Why is the Malta Group out in the open?

This is something that's been bothering me in the past few issues.

The Malta Group is essentially supposed to be the Conspiracy Theory faction, the group that uses all the classic "shadow government" tropes such as "world domination through subtle coercion of the masses" or "we are using the system to destroy you (for the lulz!)." The troops we face aren't the conspirators, but they're knowingly part of the organization and they LOVE their jobs. For City of Heroes, their overall plan is to dominate the world, for the good of Capitalism (note: that's not Democracy they're trying to protect), and the chaotic influx of meta humanity is a threat to their plans. In fact, they are in sheer terror of meta humanity becoming a major player in the world of politics. How are you supposed to assassinate a man with a long-range sniper shot when he can eat bullets for breakfast?

Lately, however, their role has become... Odd.

They're helping the Sky Raiders, for one. With their vitriolic hate for Nemesis, and their impressive network of spies, they should know better than to provide any support to any organization assisted by "a mysterious benefactor."

For another, they help Maelstrom. Maelstrom has been doing an outright DEPLORABLE job of masking his affiliation with the Praetorians, and yet the Malta Group jumps to his aid because... Well, the game's story never says. You would think a group terrified of meta humanity taking over the world would be leery of helping a man working for a world controlled by meta humans.

Finally, everybody is talking in a near conversational tone about "Malta." Not "the Malta Group" or "a group of mercenaries," it's "Malta."

"Oh, by the way, Hero, be on the lookout for Malta."

"We have it on good authority Malta will be on the scene..."

I could have sworn a few players were quite rightly miffed at the idea of this terrorist organization coming out of the island (archipelago) nation and voiced their concerns a couple years ago. Now, there's even less reference to the group being named after the fact that Malta was the first meeting and organizational location of "The Directors," and that they operate largely behind the scenes in political, legal and business manipulation (the failed "Might for Right" act that keeps showing up in plaques, for instance, is strongly hinted at being their brainchild). They also operate primarily in the U.S., because it was U.S. tycoons who had built the organization to protect their moneymaking interests.

So why are they suddenly EVERYWHERE!? Why is their storyline getting so easily mucked up? Why does EVERYBODY suddenly know EXACTLY who they are? And if they are supposed to know who they are, why are Indigo and Crimson acting like they're such a big secret still!?

People like us are the only ones who remember that lore. It was a long time ago, Emmert days, and with the influx of Freems there won't be people who'll remember how things were. They've been non-explicitly retconned, basically.

Yeah, somebody done didn't read up on Malta before they started adding them to every last mission they could. Roy Cooling is particularly bad, especially since they could basically just replace Malta with Nemesis and more or less make it work (though given the level range, Roy still shouldn't just be accepting Nemesis as being around, any more than he's like "oh, yeah, so these Malta guys...").

Maelstrom, at least, is sorta maybe justifiable, since Malta has designs on Praetoria, and perhaps he's convinced them that he's a double agent when he's actually a triple (or maybe he really is just a double!). Or maybe, somewhat more likely, it's the same as all the other egregious uses of an organization that's supposed to be secretive, and, to channel Venture a bit, it's just one of those situations where they just didn't care.

Malta helping the Sky Raiders is supposed to make sense since they're trying to have a "minimal presence," but what's funny is... They already do that. By having super-efficient commandos pull off a quiet operation before anyone even knows they're there, they leave a minimal presence. That's exactly what's supposed to happen to that young heroine whose reputation they're supposed to ruin.

Malta helping Maelstrom... Not so much. He's not covert at all, to the point where everyone, both in-fiction and actual players, refers to him as a Praetorian, when he's actually NOT. He's a Primal Earth jerkass who went to Praetoria, shot his best friend and is now working his emo fringe off for Tyrant and his lackeys. You're not doing a good job being covert when you're better known as a Praetorian affiliate than for who you actually are.

OK, granted, Malta spawns have been showing up in Peregrine Island for no real reason since I2, and since I7 they started publishing taunts for heroes in the paper, but we can chalk that off to a just a misunderstanding of who Malta are, like someone learned all hew knows about Malta from coming across them in the streets of PI. However, this is the symptom of a much deeper problem:

City of Heroes no longer has any mystery in it. At one point, the game went out of its way to keep secrets, misdirect players and build up to great reveals. The Cimerorans, the Rikti, the Clockwork, all of these start off looking like one thing on the surface and end up being something completely different when you learn the truth. At some point, however, the game's writers seem to have said "**** it, the players already know everything!" and dispensed with any sort of tension or mystery. Everyone knows who Malta are. Roy Cooling is more than happy to chat about them openly. Everyone knows who Vanessa DeVore is, and she shows up in person just to mess with heroes. Everyone knows Crey is evil so their facilities are fair game for unsanctioned raids. You have to wonder how they get any business.

There's no subtlety in the game any more. Your contacts don't even pretend to need a warrant for you to raid an otherwise legitimate business. You can just show up at a Crey office and start shooting people and it's A-OK because they were probably evil anyway. Malta make TV ads announcing their badassitude because... Well, everyone knows about this super secret world conspiracy already. The Rikti have become chatterboxes, even though they're never supposed to speak, ESPECIALLY with each other.

These days, most enemies are treated as pallet swaps of each other. This one time, I went to save the Faultline dam from my double, who had taken it over with a group of Freakshow. I asked my friend why the Freakshow were helping my double, and he sort of shrugged it of. They're probably for hire. Then my good double shows up helped by a bunch of Warriors. Why? I have no idea, but they're presumably also for hire. You could have easily swapped who shows up with what enemy faction and it would have made as much sense, because the old days when story arcs explored the world and the factions that populated it are long gone. The enemies don't matter. They're just stuff to kill, and one faction is as good as another. All that matters is whatever NPC the writers made up on the spot. The enemies are just obstacles in the way. They're not part of the story, the game just needs enemies in it because it's sort of about fighting, mostly.

