genuine need or company spite? *spoilers*
By
Aggelakis,
Posted on: 2012-03-29 18:39 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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I can see Positron practicing his Peter Cullen impressions in a mirror going "One shall stand, One shall fall" and then ordering the art team to make him a giant statue of Positron to replace the globe in Atlas Park.
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Originally Posted by Aneko
I can imagine Positron reading this thread, scratching his head and thinking "Wait, what? I'm petty and vindictive?"
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Considering that the devs are embracing the worst parts of superhero comics, we could have had Uatu the Watcher, the Phantom Stranger, Q and the Archangel Michael on hand to certify that Sister Psyche was not merely dead but really and sincerely dead, and STILL have her show up alive in the next SSA.
| He said on the latest UStream that "as far as I'm concerned" she's dead dead - although the producer and lead developer might have other ideas - plus, Verridian is writing the next SSA, not Dr. Aeon - and escape routes for her were totally left open by the way she died |
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"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
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To you.|
Originally Posted by BrandX
Really, even if it wasn't meant to be out of spite, it felt it.
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| That's what it comes down to. |
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| When people were guessing who would die, there were plenty who thought it would be Statesman to get rid of Jack, but they hoped it would be someone else. |
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| Losing Sister Psyche just made it seem even more so, when they could have gotten rid of so many. |
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| And it's not like superteams haven't had multiple psychics on a team before, so the idea of needing to get rid of Sister Psyche so they could put Penny on the team is silly. |
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| Not to mention, even with these deaths, I haven't seen anything that puts my character as the top hero of the city, and I don't even want that. |
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| If the game says you're the top hero, then what are all the other characters you've teamed with and done all the content with? |
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| Personally, I just want to see the game treat you like an A lister, more so if you actually show it, instead of the Superman icon status. |
Lastly, in my opinion, the people who are kvetching about Paragon getting rid of Statesman and assuming it was for purely petty, vindictive motives are the people who can't accept the notion that there was any other reason involved. This is typical in people who make such decisions themselves for the same reasons.
Think on it.
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Obviously, I don't care about NCSoft's forum rules, now.
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When all the characters to die are Jack's characters...what thought do you have on it?|
Originally Posted by Bloodspeaker
To you.
In your opinion. Which is likely to have little or nothing to do with someone ELSE'S reasons for making the decision. An honest point that still has absolutely nothing beyond a coincidental relationship with the actual reason for the decision. All of whom would have upset just as many people, for various and sundry reasons. Irrelevant, if their intent was to maintain the same "balance" the team had previously. The top? I didn't really get that from their prior comments. More relevant in the overall scheme of things? That remains to be seen. And... you don't? Well, that's you. When you're empowered to speak for everyone else that plays the game, please let us know. Your peers. And how is this "new" in the game? I saved Statesman from Tyrant ages ago... just like "everyone else". Funny, I got that feeling around level 40, for the most part. Lastly, in my opinion, the people who are kvetching about Paragon getting rid of Statesman and assuming it was for purely petty, vindictive motives are the people who can't accept the notion that there was any other reason involved. This is typical in people who make such decisions themselves for the same reasons. Think on it. |
Do you believe it to be just a conincedence?
And it's not just /my/ opinion. Others share the opinion.
And I can accept there was other reasons involved. I havent seen any other reason that has made sense though. Care to give me some?
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Seems like a few other people have bought into the Mind Ride Outta There Woman theory I posted a while back (22 Feb 2012) after SSA 1.6 showed up (and stank on ice).
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Originally Posted by Mr_Morbid
I've pretty much assumed that she's mind riding someone ever since I first saw the cutscene. Most likely she's riding Manticore and it was she, not he, who actually fired that arrow.
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Thoughts? Coincidence? Again, entirely irrelevant. I don't form uninformed opinions about such things, much of the time. But perhaps I was trying too hard to explain via implication. Let me try a different tack.|
Originally Posted by BrandX
When all the characters to die are Jack's characters...what thought do you have on it?
