It happened AGAIN.

I'm not sure what you intend the word "destruction" to mean in this context, but none of the statements require a burden of proof because they are simple statements about what you believe. There is no doubt that you believe them, regardless of the truth or falsehood of the belief. They're axioms.

Xanatos was picking on Arcana's wording saying "You can't say 'I believe X'", because X is unprovable" without either demonstrating that X is unprovable or by explaining why Arcana was incapable of holding an unprovable belief. I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. I cannot prove empirically that it will actually happen, but that does not make my belief in it any less true.

Xanatos chose a petty thing to get all pedantic about, without actually proving the logic that he seemed to be actually espousing, because he waved his hands and claimed that his own logic did not require proof for magical and indeterminate reasons, or just because he didn't feel like providing any. "You can't prove your stance 100% empirically to a standard that I accept, therefore I win. Unless I hear Jack Emmert himself say it, you lose."

Belief requires proof?

I feel like we're all about to vanish in a puff of logic. Does anyone have a Babelfish handy?

Wa-heeeeey, Godwin!

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.

No, I don't. That's what I get for trusting the spell checker with typos.

You are technically correct. But I think it was fairly clear that the point of the burden of proof was being directed at the implicit statements behind the claims of belief.
If someone says "I believe there are invisible giant potato people on Mars." the implicit statement behind that is that "It's true that there are invisible giant potato people on Mars." which is a claim that has the burden of proof upon it. Those implicit statements are always there, because we all think that our beliefs are true, even if we aren't certain.

Now, a lot of the time, this burden of proof on the statements behind the claims of belief are ignored, for various reasons. If someone tells you that they believe in God, and you don't, generally you don't demand they prove it, because if you did it likely wouldn't work out very well for either of you. That's not because such a claim lacks the burden of proof, but because it's such a common belief that it has its own specific set of expected social reactions.

However, if one your friends came to you and professed their belief in the invisible potato people from Mars, you probably wouldn't just accept it as a statement of truth about their beliefs, and would instead expect them to try and provide at least some kind of back-up to the implicit claim behind their beliefs.

So, although you're right, and claims about your personal beliefs don't technically require proof, for the majority of intents and purposes, you can treat them as the implicit statements which do have that burden.

With the track record of the writers lately, I think you may be right.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Can you explain to me how such actions are not reactive? 'Villain X from Villain Group Y has done Z. You should go beat up Villain X and do Z instead.' 'Villain A from Villain Group B has stolen C. You should beat up Villain A and steal C for yourself.' 'Villain M from Villain Group N has kidnapped O. You should beat up Villain M and kidnap O instead.'

At no point in newspaper missions or arcs does a player character ever do actual, "thought of it first" villainy. We're either told what to do (until playing the SSA's) or we piggyback off of the ideas of other villains. It doesn't help that none of the co-op zones/stories have a villain plot that redside characters could run 'behind the scenes.'

Considering the last SSA contact is in the RWZ, it is going to be co-op. And considering the attitudes of the writers in relation to how co-op should work, I fully expect my villains to have to don the 'greater good' mantle and go to work stopping Wade.

If I had said anything of the sort, and if no one in this thread whatsoever agreed with me, I might actually believe you. However, numerous other folks in-game and on the forums have agreed that villainy is bland and lackluster outside of the SSA arcs, especially so in co-op content. Not only would the writers be catering to me, but they'd be catering to everyone else who's chimed in about my thoughts on this matter. They'd even be catering to all the folks who pick up this game over another, newer MMO. If I were to come back to this game anew and find all the redside content written for truer villainy, I'd probably do a happy dance.

Yes, but if you're going to expect people to understand you reasonably instead of pedantically then you have a burden to behave reasonably instead of pedantically yourself, which is really the point in all of this. Xanatos was behaving unreasonably while expressing his belief that his behavior was, in fact, reasonable.

Plus, if you're going to invoke logic then you had better have a sound logical argument, IMO instead of an argument that demonstrates that you aren't actually arguing logically at all.

If I say "The sun will come up tomorrow" and I present overwhelming evidence that the sun has come up every day for the past 4.5 billion years, and you say "I won't believe it unless I see it come up with my own eyes" then you're being unreasonable.

Heck, the study of history has way more to do with inference, hearsay, and deduction than it has to do with indisputable facts taken from the horse's mouth, so to speak. You might as well say that historical study can tell us nothing useful unless you hear it directly from the historical figures involved. "Prove it conclusively", would eliminate most of the historical record from the past several thousand years from contention as "legitimate" evidence.

Actually you're invoking the problem of induction and underdetermination.

Touche.

My real problem with the demand for conclusive evidence is that Xanatos is one of the old timers around here and he knows that if the evidence he demands ever actually existed that it's almost certainly lost to time and the vagaries of forum moderation, pruning, and changes in software.

Barring Arcanaville having 8-year-old email to back up her analysis, or Matt Miller reading this thread and somehow finding it intriguing enough to respond to it personally, or Jack Emmert or Sean Fish or Rick Dakkan or some other original dev revealing that they are playing Freedom and then posting their recollections, that conclusive evidence does not exist. Since he will accept no amount of analysis, deduction or induction as valid evidence, q.e.d, he wins.

I don't respect that stance, especially given that Arcanaville is pretty much as close as you're going to get to a non-dev who is also an expert on the game from both a mechanical and a historical standpoint, and Xanatos likewise knows that as well.

As I said, even I agree with you on the general point of "the writing on villainside is pretty poor". I just don't think the issues you have with it are the main problem.

I can't tell, are you just pointing out the joke or did it go completely over your head?

Godwin's Law

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.

Tell me honestly: did you come to this thread to argue?

Is it really that hard to read?

It's NOT ABOUT THE PLAYERS. It's about THE WRITERS.

Yes, we can twist the game world in our head in whatever way we want. That's called roleplaying. But it gets really, really repetitive when we have to keep doing that. All of the redside co-op content is written with heroic intent, and that's what I have a problem with.

Some of our villains don't want the heroes to succeed. At anything.

Why?

BECAUSE THEY'RE FREAKING VILLAINS.

I am reminded of Deadpool.

I like how "villain" must mean "I'm an Omnicidal Idiot", at least in the way you're defining it. Honestly, I'm glad we've got villains like Scirocco or Ghost Widow around as examples of "You don't have to be a monster to be a bad guy."

And the contact being in the RWZ just means it CAN be co-op. You don't have to run it co-op. I've been running the SSAs solo or duo with a good friend since they've been coming out.

If you don't want the heroes to succeed at "anything" then don't play the co-op content. Zwill said himself in the thread that they can't account for every single origin/backstory you come up with, so they provide a generalized experience.

And as someone with a few redside characters I rather like the experience I'm provided.

Thanks for not ready any of the posts in this thread. If you're still pandering to the "you can't destroy the world/kill everyone" argument, the receptionist would like to direct you about 4 pages back.

Well, as for that...





Nope. It's not a generalized experience. It is a heroic experience, with the "allow villains too" switch flipped to "on". No matter how much you twist the "you're an idiot if you don't want to survive Armageddon" argument, saving the world is inherently heroic.

And by the way, you're a bit late: the last 18 pages contain on the average one twist of that argument per page. And it's still moot.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

That's unlikely - the SSAs use quite a lot of new art assets, so the biggest return on that time and investment is to use them for both sides.

What about robbing the speakeasy in Port Oakes/Cap Au Diable and standard bank robberies after Mayhems were introduced?

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

One is initiated by Mongoose, the others are initiated by the contacts that you just had to do five "someone else thought of it first" missions for.