I guess that's why some of the newest story arcs try to involve actually fighting actual enemies as little as possible and instead focus on new tech gimmicks, like empty missions that you enter, have a conversation and leave or huge warehouses with all of five people in them with lots of inanimate objects to converse with. The game has this rich, nuanced world that Rick Dakan and the old team built from scratch, but that's boring! Let's have more jabbering Rikti and Freakshow with leet names. Because it's funny.

*edit*
To the game's credit, First War is probably the first place in a LOOONG time that actually seems to have been built with a shred of backstory and with a storyline that had both mystery (enough to keep me playing till 4 AM on a work day because I wanted to know) and exploration of the source material to a significant extent. Sure, it goes a bit batty-nuggets towards the end when it feels like the writers ran out of ideas and started putting in chicken leg women to up the stakes, but even then, it's a consistent story with enemies that behave according to their concept and an interesting plot that doesn't rely so much on gimmick characters (Circe the Sorceress notwithstanding). We'll see if that keeps.

Quote:

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.

I agree with Sam about the loss of mystery and subtlety. I really enjoyed those elements when the game was first released, and it really added to the atmosphere of the villain groups.

Malta hasn't been a stealth ops group since they've been introduced.
I mean COME ON! They have OUTDOOR SPAWNS IN PEREGRINE AND USE ONE TO FIVE STORY TALL ROBOTS!
They also do not have snipers, strangely.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

I've asked what Blackwell was before. Honestly, I always figured somebody would come along and say that they were a Private Security/Military Company (i.e. mercenaries) acting as a Malta Group front and that the soldiers we keep fighting are actually Blackwell troops.

Would that have been so hard to do?

So... That way, instead of saying "You're fighting Malta." they could have said "The operation has Blackwell security, so be careful..."

But, then again, there's no real concrete explanation of what Blackwell is. It's just a billboard with an ominous, corporate setting sun symbol. I've heard explanations from Private Security to "Think Tank." No missions, no dialogue, no plaques to explain what they are. It's just an omnipresent company with no bearing on the plot.

Just like Scherazade (though that's supposed to be an homage/shout-out).

You can't make level-based content "secret". As soon as one player completes that content, the secret is out for him (on all future characters) and anyone he talks to.

Now, we can pretend we don't know this, we can try to put up the walls of IC/OOC knowledge, but after a while the doublethink and suspension of disbelief just gets to be too much to maintain.

If the world's story is to change and progress, it needs to do so (and ONLY) over real time, so everyone is on the same page. It means that new players won't have the same experience that old ones did, but trust me, that's already the case. (And I don't just mean the new tutorial or starting arcs; I mean stuff like "run everywhere until you're level 14 and get your first travel power, try not to get killed on your way to your Hollows mission, street sweeping in Perez gives great xp, hope you don't run out of missions in your late 30s".) As it stands, when a player makes a new character and starts doing contact missions, radios and tips, we're moving between stuff that was written in 2011 back to 2004, then to 2007, then back to '04, and so on. And because none of that content ever seems to get rewritten to acknowledge the current state of the world, sometimes it feels like we really are traveling through time, moving between temporal shards as well as zones.

Once Arcanaville speculated how Sappers' sapper rifles probably make them go sterile, I never looked at Malta the same again.

And I hope the Skulls get their skulls back.

And Positron apparently likes the Rikti-as-aliens bios.

Brave new world...brave new world...

WARNING: I bold names.

I wouldn't mind the Malta Group getting exposed to the public, but the method has been thus:

"Nobody knows who these guys are..." to "EVERYBODY KNOWS!"

With no storyline transition or Task Force event to explain the shift in approach. There are no arcs detailing people being skeptical of the government. No new arcs featuring Crimson, Indigo and maybe Vermilion sending you to seek and destroy the Malta Group (just the old Crimson and Indigo arcs in which you *redacted* oh, right, new players don't know about that yet; still, they still refer to the Malta Group as "Our Good Friends" and "Some Bad People" instead of their unassuming moniker).

*sigh*

I don't mind the story changing. I just feel that the method being employed is clunky and, well, lazy.

I get that the developers and writers are trying to tell a lot of disjointed story at the moment, but there is little to no explanation for these groups to be acting so "out of character."

For instance, to dust off an old chestnut that still chomps my hip, there's a Fifth Column Tip Mission that talks about "awakening a fallen slumbering leader." I suppose, considering later level content, it means Reichsman. Problem with that, however, is that Reichsman isn't a member of the Fifth Column. He was detained before the Fifth Column even revealed themselves to the recovering Paragon City. However, somehow, he wound up taking over the group in that time.
-And before anybody says it, there is no ruling body calling itself the Fifth Column in Axis Amerika. They are Amerika Korps, they have no reason to be a "secretive organization of hometown traitors."

Then there's the Malta Group, acting as mentioned before, with decrepit old Directors suddenly showing up with excessively powerful weapons and gear. Now, granted, I'm willing to accept that the current crop of Directors are the sons and daughters of the original group (Old Money at work...), so the arrival of a lean, athletic and surprisingly capable Director 11 doesn't really bother me. But the fact that we get NO gameplay to explain these shifts, changes or even the core elements of their backstory just leaves for their insertion elsewhere in OTHER group's plots feel forced and artificial.

Remove Malta, Rikti and DE from Peregrine Island, and flood the place with Rulu-Shin trying to take over Portal Corp