Do you believe it to be just a coincidence? And it's not just /my/ opinion. Others share the opinion. And I can accept there was other reasons involved. I haven't seen any other reason that has made sense though. Care to give me some? |
I see absolutely no need to ascribe ridiculous motives to the decision. No, it's not just your opinion. It's apparently fanatically cherished by a great many people. But it's an OPINION. Yes, you're entitled to it... but it's never going to be gospel, until such time as some disgruntled ex-employee writes a tell-all book claiming this was the case, at which point all of you can pat yourselves on your collective backs for being "right all along". You can even form a "drum circle", if that'll help.
At the end of the day, they're still dead. Move on.
Where to find me after the end:
The Secret World - Arcadia - Shinzo
Rift - Faeblight - Bloodspeaker
LotRO - Gladden - Aranelion
STO - Holodeck - @Captain_Thiraas
Obviously, I don't care about NCSoft's forum rules, now.
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We weren't "in their shadows" until the writing put us there, which is a fairly recent development. (Though the trend started as early as i6.) It doesn't matter if there are characters more powerful than the player-characters; in fact there have to be. The world must be bigger than the players in anything but a single-player video game with no ongoing continuity. The DA material is doing a great job of illustrating what the tabletop branch of the hobby figured out in, oh, 1978 or so: great, now you're an Incarnate, just like Arachnos Redshirt #24 and Tsoo Gangster #87. Escalating power levels is a sucker's game, but that's a digression. The issue, again, is the character or characters' gravitas in the narrative.| But how can we do that when we're in the shadows of near-immortals who are of a magnitude more powerful than our characters? |
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| The only way our character can shine story-wise when there is a more powerful generation that just won't die or age out... is to murder them. |
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| The content writers have already diminished the Freedom Phalanx in many ways by setting them up for failure. Positron is no new Mary Sue when villains steal the Fire of Prometheus from him; he was inconsequential in saving Psyche or Statesman; and he gets his entire team snared in Diabolique's trap, requiring us to save them all. |
Making a character fail all the time does not in and of itself exonerate it of Sueness.
The only thing necessary for the players to be at the forefront is to put them there. The game's original model was "there are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them", and it worked. The ever-snowballing trend towards these grandiose plots is never going to produce the desired results.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
I still think we could also see this as just the devs feeling the need to downsize heroside signature characters.
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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.
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I was hoping it was Statesman but thought it would be someone else. |
Originally Posted by BrandX
When people were guessing who would die, there were plenty who thought it would be Statesman to get rid of Jack, but they hoped it would be someone else.
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Originally Posted by Dispari
I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.
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As creators and maintainers of the system ALL credit/blame for MA's structural triumphs/flaws lies with the devs.|
Originally Posted by Zombie Man
There's a lot of problems with the AE, and a lot of those problems rest with decisions by the Devs. But clamping down on the exploit frenzy was not one of those bad decisions. The bad decision was not taking more draconian steps like shutting down the AE (or simply shutting off all rewards) until better anti-exploit clamps were put in place.
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And, not aimed at Zombie Man, but the poor, innovent devs didn't realize mean, nasty players would look for the most efficient reward paths possible justification for their apocalyptically failed overrreaction to players doing what players always do would only hold water if the entire design team had parachuted in from some hidden stronghold in the Arctic where they'd been kept in suspended animation since 2004, utterly unaware of the history of this game, or of pretty much every multiplayer computer game ever released.
Positron reacting like a kid freaking out and taking his ball home because people didn't play the way he expected them to was not appropriate for the lead dev of a major MMO.
But that's all water under the bridge- he's back in a role he's more comfortable with, they've found a lead dev who's more in tune with the requirements of the position, and here we all are, little worse for wear.
I poked my head into MA the other night for the first time in a loooong while, picked a fun looking HOF arc and had a good time with it.
*shrug*
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My City Was Gone
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Positron is still the lead designer |
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
But that's all water under the bridge- he's back in a role he's more comfortable with, they've found a lead dev who's more in tune with the requirements of the position, and here we all are, little worse for wear.
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@Golden Girl
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he's a quality designer.|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Positron is still the lead designer
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Figurehead, not so much.
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My City Was Gone
Once upon a time in America, maybe 40-50 years or so ago, our political leaders were expected to avoid the appearance of impropriety. A credible accusation was enough to drive someone out of public life. Now, you can commit adultery in the White House, lie about it to Congress and not only not go to jail but still be president.
