Heartsick (*SPOILERS FOR BELLADONNA VETRANO*)

Oh wow, Agenda 21 on the CoH boards. Where's my vomit bag?

My point. It went right over your head.

Not surprised, though.

I don't. I feel a sense of "we could have evacuated everyone who wanted to go and left the rest to the Hamidon back in i19 and spared ourselves this pointless, over-long drawn-out storyline." If I were to be a little less meta about it, I'd add that we also would have spared all the primals who died in Praetoria's invasions (don't give me that crap about Tyrant sparing civilians. When you're knocking down overpasses and blowing up buildings, civilians die.) as well as any Praetorians who would have jumped at the chance to leave but weren't given the option, and died in one of the ultimately pointless Resistance/Loyalist or Praetorian/Primal conflicts.

But then we wouldn't have had the fun of totally crushing the loyalists

Tyrant is absorbed by hamidon. Super hamidon thusly attempts to take over the multiverse, without any of tyrants reservations. Nice job breaking it, hero!

Skyway was ok for an extreme makeover because it was ugly. How is that any different than one group of people saying it's ok to get rid of another group because they're not the right skin color?

Basically, this boils down to "I liked this zone, and I wish they hadn't blown it up." Don't couch it with arguments against the Praetorian war, the Resistance, etc, if all you really care about is a skyscraper.

If you didn't see the Praetorian leadership as anything but sinister, you willfully ignored half the story. People brainwashed and mind controlled into subservience need to be slapped out of it, and sometimes that includes blowing up some of the symbols of their oppression. They need to be shown that there's an actual battle out there, and that they need to choose sides. There is no more neutrality in Praetoria.

The last time some overpowered eldritch abomination tried to take over the multiverse we locked it up. And that one had some experience with destroying dimensions. Hamidon and Tyrant are noobs.

So, that's your opinion then, yes? Because the Destroyers aren't a reliable sources of information, last I recall. Do we have any hard evidence that it wasn't Hamidon that killed off supers during the war?

If you be Rularuu, we didn't lock it up. The Dream Doctor did, using a weapon that was the ONLY means to deal with him.

It had to happen eventually.
Picture it: "It the symbol of his oppression! BURN IT! BURN IT ALL DOWN!"

So, this guy but with fire, huh?

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.

They didn't do a very good job of buring it down - although if they vandalized the elevators first to stick to the Man, and then had to take the stairs to the top, they were probably too out of breath to start a big fire, and their anarchist spirt would rebel against the traditional method of setting fire to the ground floor first and letting the fire work its way naturally upwards, trapping everyone on all the floors above, and they were probably saving all their explosives for use on hospitals and orphanages, which would explain why they didn't simply blow the buildings up.

Or the 5-6 buildings with small fires taking up a couple of windows on each one while 30+ other buildings were untouched could have just been the result of crossfire during the battle.

"Hurting people who've fallen into your hands is the mark of a villain, not a hero."

So is taking enjoyment in the suffering of others, by the way.

The truth of those fires is: Someone left the coffee makers and hotplates running for too long.

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.

They're only in our hands after we crush them - that's how we capture them

A lot of the fun also comes form the sheer scale of what the devs have done - the loyalists are one of the biggest and most complex villain groups in the game, covering 1-50, with their own unique zones, troop types, AVs and history - but instead of the normal temporary victory that we get over other groups, this time the devs have spent almost 2 years carefully setting them up for us to utterly destroy them in the most permanent defeat and destruction of any villain group that's ever been done in the history of the game - they've basically given us a group with the size, scope and depth of Arachnos, but let us crush them in the most spectacular, wide-ranging and comprehensive way possible, even openly telling us which of the AVs have been killed rather than captured, leaving no room for a "world reset".

Add in the fact that ever since GR was first announced the heil brigade have been squealing their "for the greater good" lies just about every thread about Praetoria, but now have to witness the total rout, collapse, defeat and humilation of the loyalist dictatorship, and I23 becomes almost better than sex.

No, he didn't. He said he had good intentions. He may even have believed he had good intentions. But as a dead fictional white guy said, it's the choices you make that determine who you are. Tyrant's choices show who he really is: a bully and a coward (but then I repeat myself), afraid of the rest of the human race.

All of the true monsters in human history, from Chin Shih Huang-Ti through Hitler to Osama bin Laden and whoever else is coming down the pike, committed their atrocities because they thought they were doing good. They were saving their people from evil and corruption, according to them at least. What is so frustrating about this Argument That Will Not Die is that practically everything Tyrant and his regime said and did is cut and pasted from real human history. If you're prepared to argue that Tyrant was really a good guy then you might as well argue that Hitler was just misunderstood.

As for the comparisons made to Paragon City, I wonder exactly how we know what the murder rate is in Skyway City and where this information is available, either on the company website or in game. The truth is that Paragon City is in growth mode. They're rebuilding destroyed areas of the city, building new housing, and that wouldn't be done unless people were moving into the city. The game's artificially-inflated portrayal of criminal activity notwithstanding, people want to live there. Whereas even with everyone drinking the mandatory government-supplied Kool-Aid people were literally dying to get out of Praetoria.

