight loses the adjective "Surviving" as to why they did not get medically teleported?

2) Will the explanation be, to use the most delicate term possible, "problematic with its credibility within CoH lore"?

There are some story arcs already in the game where heroes die because the enemies have found ways to stop the medical teleporter signal, or have been able to prevent them from teleporting away some other way. There are also missions in the game where you are sent to "prison" instead of the hospital when you die (but still have full health and endurance...odd). I think that any stories involving the surviving eight dieing will either be some variety of this, or will be such a catastrophic injury that the hospital can't fix it in time.

Just more reasons they should of kept game mechanics and CoH storyline seperate.

A wizard did it.

I don't know how they'll explain it away (if at all), but I can guarantee that it'll be one of countless things cited by the forum's Content Police as "terrible writing." (If I were the devs, I wouldn't even bother to write things any more, the feedback on new arcs is so hostile. Of course, every time I think that, I remember that the devs don't generally read the fora, except through the broad summaries developed by the OCR team. I think that's something that more forumites need to recognize when they claim to give feedback- it's just going in a hole someplace.)

Edit:

Oops, forgot to comment on how they'll explain it. My money is on the previously suggested "they port you out instead." Personally, I don't require an explanation.

Perhaps, assuming it is a Shivan related fatality, the death is due to one of them being absorbed (or whatever) so that their body is unrecoverable.

In the game, the med teleporter is infallible. You're always saved. Doesn't mean the game fiction has to follow the same rules. Fictional characters don't pay subscription fees. It's okay to kill them.

But seriously. There's no reason to think a character can't be killed outright such that no emergency medical response, no matter how instantaneous, can save them. You don't even really need to always contrive a situation where the med teleporter is disabled or blocked somehow from operating. If you put a gun to someone's head (and they are not bullet-proof / invulnerable as part of their super powers) and pull the trigger... it's hard to imagine the med porter saving them. I suppose anything is possible considering that in CoH you really CAN get a wizard to do it, but as far as I know they don't rely on mystical/divine/magical resurrection in the CoH hospitals. I should think if you arrive there dead... you aren't leaving.

This isn't even a hard question to answer. Medicom is a handwave for giving player-characters "script immunity". It's necessary because the idea of permanent death in MMOs is permanently dead. In-universe, however, it is far from a sure thing. If, for instance, someone gets his head blown off in one shot, the Medicom beacon may engage but there won't be much the hospital can do for him. The beacon itself might be damaged in combat, or as previously mentioned, the signal might be deliberately jammed or otherwise unable to get through. These things don't happen to us because of the aforementioned script immunity, but that doesn't mean the system should be inferred to operate flawlessly.

Has it been confirmed that "one will fall" means death? Ibe been a bit preoccupied with anemergency in the family. Just thinking that "fall" is also commonly used for a fall from grace....

Hero training day one: Learning to use the Medical Beacon BEFORE you die!

This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the AE system. In the AE, every villain group and their mothers can disable the medical transporters, and the arcs all point this out. It's annoying to me.

You can't activate your medical teleporter when you've been blown to pieces/de-atomized/thrown in lava/smashed into a fine paste/hurled into the sun/had your skull crushed/been flat out killed with one strike.

I mean, the porter will fire I'm sure, but... I'm not sure the hospital would want what comes out of the tube.