Whether or not greasing Jack Emmert's characters was done out of spite isn't the point. The point is that it can be perceived as having been done out of spite (and various comments have fostered that perception, deserving or not). For that reason alone it shouldn't have been done. No one was putting a gun to anyone's head to force the use of these characters. They could have been quietly allowed to fade into the background if the company felt it needed to move past them. Killing those characters might not have been petty and vindictive, but it was certainly poor judgement.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
And then some of us grew up, and realized that appearance alone does not constitute fact. This is quite aside from the notion that, even if they DID "kill Jack's characters" out of spite... so what? Frankly, I'm monumentally unconcerned with any such reasons for the decision. To me, they didn't "kill Jack's characters", they killed Statesman, Sister Psyche and Malaise. I could posit any number of viable theories as to why these specific characters were chosen. They'd be as devoid of factual support as THIS drivel. The only pettiness and spite I see clear evidence of is among the players who are so desperate to see it in someone else.
Where to find me after the end:
The Secret World - Arcadia - Shinzo
Rift - Faeblight - Bloodspeaker
LotRO - Gladden - Aranelion
STO - Holodeck - @Captain_Thiraas
Obviously, I don't care about NCSoft's forum rules, now.
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There are those comments where you read over and over and try to make sense and all you can do is just... well...|
Originally Posted by Venture
Once upon a time in America, maybe 40-50 years or so ago, our political leaders were expected to avoid the appearance of impropriety. A credible accusation was enough to drive someone out of public life. Now, you can commit adultery in the White House, lie about it to Congress and not only not go to jail but still be president.
Whether or not greasing Jack Emmert's characters was done out of spite isn't the point. The point is that it can be perceived as having been done out of spite (and various comments have fostered that perception, deserving or not). For that reason alone it shouldn't have been done. No one was putting a gun to anyone's head to force the use of these characters. They could have been quietly allowed to fade into the background if the company felt it needed to move past them. Killing those characters might not have been petty and vindictive, but it was certainly poor judgement. |
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What leads you to deduce that I ignored the group discussions that you mention? I came to a different conclusion about the significance and motivations for those discussions than you arrived at, or so it seems. I get the sense from your writing that you prefer to take the stance that we can't know the motivations and that we shouldn't draw any such conclusions. I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge the truth of that stance. That acknowledgement does not change any of my own conclusions for me, personally, however. Your mileage may vary.|
Originally Posted by TheDeepBlue
Tell me, at what point did you decide to ignore the part where killing Statesman had been previously discussed as a group, decided against, then brought up again much later and discussed as a group again, where it was decided that it was a more acceptable plot line? How can you be sure that a desire to separate Paragon from its roots at Cryptic was the actual motivation for deciding to kill Statesman and/or Sister Psyche? How would you know if the statement above isn't just how Miller ended up feeling about the death of Statesman, instead of being at cause for it?
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Let me ask you something, and then I'll be finished with this discussion because I've already worked it through and I'm ready to put it behind me. What do you feel that it says about the corporate culture at Paragon Studios that when Positron brought his new Freedom teams together and said "Give me great ideas, people!" that the response he got was "Can we kill Statesman, NOW?" Not just as a fact standing alone, but in concert with the "revelation" that they'd had similar discussions in the past about killing him?
(Since you bothered to search those prior postings of mine, I'll point out a fact that you might have missed from them - When the death of Marcus Cole was announced, an ex-Paragon Studios developer posted on the facebook stream of a mutual friend that Matt had been wanting to kill Statesman for years. I am not going to name him here, just to avoid the possibility of causing him trouble, and if that means that anyone who reads this chooses to see it as an unprovable statement or a lie, I don't anticipate losing any sleep over it.)
Does any of this make Matt or anyone else at Paragon Studios "vindictive" or petty? No; it's their game and they can do whatever they please with it. I WISH that they treated it more as OUR (the players') game because I get tired of them either not supporting the back story or screwing around with it because it's "old" and some new guy wants to write HIS story, and then pulling crap like the destruction of the flagship character for no good reason other than wanting him dead and out of the game.
The fact that I'm still hanging around in spite of those things is a testament to the quality of City of Heroes in comparison to most of the competition. My continues support of the game does not, however, comprise some kind of ringing endorsement of the game's direction. I respect Matt but I don't like his story telling. I'm hoping that with Melissa in the producer's seat that we might see something more like what I came to this game for eight years ago.
