New Spring Fling missions [SPOILERS]

And...this would be...bad...how?

You keep missing or outright ignoring the point. It doesn't matter WHO Countess Crey really is so much as that she's a MURDERER. Once we know she stole another woman's identity, she can no longer hide behind lawyers. The only reason she can hide behind lawyers in the first place is Crey Security are very good at making evidence disappear. Countess Crey's true identity IS evidence that she's a murderer and a con artist.

Revealing her true identity, regardless of what the name of that identity is, removes her singularly defining character trait - the ability to commit crimes and escape justice. That's not just a spoiler, that's an utter ruination of pre-40 Crey as a whole.

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 don't want to play Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, either, but we really don't have to. It's a question of presentation and story structure. Most Crey arcs shouldn't be told as a fight against a paramilitary organisation, but rather as a hunt for clues and evidence, with Crey personnel always inventing some weak excuse for why they're getting involved. In fact, the hero-side Crey story arc that eventually unmasks Clarissa/Julianne is a perfect example of this, at least right at the start.

You're asked to check out a warehouse in relation to a missing girl and you find Crey there, looking to cover up evidence. Their own presence is an admission that they are involved even if clues to that effect don't exist yet, and Crey can claim that they were just securing the warehouse. You go looking for clues about Julianne, with Crey hounding you at every step, proving that they have something to hide. Only towards the end when you get enough evidence against Crey in general and Clarissa in particular does your contact start sending you to Crey facilities without saying how "Your reputation is shot, you might as well do this." Said contact even mentions warrants repeatedly.

That's really the key thing. Crey arcs need to be handled like detective stories. Fighting them head-on isn't the issue. It's finding enough evidence to get a court order permitting you to raid their facilities, THEN fighting them openly that's the real heart of the story.

Once upon a time, I postulate that one of the biggest rewards from story arcs was the revelations they brought about the enemy groups they dealt with. I was always eager to run another story arc just because each one was, in its own way, a mystery, and I was eager to learn what other exciting and cool ideas the writers had come up with for giving what at first appeared to be bland enemies some added depth. Yeah, the actual writing in terms of style, spelling, grammar and presentation wasn't all that great, but it spoon-fed me a conga-line of amazing ideas that really kept me interested well into my first year of playing this game.

Then City of Villains came out, and it seemed like all the good ideas had run out, so now out story arcs were all thug work. Go there, beat up that guy, come back to me, get paid. Plot? What plot? You do as you're told, that's your plot. You're a thug for hire. Do you expect to have a story to follow? Your story is you do as I say and you get paid. Revalations? What revelations. City of Villains factions don't have the kind of depth it takes to support any revelations. What you see is what you get. These factions don't have any secrets you can't learn from reading the various members' info windows.

This really bugs me, honestly. There's very little mystery left in the game. And, OK, you can argue that that's to be expected. I've been here for coming on eight years now and I know everything. I'll give you that. But if all of this new content since 2004 had incorporated a bit more of a mystery that ISN'T resolved within three missions of being brought up (or in extreme cases, within the same paragraph it's brought up in), then I'd have had a LOT more mysteries to tackle. And even though I'd probably know all of that stuff anyway, I would and do enjoy going through the old storylines, pretending I don't know the plot that my character really shouldn't, and that's still enjoyable after all these years.

We need mysteries. Much as I decry the Letter Writer, I ma genuinely excited to learn who it is and what his plan is. Yeah, it took FAR too long for that to develop, but now that I know it is... I want to know. I'm not a big fan of Darrin Wade as the evil Batman, but to be honest, I was really looking forward to learning who it was that was standing always just out of shot. Hell, even First Ward counts, even if it feels like three consecutive arcs are just a retread of the "What are the Apparitions? Well, do this side quest before you can learn that." Or it WOULD count if the hole in the sky above the Gozer building were ever explained, if the Claws of Vengeance were ever explained, if Circe the Sorceress were ever really explored or if the whole story arc weren't paced so 3/4 of its runtime is devoted to 1/3 of its plot. But that's just splitting hairs, really.

I don't want to see old mysteries "spoiled." On the contrary, I want new ones introduced.

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 really wish they would invest in hiring a story editor-- someone who would know (and care about) the game's lore, while overseeing every mission that gets produced.

I think it's great that we are supposed to be able to "play our own way" and each character has their own story... but the writers shouldn't follow that same rule, with their stories so independant of each other that they might as well be different universes at times.

It may seem like a double standard, but you're completely right. Players need to be allowed the freedom to write their own stories as they see fit, because those stories affect only the players who wish to acknowledge them. They are not canon. Writers who write canon stories cannot and should not try to do the same. Their stories affect all players that play through them and fit together to create a consistent, persistent world.

Players should be allowed to write whatever they can get away with, but staff writers really need to follow a more structured, consistent approach.

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 thought they were doing a good job of setting up a mystery with the Who Will Die arcs, but then they went and posted a banner on the official front page letting us know that Statesman was going to die in part 5 a month ahead of it's release. When it was released I found part 5 MUCH less enjoyable than the others since I already knew how it was going to turn out. Compare that to part 3 which is, imo, the best segment of WWD so far. That one had a death in it that I wasn't expecting and made me much more vested in the story.

Crey is unsubtly portrayed as the evil corporation overlord right from the get-go. Murder is the least of their sins that I would be expecting of them or the ones running the show. And whether it's done by the real Countess Crey whom I can't touch because lack of evidence (as if that should ever stops a licensed vigilante... but this is the whole Lex Luthor schtick going on here), or by an impostor whom I can't touch because of lack of evidence -- her identity becomes a non-issue and a surprise which registers no emotional investment.

