Okay, let's sort this out once and for all. Lore: What do we do about it?

I like the direction the lore is going and has been. I guess lore is the very reason I started playing CoH. I picked up issue 18 and 19 when they were new at my comic shop and got interested even more when I found out it was a MMO. After I started playing I got all the comics and 2 novels. I like the characters and the way the players make up stories to fit in with the CoH world. I was sad to see the comics go as I was only subbed for the last 2 issues. Hopefully they will start again with digital issues at least after Freedom. I like the story arcs and reading the description on all the souvenirs, badges and even have collected all but 3 or 4 of the base salvage just to read them. I tried playing DCUO and the story/lore of CoH is way better dare I say hehe, but thats coming from a Marvel fan.

I am a content fiend and like to do everything at least once. So the lore is important to me BUT I don't tie my characters tightly to the lore and (maybe because I am a Doctor Who fan) I am not that worried by continuity errors and can ignore them.

I am far more upset about those story lines where my character is forced to make decisions I would not have them make. This happens more on the red side than the blue. I would much rather they put their efforts into adding decision tree tech into existing missions. If at the same time they cleaned up some of the continuity, that would be extra credit

As for the Well story arc. I shall hold judgement until its been played through. However I would like to be able to tweak "Lore" pets so they were not echos but rather actual people, because that would better fit my character concept. I'd rather not have a character concept chosen for me. Even if it its just one aspect.

The neglect of the Fodder for the Canon thread speaks volumes. If Manticore is apparently no longer with NC Soft and Hero 1 hasn't posted on the forums in almost two years, could another red name please start curating it, just as a gesture of good faith on the issue of lore?

EDIT: The (comparatively) new hire Protean would be the obvious choice, but his posting frequency is pretty sparse.

1) The lore does the job. It kept me interested in the game for the first couple years I played it, but that interest in the story did eventually fizzle out. I don't think that the world's lore is enough of a reason by itself to subscribe.

2) Yeah, it's messy and frequently vague. I'm almost grateful for that - I'm a roleplayer, and I'm more interested in playing through my own characters' arcs and experiencing my friends' plotlines than I am in the game's story. I feel like the fact that the lore is so vague in parts gives me a whole lot of options when it comes to origin stories. There has always been a ton of creative wiggle room in this game, and that's one of its strengths. The more rules of the universe that they set down in stone, the less is available to the player, so I think this lack of clarity on certain plot points is a deliberate choice.

Is it well-written? Depends. I think some story arcs make it somewhat obvious that the game's lore has had a number of different contributors. Compare Ghost Widow's dialogue in the Patron arcs with her dialogue in certain tips and morality missions - they sound like completely different characters. Some parts of the lore are good, some parts aren't. Some parts are serious, and some parts are campy. It tries to be all things to all players (until recently, at least).

I'm okay with that.

3) I don't like the current direction that the story is heading. I'm not really a fan of Praetoria in general because I feel that the writers dropped the ball on the whole 'shades of grey' theme they were going for. Cole is the villain of the story. Praetoria is an awful, dysfunctional society. In the late game, the plot doesn't even try to hide this. It's not terrible, it just wasn't at all what I thought we were going to get, and I haven't been able to get over my disappointment since it came out.

The thing is, though, many of the individual contacts and small plots of Praetoria are actually kind of neat. The missions themselves are slick and the stories are memorable, whereas many of the main game's contacts and arcs tend to blend together in my memory.

So I've spent the time since I18 ignoring Praetoria and pretending that it just isn't there, playing the game as I always have. It doesn't really work, and I've been losing interest in the game as a whole over time. I continue to hold out hope that once Praetoria is defeated and the game moves on to the Coming Storm, I'll begin to enjoy the new additions to City of Heroes again.

4) Unsure. The current story does what it's supposed to, and I'm not at all sure that tampering with it would make me enjoy the game more. Especially if they retcon a bunch of things. I do think they should spend some time revisiting the old story arcs and bringing them up to date with the tools they now have access to, like cutscenes, branching dialogue and the like.

I agree with some of the other posters here. The copy editing is often fairly lousy.

The problem in such cases is that the game's plot is advancing along two time axes - real world time, and character level. And the first of those is held back by (or, as some would say, grinding up against) the design goals for a persistent world, in which old content needs to remain accessible and "current" even to new players/characters. But it can't, not if the context around it does, without becoming inconsistent (see again, Agent McQueen telling you to stop the Rikti from invading again... like, uh, they have). And yes, I'm aware that, ironically, this is a problem shared by the actual comics - where time advances but the characters have to stay the same, sometimes requiring their entire pasts to be rewritten or at least redated (e.g. Superman's first appearance, Captain America's thawing out, or the war that Tony Stark was wounded in).

It's difficult if not impossible to have a consistent, coherent world when parts of it are moving forward and other parts are standing still. It'll tear itself apart or, if the anchors are strong enough, grind to a halt.

Edit: GG, I was referring to the way that, at the current spawn rate in Atlas, defeated gang members are immediately replaced by new arrivals, in some cases before the body of the first has hit the ground. (This tends to lead to defeat by attrition for lowbies, as the spawn's aggregate health and damage output never goes down but your own health and endurance do.) It's like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.