Posi Blogs about con to the ret

not nitpicking your post but this has been in the game awhile. I think since GR, may be later, but well before I21.

Fair point. I didn't quite elaborate enough:

In The Praetorian War pre-i21 (and still available on Ouro), you get to the part of the arc where the original clockwork, the Nuon style mobs, were fighting Carnies in Waxahchie Park. There was little to no dialog during this mission. After you cleared it out, you had to go clear out all the Carnies in an office building to find a connection. On Mission Complete, when you defeated the boss (a named Ring Mistress mob) you simply got a 'note' that said it was a case of mistaken identity as the Praetorians mistook them for Carnival of Light. And that ended that.

In this retconned version, the arc takes you to a similar fight in Waxahchie Park. Only now, the newer Praetorian Clockwork, especially the boss mobs, make several dialog references to Carnival of Light (oddly, each boss is accompanied by a couple of the old style Nuon mobs, the only place you'll find them in that arc now). Afterward, you're sent to investigate the Carnival's involvement, but instead of a kill all with a simple tip, you actually end up being face to face with Vanessa DeVore, who has a whole lot of text to read (interesting aside: If someone on your team engages hostile Carnies while you are talking to Vanessa, her posse of 'friendly' Carnies will go over and beat the everliving crap out of the other Carnies).

So, no, I suppose it's not too big of a retcon, but it's radical enough that it helps change the entire arc which makes it appear more as though it's put in to tie together the "new" Praetoria rather than pre-dating Going Rogue, which, at least to me, is a marked continuity shift.

We understood you the first time; you're just wrong. The Tina MacIntyre and Maria Jenkins arcs were changed in i18 when Going Rogue launched. If you're just seeing the difference now it means you haven't looked at them in over a year.

There are still haunts to War Earth and deliberate mentions of the shadow dimensions in those arcs, that seems to be more deliberate than a simple oversight or "glitch".

And the Underground spoiler only singles out Primal Earth, not "other dimensions" in general. This could speak to the idea that War Earth and the shadow dimensions are roughly under Praetorian control already, or that Primal Earth is "special" somehow (as usual).

Either way that's a real reach to go looking for "canon conflicts".

Even the real conflicts don't seem like a huge deal to me anyway, and I have to wonder if some apparent contradictions might get explained by one of the hundred or so dangling plot threads. Like the individual who has supposedly been interfering with the past, an idea introduced with Montague Castanella and Ouroboros, and then promptly forgotten.

The "Planet Zeist" option. Something which should, in the name of all that's holy, kill a franchise, bury a stake in its chest, cut off its head, burn it, scatter the ashes, then lift off and nuke the ashes from orbit just to be sure.

Yeah. Don't do that.

Yeah, but it was even worse than that-- it retconned anything that had to do with World War II to involve something else (aliens, kidnappings, a different war). Post that image you have of the clues from the Ubelmann the Unknown arc when it was changed to use the American Civil War!

I was just going to quote part of Arcana's post, but it turns out ALL of it is relevant.

And this is where I, again, swear that Posi sometimes really doesn't have a smegging clue about what a lot of us think, ESPECIALLY those of us who give two feth's about the lore.

ALL of my characters are tied into the lore in some way. ALL of them exist in the 'CoHverse'. If they didn't, I wouldn't have made them. I wouldn't play CoH. I play the game and make the characters because the lore and universe interest me.

It's like CoHverse is the slate, and I am the Comic book writer. I can make characters, plot lines, histories and cross-overs.
That ALL goes out the window when they decide to retcon something for stupid metagame reasons (Puddle of Annoyance, looking at YOU)

Short version; Without CoHverse, I would have no characters. Great stories can work just fine within established lore. In fact, it's a sign of a BETTER writer who can make great stuff within existing lore than one who NEEDS to twist stuff just so they can 'make things work'.

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.

Its just a side issue to the main ones I mentioned, but I don't consider it a reach. I know the Underground trial singles out Primal Earth: that's the problem. That should not be the case because there's nothing special about Primal Earth relevant to this situation. Its directly implied what is "special" about Primal Earth, and that thing is something not unique to Primal Earth and also true for those other dimensions.

I didn't even think your 'main' ones were any more of a problem, either, except for the one where Praetoria attacked first. And even then, the main issue is that if Praetoria attacked Primal once before, why is it such a huge issue/surprise to Praetorian citizens that they're going to do it again -- and I may be mis-remembering, but wasn't the original intent to write that original arc out of continuity altogether? And the current solution (writing into the new arcs a mention that the old arcs happened as well) was an answer to player outcry?

At any rate, I don't see it as a huge deal. Praetoria went from a generic goatees-and-all parallel dimension to a more fleshed out world. (It's interesting that despite the fleshing-out, the Praetors themselves have little to no added depth to them, but GR is more about how the minor players, including the PC, deal with the grey areas; but I digress.) I'm willing to live with some minor background changes for the sake of a better story.