But that lack of emotional investment is my point which you keep missing or outright ignore. Without emotional investment, a supposed surprise is just a new bit of information, like, it didn't rain even though it was forecast.

The difference is that if she's an impostor, you CAN prove it. It really is that dead simple. If we know Countess Crey is Julianne Thompson, then it's a simple matter of exhuming Julianne's body and testing it, then discovering it is Clarissa's body, instead. In the story arc this comes up with, this is as simple as "Hand me that bowl of chicken bones... And the identity of the body is... Clarissa von Dorn?!?"

At this point, it's not a hunch or a case of insufficient evidence. Her real identity IS the evidence that she's a murderer. All of Crey's other crimes can never be linked to the countess directly, but a crime she committed with her own two hands very much can.

Well, of course. If you don't care, you don't care and there's nothing to be done about it. But I care, and I see no reason to spoil a story I care about when you wouldn't have cared either way. Overall, I find "I don't care about this" arguments to be somewhat unfair as a general thing, because they gain the person making them nothing while taking away from those who do care.

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.

Leaving aside the fact that I HAAATE SSA3 for the pointless shock death delivered for no reason other than to be darker and edgier, I do want to argue about how much mystery the SSAs have. Mind you, I don't disagree with what you said regarding the slow reveal of the SSA plot, but I'm not sure if I'd specifically call that a mystery. Perhaps a semantic argument, but hear me out.

To me, a mystery is the lack of explanation for either a fact or a past event. Who framed Roger Rabbit? What is the true nature of the Rikti? How does Superadine relate to inter-dimensional travel? All of these are mysteries, because they already exist as concepts, we simply don't understand them, and to me, that's the most exciting kind of reveal - when I know something has an explanation, but it simply eludes me.

What isn't a mystery is, ironically enough, "who will die." What will happen in the future is not a mystery, because what will happen in the future is subject to change by means of our actions. You could call it suspense, or even foreboding, but time travel aside (in which case the future actually is the past in terms of plot act sequence), the future is not set. We don't work to uncover the future as we do to uncover our lost past. We work to shape the future, and that's something entirely different.

Mind you, neither history nor suspense are better or worse than each other. They both have their place and, really, I feel a good story should have both. What I am saying, though, is that we've had a lot of suspense in recent storylines, but comparatively little mystery. It's always a question of what happens next and very rarely a question of what happened before. I always emphasise the history of the City of Heroes world, because to me, that really is where so much of its wonder lies. There's only so much you can show in the limited screen time a story arc provides, but there is SO MUCH history you can bring in to shape what you're showing without needing much screen time to do it. History doesn't need to be retold in narrative, because history shapes the future, and if events are shaped to conform to a common history, just going through those events is enough to show us the stories of the past.

Rularuu is an easy example. Pretty much everything we know of his past comes down to two names: Rularuu the Ravager and the Dream Doctor. There are specifics about the Shadow Shard, but for all the times the Soldiers of Rularuu have been involved in other people's content, they never seem to bring any sort of history or culture with them. We see them as replace-the-name monsters from time to time, but they never act in a way which infers the history that brought them to be or the nature of their existence.

I want to point back to a single line from one of the game's worst TFs - the Dr. Quaterfield TF:

This is never followed upon, obviously, but the implications of this are very interesting. Yes, it's part of that TF's plot, but it implies that the Rularuu are not just mindless monsters who attack anything on sight. It implies that they are highly intelligent, goal-driven and even technologically-savvy creatures, and you really wouldn't guess that from looking at them. That's the kind of revelation and the kind of mystery that really makes me sit up in my chair and start paying attention to my briefings and clues. Because this matters, because it's interesting, and because it represents a mystery I really want to solve.

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.

Well, that's largely because of exactly what you called it - Praetoria's "new" trick. If we could go back and recode half of the game, I'm pretty sure that Crey would be neutral until you actually started in on those story arcs, and then they'd be hostile toward you. Which would be a really darn neat way of handling it, honestly.

Actually, that'd be a damn neat way of handling a lot of things, if it could be managed. Nemesis automatons in the guise of office workers? Neutral unless you attacked, and then they open up (makes those weird gossip bits a little creepier, too). During the one or two times when you're "framed and wanted by the police", the random PPD patrols are hostile (fortunately, that doesn't happen often).

Right now, however, that tech hasn't been imported into Paragon, and as a result, it's pretty darn obvious from the first time you see them that Crey are... well, thugs, really. They behave like every other thug you see in the game, mugging hapless citizens in Brickstown, right along with the Freakshow. Honestly, the Council are slightly better behaved, at least they mostly just give lectures and terrorize a few less people.

So who are you going to get? Someone from the Praetorian masses, who's been fully inculcated with the 'Emperor Cole is your Saviour' bushwa and is going to be completely overshadowed by him, someone from the Praetorian Resistance, who'll look at it as a way to get close to Marcus Cole to be able to off him and free Praetoria, or someone from another Earth, who'll be there constantly reminding him that there are other worlds not under his 'benevolent' control?

Many times through earlier level content, you're sent to save Crey facilities under attack by various villains. All over the city, you see billboards advertising Crey products. On numerous occasions, Crey actually help provide supplies to forward your story.

Just because you've never run into Crey Security, that doesn't mean Crey themselves aren't part of the story. Until I12, the Midnight Club didn't exist as an actual faction, but it was still well explored in the story. You keep hearing about their old labs, about their old researchers, you meet former members, you use their arcane knowledge, you run across their old books, many people remember all the things they did in their heyday.

Once you get to level 30, you're already starting to piece together that Crey is an evil corrupt corporation, but it's featured in storylines far earlier than that.

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.

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.