I have to do nothing of the sort. They're not the same person and have no connection to each other. Keep hammering on Godwin's Law, though. If enough people do it, people will stop caring whenever something bad is juxtaposed with the Nazis.

Cole's story is one of a man with good intentions and bad circumstances. Praetorian Earth is a long series of bad circumstances.

Now Cole is in a world with better mentalities (at least, one would think so). He has a chance to see where you can take a chance, can hope that people's better judgement will win over their selfish desires.

Or maybe he'll just run into somebody like you, who will selfishly butcher him when the world is at stake and we need all the help we can get.

He's not the black-and-white madman he was back when he was first conceived. He's not a paragon of morality either, by no means, but nor are any of the heroes in this game.

But they're getting better.

Even Scirocco overcame his villainy and has made a better, more honorable person of himself.

Give the man a chance to redeem himself, or at least let him be imprisoned and learn why what he did was wrong.

If you just kill him, he doesn't learn anything, and those who are still loyal to his cause wind up believing that he was right, that maybe Primal Earth IS a chaotic den of psychopaths and madmen that needs to be culled.

Executing him doesn't solve anything. His city is already destroyed. His society is already crumbled.

Let him live with his shame. Let him learn his guilt.

It's hard to imagine a worse punishment.

They do have a connection to each other; their stories are much the same.

You can say the same about pretty much every dictator (etc.) in human history.

We don't need his help. Even if we do. The price is too high, the risk too great. He's too powerful to be trusted and a greater war criminal by far than anyone executed by the Nuremberg trials. Better that the human race should die to the last person than to make a deal with the devil to try and save it.

Of course he is. He's even more of a madman now. Like all of these guys, when they get cornered in that last bunker (etc.) they finish losing whatever tenuous grasp they had on sanity. Hitler gave the order to destroy Germany when it was clear his number was up; his men just didn't carry it out. Tyrant didn't have to give an order. He did it himself.

I don't think we need much debate to establish that (e.g.) Manticore's use of excessive force against Protean does not even remotely compare to Tyrant's crimes against humanity.

No, he hasn't. He just likes to think he has. He's a terrorist and nothing will ever change that.

There is nothing a war criminal on this scale could do that would possibly redeem him and if he was ever going to realise what he did was wrong it would have happened long, long ago.

They're never going to stop believing he was right. You can't reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

It prevents him from repeating his crimes.

Great. I don't know why, but now I'm picturing Golden Girl and Venture getting married and having kids...

Those nightmares are going to haunt me forever now.

Without engaging in thread necromancy, I think I made my point about that pretty clear when Galaxy City blew up, namely:

I will be very, very disappointed if what comes after the Rikti War, the Council War, the Second Rikti War, the Second Council War, the Praetorian War, and the Battalion War is yet another war.

When I was a kid? Superheroes fought crime. I miss that. Nothing would delight me more than to to spend a year or more leading up to a triumph over corruption in Paragon City and in the US government as thorough as, if hopefully less destructive than, the triumph we just had over the Praetorians. Say, a victory where it's enough to expose their secrets and the whole conspiracy collapses, something like the one we had over the Rikti Lineage of War that all-but ended the Second Rikti War. I would dearly love to expose their secrets in such a way that we see either the Family or Crey or the Circle of Thorns or Wyvern or anybody else engaged in crime and corruption at home go down hard.

Please, don't let me get mod-smacked over this, but I get enough war cheerleading in my daily news, I don't need it in City of Heroes. I get enough fatalism about how we can't ever really triumph over corporate and government corruption in my daily news, I don't need that in City of Heroes, either.

After that we can have another war, if we must. Preferably one that's less grim. I nominate Nemesis, one that features steampunk submarines and brass dirigibles and crazy can't-work inventions. Or maybe something silly, involving numerous but comically incompetent extra-terrestrials. Or maybe some wacky, ill-thought-out scheme by Dr. Aeon and Dr. von Grun involving robotic Magical Flying Rainbow Unicorns. Something not nearly so grim and serious. Something fun.

No, it's more like I do believe in the Moral Event Horizon. You can't backtrack after you've walked off a cliff.

Edit: oh, and I agree with Brad. Less war, more crimefighting. With meaningful consequences plz k thx bai.

I do gotta agree with Venture, to a point. Cole had plenty of chances to do the right thing, but didn't. He could've asked for our help, or not appointed insane people to positions of power. And considering the Destroyers, Syndicate, Crusaders, and even within his own PPD, all the control really didn't stop crime at all. Mind you I wouldn't call Praetoria a prison and still think of it as a society, but Cole effed up and did the wrong thing. He's just as bad as Lord Recluse, except at least Lord Recluse is aware of his evil and plots.

And yeah, if we could get an issue or two of just local crimes and plots, that'd be awesome. When was the last time Crey, or the Trolls, or even the Circle of Thorns had the spotlight?