All Hail Arachnos!

You know, given you're not ending these statements with your usual winkies, it makes me wonder if you're being serious and if there's a tone of bitterness that the text doesn't convey in your posts?

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'll have you know that I clean and polish my impervium alloy on a regular basis!

Penelope Yin needs to BE a sidekick.

That said, I like Arachnos, but not directly. I like what they represent, which at this point is "the old guard" of villainy before we went into this extra-dimensional, high-talking malarkey. Recluse and his cronies represent what villains were when they were real villains with real villainous plans, rather than "antagonists" we have right now, who generally deviate between jerkasses and anti-heroes and it's always gods and super monsters and such forcing their hand. Arachnos also represents a time when villains were allowed and indeed expected to be bad, as opposed to rooming with heroes for the greater good.

For all of their factions and infighting and politics and all that, Arachnos is a remarkably uncomplicated, fitting villain group that can serve as both an antagonist and an ally without really suffering villain decay. They just do a good job.

However, I don't like Arachnos from a stylistic point of view. They come across as a fantasy group masquerading as a sci-fi group, like those black leather aliens from the Chronicles of Riddick. Compare them with the Council, for instance - these guys are a paramilitary organisation structured around a industrial era military discipline. Arachnos, by contrast, are structured like the court of Sauron. Their sense of aesthetics doesn't help. Bound and masked mystics, bucket-helmet psychics and soldiers with spider fangs on their helmets, all taking place in the world's most poorly-lit bases that waste more space being suspended in a black void than makes any logical sense. Seriously, does someone dig a square mile of bedrock out of the ground just so he can suspend mesh-walled corridors from the ceiling for the sake of being ominous? What IS outside of those hallways anyway?

Nothing with Arachnos looks like it was designed with function in mind. Their uniforms seem to have been desigend primarily to resemble spiders and to be menacing before they were designed to be functional, their "helicopters" look like giant bugs and land on three spikes which never seem to sink into the ground despite carrying a huge machine's full weight, their robots look like spiders for no reason and the whole thing just comes off like someone sat down and designed the most obviously evil organisation he could think of.

And "survival of the fittest" is a bad way to run a country, because you end up running a slum, as is evident from the isles. Recluse rules his country like a slob, giving me the impression he doesn't want to rule it in the first place, he's just letting it decay for a couple of decades while he has other plans cooking, intending to abandon it as soon as a better option pops up. I guess that's a good motivation for a villain, but it makes him a terrible ruler which takes away from his prestige somewhat. You'd think he'd tidy up the place where he lives a little more, maybe install a few more lights so he doesn't destroy his eyes, cover up some of that exposed wiring so it looks nice. Nope! He lives in a place that looks like it was converted into a conference room while construction on it was only half finished. It's all big ominous towers with spikes and alien-looking tech with wires hanging out, and always so dark I need a flashlight to avoid tripping over the zillions of changes in elevation.

That's their shtick, though. I personally wish Praetoria wasn't in another dimension, but was instead a few more islands in the Rogue Isles chain with cleaner cities and better rulers. CoV-side needs that contrast.

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.

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.

You wonder wrongly

I like Penny, and have zero problem with her joining the Phalanx and helping us out when we need it - I find all this weeping over her promotion very silly

well there you go. When you've spent most of the time one forums using winkies to denote that you're joking and stop doing it when you still are joking I think you can understand it can get a bit confusing.

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.

The 5th Column could have made for good villains, and Requiem is one of my favourite bad guys in the game. However, they were never THE villain group, they were just one of many. That distinction has really only ever been given to the Ritki, to Arachnos and now to the Praetorians. Hell, read the Rikti's description some time. They're "the biggest threat Earth has ever faced"

I like Arachnos because they held the place as biggest, baddest villains, but that in itself kind of sunk them, because the writers felt compelled to shove them into EVERYTHING. I get introducing them hero-side where Arachnos had very little presence, which is why I don't mind them being in Faultline at all. What I DO mind is everything and anything villain-side being sent through the Arachnos bottleneck. Wanna' take down some random villain? It's to gain favour in Arachnos. Wanna' make some money on the side? It's by working for Arachnos. Wanna' go mess Paragon City up? It's Arachnos who take you there. And when you're not doing all that, your grand objective is to join Arachnos. THAT is what made so many people reject them back in the day.