And that's where the 5th/Council mess went so explosively wrong. It added nothing to the depth of the story (the Council is bland as can be, and the concept with the most potential, the Center, is completely ignored), vastly complicated and confused matters, and greatly diminished the weight of much of the 5th Column's history. But neither Positron, nor Positron's design philosophy, was responsible for that -- it was a directorial fiat from above, with no clear direction as to how it should be specifically implemented; rather than letting the writers drive the storyline.

Anyway, I find the whole kerfuffle over "canon" to miss the point entirely; the more significant consequence of Positron's philosophy is the situation we have now, where plot threads are left to dangle for years on end without resolution. Wasn't it, like, 6 or 7 issues ago that Hero 1 said (in some podcast) that we'd know the identity of the letter writer "within an issue or two"?

That's my reason for thinking a slightly more hands-on approach to story direction would be beneficial: you let those threads dangle too long, it leads to confusion; future writers may want to take that thread in their own direction, and that genuinely could lead to significant canon issues.

To tie this back to the last part of your post, I see no indication that Primal Earth isn't special somehow (if only to follow that hoary old cliche of sci-fi, which is that Earth, or the protagonists' Earth in particular, is the Most Important Planet Ever), and it is entirely possible that this will be addressed somehow in a future issue. Or it might not; we just don't know, and it's awfully premature to declare that it's a canon conflict for certain. But at any rate, it's something that's in everyone's best interests to address sooner rather than later. Best way to keep people on the hook is to consistently answer one question while raising another; raising 2, 3, or 4 at the same time (often while not answering even one question) is just askin' for it.

Thank, Arcanaville! You saved me a lot of time trying to express pretty much those thoughts.

-D

I'm not addressing the issue of whether a canon contradiction is "a big deal." Something either is or is not contradictory to canon. Canon either is or is not changed. Whether that is important enough to Positron, or to you, is itself a component of my thesis in the original soapbox post. To wit: once you decide to start making such distinctions, you have to decide if that position is applied across the whole of the creative staff you are responsible for, and what the ramifications are for applying it in that way.

I would say that MMOs are necessarily prone to anthology story-telling within a relatively persistent (and not necessarily consistent) setting. Much like Conan, Elric, or Lovecraftian anthologies.

The thing is, without concrete examples of how any of Posi's changes have seriously, materially changed someone's gameplay experience in a way comparable to, say, the 5th column mess, I frankly see this as a lot of hyperventilating over nothing. You even agree that his original statement is reasonable, but you extrapolate the implications in such an extreme way that, frankly, I'm just not seeing any evidence of in game.

Of course, it's hard to quantify these things; say, whether, say, the EA "stealth brutes" are more or less affected by their recent power changes than the roleplayers are by the Praetorian changes. But it certainly seems to me, in a "fuzzy" way, that the creative leeway is being consistently applied.

Actually, that whole shadow dimension thing could have been easily avoided if they had sorted out the CoX cosmology before making it central to any story lines. It also raises another question, of where exactly Infernal and Infernal and their demons come from, and the CoV arc with "our" Infernal's mom in it doesn't help matters.

War Earth is clearly an alternate universe, and I'd have to actually find out what those Underground Trial spoilers are before I decide whether it's an inconsistency or not. Even if it is, it could be written around.

I'm not sure you've actually read the entire blog entry. I'm not extrapolating anything. Positron articulates the philosophy directly within the post which goes beyond his operational statement in a way I cannot see how anyone could confuse. And as I said repeatedly, I'm not arguing with any specific way the game canon has been managed, but the philosophy articulated in the blog post. Because I say that repeatedly as well, I'm not sure you've actually read my entire post either.

As I understand it, you're not saying that the game has necessarily been mismanaged but simply that there's an inherent flaw in giving one team creative leeway (the one in charge of story/canon) where you would restrict another (the one in charge of powersets). Whether or not this flaw has become a problem in the game is beyond the scope of your statement. But I may have misunderstood.

My original post presented my position that a good story should not automatically supplant canon, and I gave two primary reasons for that. The first is that contrary to what Positron implied about players seeking "open" environments, many specifically find it interesting to integrate with the existing environment to the best extent possible. You cannot therefore presume which parts of canon are more or less important: players can gravitate to minutia as much as grand story lines when it comes to leveraging pre-existing story.

The second is that simultaneously considering storyline canon to be stifling to authors but historical gameplay worth preserving presents the prejudice that story writers as creative authors deserve to be unfettered by game history, but gameplay designers as creative authors do not.


In a separate post the subject came up about whether the game *ever* retconned anything. And its obvious they have. But that's ancillary to my original point. Nowhere did I try to argue that the devs have overturned canon in ways that reduced my enjoyment of the game. Whether they did or not is not relevant to either the question of whether canon should be trumped by good story, or whether retcons have occurred in the past at all.