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The thing is, he's not wrong.|
Originally Posted by SpyralPegacyon
There are those comments where you read over and over and try to make sense and all you can do is just... well...
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So, here's a story. I used to be room-mates with a guy who was going to law school. (He has since become a lawyer, but at least he's not an ambulance-chaser. But I digress...)
One of his favorite sayings was "Not only do you have to avoid impropriety, you have to avoid the appearance of impropriety." It's not enough to just follow the rules, you have to look like you're not trying to break the rules.
So, what does this have to do with the topic at hand?
Simply put, were the characters that died in the SSA killed out of spite? I don't know. You don't know. For all we know, the writer(s) don't know; they were merely given an outline and told "X, Y, and Z die. Write me a story around it."
But to an outsider (i.e. non-employee), who only knows that Statesman, Sister Psyche and Malaise were characters created by Jack Emmert, does it have the appearance of targeting his creations? Well, yes. If it had been Statesman, Positron and ... oh, say, Wretch who had died, we wouldn't be having this conversation. That in itself says something.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Storyline wise, any of the Surviving Eight dying has a significant effect on the overall game, with, quite obviously, Statesman having the largest impact. That Sister Psyche also died is almost certainly going to lead somewhere for Manticore's character development. And Malaise? Well... okay, they can't all have large impacts on the story.
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Oh, I see. If it's either the case of X or the case of not-X, then you're right anyways.|
Originally Posted by Venture
Anti-Sue. Suetiful All Along.
Making a character fail all the time does not in and of itself exonerate it of Sueness. |
I see very clearly now.
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Makes sense. If someone says Posi isn't a Mary Sue because he's failed, then Statesman isnt a Mary Sue, since he's failed. Or am I the only one who ran the arc to save him when he was captured?|
Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Oh, I see. If it's either the case of X or the case of not-X, then you're right anyways.
I see very clearly now. |
Being captured is a failure.
Oh, want to give him another failure to show he's not a Mary Sue. Couldn't save his daughter! The most powerful of superheroes, and he couldnt protect his child.
BrandX Future Staff Fighter
The BrandX Collection
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Well said. I'll be taking that as my cue to exit the discussion, thank you.
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Originally Posted by Bloodspeaker
The only pettiness and spite I see clear evidence of is among the players who are so desperate to see it in someone else.
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'I don't like the look of it at all,' said the King: 'however, it may kiss my hand if it likes.'
'I'd rather not,' the Cat remarked.
'Don't be impertinent,' said the King, 'and don't look at me like that!' He got behind Alice as he spoke.
'A cat may look at a king,' said Alice.
Reading all this back and forth I get feeling when I get around to playing this I'll finish it, say to myself "huh, that was pretty fun!" and happily go on with my day.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
If his crazy nasty rant to the players was any indication of his interaction with his co-workers then I could see someone doing things to get back at him out of spite. It would not be the first time a human being reacted in that way and if true it would not be the last.
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
If you'd spent six months working on something, only to have the people you presented it to immediately smash it to bits and use the bits to try to get high, wouldn't you be a little bit upset?
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Shoving MA out the door in the shape it was in and flipping out when players "exploited" is exactly as rational as giving a giant hookah pipe to a village of Rastafarians then losing your mind when they didn't use it to smoke tobacco like you expected.|
Originally Posted by Megajoule
If you'd spent six months working on something, only to have the people you presented it to immediately smash it to bits and use the bits to try to get high, wouldn't you be a little bit upset?
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Gamers are simple, predictable creatures.
Designers who claim shock and surprise when gamers seek the most efficient reward path they can find are not credible.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Let´s see, Statesman, Sister Psyche, Malaise... probably just coincidence that all three dead characters were Jack`s.
Yeah, totally out of spite. At least don´t do it so fracking obvious. I mean, all three in ONE story arc?
SRSLY?!
I really don´t mind killing States, would´ve just wished to do it myself. Psyche was clearly a Stuffed Into The Fridge thingy for Manticore.
But Malaise...WTF?! You can´t just go and kill the Vindicator´s Token Evil Teammate, that´s just bad writing.
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