Because they're so omni-present and we kick them in the teeth so often, they lose face. If I were redoing the Isles, I'd make them a collection of independent states. Arachnos would hold Mercy Island and Grandville, and then have either embassies or safehouses on all the others, but the other islands would not belong to them. Here's how I'd do it:

Port Oaks: The port belongs to Guido "The Mooch" Verandi and downtown belongs to Emil Marcone. The dockside is your poor people's working are while Marconeville is the clean, shiny sin city where people with fancy suits drive nice cars.

Cap Au Diable: Doc Aeon, the mad scientist, rules the island from behind the facade of a puppet government in the hands of Marshal Brass, an ambitious upstart who wants to kill the good doctor and take control of the island for real. Aeon City would be a city of the future - a clean, safe, happy and perfect ivory tower for the select few patrons of the good doctor who directly benefit from his experiments and fund his research. The rest of the city would be a slim for the refugees who gather at the walls of Aeon City, but are denied entry.

Sharkhead Island: Kirk Kage more or less bought an island for himself and move in on the local population. He lives in his secluded villa off the coast in decadent luxury while forcing the people of the island to work in his mine for minimum wage or be run out of town. Clashes often take place between his heavy-handed, brutish guards and rioters from the local populace. At the same time, the Family help run the docks and handle shipping of "sensitive" materials for a fat cut of the profit.

Nerva Archipelago: A small chain of islands formed together into an independent state. Lacking any sort of muscle, the local governor has requested assistance from Longbow in order to keep the peace and deal with pirates in the local waters, going as far as to lease an old fort to them for an indefinite period of time, as well as handing over excavation rights on the uninhabited island of Primeva. As the only island with a legitimate, non-corrupt government, Crey have taken this opportunity to set up a branch of their corporation in the hopes of turning the archipelago into a company town, trying to employ as much of the population as they can, as well as presenting a good face by assisting Longbow.

St. Martial Island: Using his meteoric success and mob connections, Johnny Sonata was "elected" as governor of the island, vowing to save it from poverty by turning the place in the one of the world's premier tourist destinations. Using the massive renovation of the entire island's populated areas as cover, Johnny reconstructs St. Martial into a giant protection seal to keep the Wailers away from his soul. The city is an ever-gleaming, every shiny paradise for tourists from all over the world, with poor people being forced into underground sewers or walled-off ghettos where hapless tourists are unlikely to run across them.

Terra Nova Island: A new zone consisting of a single small independent nation, ruled by Lord Nemesis himself, who constructed the island with his own technology in the middle of the ocean. It is a perfect utopia where every citizen is provided for in all ways, no-one has to lift a finger and machines do all the work. All are welcome on Terra Nova so that they may witness the truth of Nemesis' ways, provided they obey the law to the letter. Local residents are forbidden from leaving the island, however, not that they'd want to. Can technology really support this kind of utopia, or is there more at work here?

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.

What makes them so epic is that they're so comicbook-y - like there's no attempt by them to present themselves as anything other that evil - they even embrace the title of villains

Quite agree, quite agree.

I also think that the current names of key Arachnos members cause a bit of confusion. Why don't we change them just to keep it clear? How about:

Lord Recluse -----> Bruce
Black Scorpion -----> Bruce
Captain Mako -----> Bruce
Ghost Widow -----> Bruce
Scirrocco -----> Bruce

Amen!

I nominate my ss/invuln brute Lucky Dragon! They totally bonded during Faultline arcs.

She's a dark/dark dom before dark control existed. She actually is dark miasma/dark blast with a dark armor power and a few custom powers

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.