*spoilers* The Freedom Phalanx are incompetent!

That's really what gets up my craw, to be honest. Actually, "that" is two separate things.

1. The deadlines. With Freedom, the development team chose to give themselves a ridiculous deadline for EVERYTHING. It doesn't matter how complex or simple a new piece of content it, its deadline is always short of what you'd need to deliver a well-rounded, complete product. Even if it's something that doesn't take a lot of time, it feels like they intentionally give it even less time than that so they can squeeze in more stuff. This ends up producing a LOT of mediocre results.

2. The complexity. Ever since the Architect came out, the development team have sworn to outdo player Architects with official content. Originally, I thought that just meant buckling down and committing to better writing and higher quality, but instead it seems to mean cramming their missions full of scripts players simply don't have access to. This leads to every mission being so complex and constituting such a high opportunity cost that we never get much screen time for anything. Not everything has to be so complex, guys!

The result of both of this is every bit of content that comes out feeling it was cut for time. Well, more slaughtered for time, really. And it doesn't have to be this. There's nothing wrong with the game that requires you to script over it so completely. City of Heroes is a good game. USE IT! Write your story as directions for the action, but rely on the solid game that you have to carry that action. Use combat system, use your spawning system, use your information delivery systems and don't be afraid to ask me to actually play the game for half an hour without you holding my hand the entire time.

Honestly, it feels like the mission designers are trying to look over our shoulder as we play the whole time. It's like trying to team with someone who's already done the content, so he's constantly going "Don't go there, it's a dead end. OK, watch out, boss coming! Here, stand in this spot so you can see the cutscene. Back up now, enemies spawning." and on and on and ******* on! Really, mission designers. Let me play the game. I like the game. I like playing the game. You don't need to replace the whole game with your own scripts. You're wasting your time, you're wasting my time and you're producing an inferior product!

I say budget your cutscenes and complex scripts like animated series budget their animation. Watch any series and you'll note that the most expensive episodes are right at the start, somewhere around the middle and right at the end. Why? Because "exciting" is costly, and you're better off saving it so you can make a small selection of moments REALLY special than wasting it to make ALL moments utterly mediocre.

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.

It's not a question of us as players doing a better job than the developers. It's a question of the developers doing a better job AS developers and as storytellers.

Do you never go to a movie with family or friends, and then go out for coffee or drinks or a meal and then discuss and argue about what you just saw and whether it was good, bad, or indifferent and how it could have been improved?

That's all that's happening here. I don't see why it should be a cause for consternation.

More importantly, the SSA is a commercial product. It's not some free giveaway where you should just be grateful that someone took the trouble to make it for you.

As a VIP, it's one of your perks that justifies the monthly subscription expenditure. It's not really "free of charge" because that list of perks is the reason that you're making that expenditure. Even if you don't think about the SSA most of the time, you'd notice if the list of perks started shrinking and at some point you'd decide that there were too few perks to justify the sub.

As a Premium player, the SSA is an outright purchase at $5 per chapter. That means that as a premium player I will lay out $35 for the entire story if I want to experience it. $35 is more than the list price of pretty much every box there's ever been for the game except maybe for the initial releases of the collector's editions of CoH and CoV. You can be damn sure that if I spend more money on a single story than I ever spent in the past on an entire expansion set that I expect that story to be the greatest content ever published in the history of the game.

You can snort and say that's unrealistic but I'm not the one who priced the story as if it was more valuable than an entire expansion like Going Rogue or any of the themed super packs we had in the past. If Paragon Studios markets their products at premium prices then they'd better deliver premium products. As customers, we need to take them to task if they fail in that duty to publish a product that delivers value for the dollar, unless we're actually patrons and we're just tossing donations at them and not really buying their product.

In short, the "plot analysis" is just as much "market analysis" and you can be sure that the Powers That Be are keeping a close eye on how this initial foray into episodic content is being received. It behooves us as players to let them know exactly where they succeeded and exactly where they need to improve.

The biggest complaint in this thread, if you boil it down to a single sentence, is "We need more story!" Not, "This sucks!". I think that the devs at Paragon Studios are thick-skinned enough to handle that sort of criticism without throwing up their hands and saying "Fine, you don't like it then YOU do it better!"

True, true, but it's not never as complex as that. I originally started this thread because I teamed with the Freedom Phalanx, and they performed worse than a random, dead air pick-up group. They fumbled, they argued, they couldn't do what they should have been expected to do, and it just served to destroy these people as characters in a persistent world.

Needing more story was born out of the need to make peace with the story as it was told. Maybe if we'd gotten more context and more background, then maybe we'd understand WHY these people acted as they did and they won't seem as incompetent and malicious. And while that's possible... I honestly just don't feel that they should have been written as such bad heroes to begin with.

I do agree with most people that having more screen time for character development would make for better stories overall, as we could "get" where these people are coming from. But in a larger way, I just don't "feel" the darker and edgier storylines we've been getting recently. Even when they make sense and they're justified, I still just don't "feel" them.

I don't want to get anyone fired or make anyone feel like crap. Far from it, I feel it is our responsibility as players to guide the development team, to show them what we want to buy, so that they can make money and we can get cool stuff in return. And, really, if you look up and down the thread (and I've read every post), it's littered with suggestions on various ways stories can be improved. That has to be worth something.

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.

The original miniseries of "Shogun!" is around eight hours long. My wife rented a video version of it a while back, but it was distilled down to around TWO hours. It was like watching a long trailer. Everything was cut down, and dialogue, etc., that explained motivations vanished. Even the camera shots were cut down to MTV quickness. Having seen the original, this version was painful to watch, and it completely confused my wife. We later got the uncut version on DVD and she enjoyed that.

This may explain pretty much why I thought the SSAs, up through the death of Statesman, have been awful: the story is a bare-bones cut-down. Who knows if the full story is any good? We never saw it. Many folks have fleshed out the details in their posts, but that is more than we got officially.

And as Slick Riptide has pointed out, the SSAs are promoted and priced as UltraExcellent Good Stuff. They should be Epic. As it is, I thought they were lame, but I think upon reflection, they are just really, really incomplete stories, probably due to time constraints. And that is actually just a shame. I wish they were Epic.

Good Lord! Talk about a crime against story telling! I can't even begin to imagine how you could hack up Shogun in such a manner...

Precisely.

My whole interest in being a VIP is the monthly content additions, not the iTrials, nor the points, nor the tokens, not even the honor of playing in Exiled server. It's all about the content. Sadly, and to put it bluntly, I'm extremely disappointed with the hero-side SSAs.

- Lenght - 3 missions/month that can be played in 10 minutes is extremely short;
- Plot - overly predictable, overly depressing;
- Characterization - hero missions portrait the NPC heroes as bickering, incompetent morons and keep sugar-coating every dumb move my PC character makes;
- Tone - death, grief, failure, no sense of accomplishment whatsoever, hate it;
- Outcome - I can't see this end well for heroes;
- Soloability - not all characters are capable of facing bosses and Elite Bosses while exemplared to lvl 20, worse, only the leading character in a team will get to see the in-mission dialogues;
- Rewards - if there are 7 different missions, the reward table should take that into account and offer 7 different rewards.

On the other hand, the SSAs are quite enjoyable when played by a villain character. If it were up to me, I'd give whoever's writing red-side a raise, and whoever's writing blue-side the boot. If both writers happen to be the same person, put someone else in charge of blue-side.