Ms. Liberty Task Force?

He's Welsh. Leave him be.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

It hasn't shown that anyone is the star of the game.

And they didn't do it earlier because it would of been a worse time to do it then. Notice how in SSA 1, all the characters that died where tied to Jack. That isn't a conincidence.

As for BABs, let him rot.

He's not as great a character as people make out. Statesman had just as much if not more story but people's dislike of States comes from their hate of Jack, hate of Superman, hate of costume heroes (and dont kid yourself, there are plenty in this game who hate costume heroes, but still play CoH) or combination of it all.

BABs also had a dev who people generally (not all of course) liked.

These last few issues actually have though, we are no longer just a single hero in a city of heroes, but rather THE hero like Statesman was.
This is reflected in the latest story arcs, no longer do we seem to be working alongside X signature hero because they can't be bothered to do Y task. Now they are coming to us because THEY need OUR help.

In regards to Statesman though, he was seen as a character who could never die and thus had a boring story gameplay wise. How many times can a good story be told against a hero that cannot be killed?


Thank you for your positive and constructive post, in future reference however could you please private message me if my method of posting annoys you. I do 4/5 things at once and so i do have the odd spelling mistake, if however you do not wish to do it in a constructive manner then feel free to have me on ignore instead of trying to "show me up" on public forums.
Thank you

I don't see it as trying to show you up.

Some people (my self not excepted) have a few Grammar-peeves and they ca't help it. I myself have accepted this about myself. (accept/except, affect/effect).

On a non-related note, nice avatar.

If that is the case then i'll gladly hold my hands up and say i was wrong and that i am sorry

Thank you also

We have always been the star of this game and it has gone through several major changes.

Statesman was simply the iconic hero of the game. In many ways the game was built around him - the foundations of the game if you like.

He was an easy target to kill off because of his connection to Jack but therein lies the mistake that has been made.

The devs have removed States because he was Jack's character. Let's all be honest here. There was no other reason. What they should have done is to develop the character when Jack left and made it entirely their own.

There was plenty of scope to develop Statesman. DC have been doing it with a similar type character for decades and they're still going strong with it.

IMHO killing off Statesman is harmful to this game.

When you start stripping away things that made this game what it still is today, you run the risk of irreversibly changing a winning formula.

So ... again .... Who gains from killing off Statesman?

Us?

I don't think so.......

Don't ignore the fact that Jack created the Statesman character prior to working on CoH. If he decided to get spiteful and threaten a copyright lawsuit (which I don't think anyone would put past him), Paragon wouldn't have had much other choice. A cheezy, one-dimensional character isn't worth whatever negative publicity a lawsuit would have generated.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

That's pretty thin as a reason for removing the character.

Jack probably created several character/groups that still exist in this game prior to working on it.

Who loses from killing off Statesman?

We've lost... a one-dimensional character with whom the extent of our interaction was to rescue him from some silly Praetorian plot, and then have him tell us in a vaguely condescending way that he's been somehow watching our career (despite having been missing for most of a player character's career)?
And who, meanwhile, kept players eternally in his shadow? (Despite all four Patrons being defeated at once, Recluse exclaims "even the mighty Statesman will bow down before me!", despite him being nowhere in sight and having done nothing for the duration of the task force.)

I don't hate Statesman; I'm as indifferent to his absence as I was to his presence. He was as generic and undeveloped after eight years as he was at launch, though, and I don't think we've lost anything resembling a great icon. If anything, we've lost the guy who was occupying the spot where a great icon SHOULD be, and maybe now it can be properly filled. I enjoyed WWD more than everything else involving Statesman for the last eight years, including his role in the comics (even though I really like the CoH comics).

Obviously, this is highly subjective. But y'know, other works of fiction have killed off far more important and popular characters with less reason, usually with little impact on their ability to tell a good story.

...killing him retroactively in past content was a bit much, though.

The influx of Incarnate powered players and how Statesman adapted to them would have been the ideal time to develop the character.

The scope that was available to the devs with just that one scenario would have been massive.

I know I'm in the minority here but I don't automatically link Statesman with Jack. I just saw another character, albeit the games primary NPC. The devs should have made good use of the character after Jack left.

It's ironic that when they did eventually do something with him that was pretty good, they ended up killing him off and made the surviving main NPC's look like a bunch of clueless idiots.

I still can't see what the game gained by killing him off. I understand that some people still identify him with Jack but I'm talking about what the game as a whole gained from his removal.

It gained WWD #7, possibly the most awesome arc yet made.

It may well be but with Statesman's removal, it's not something we can expect to see again is it?

What I'm trying to say is that used properly the Statesman character would have been awesome for the game and it was the stupid, prolonged association with Jack that prevented the devs from making proper use of it - to our detriment basically.

Ehhh, Statesman was a useless one dimensional character that I found as iconic as a cockroach.

YMMV.

So you're saying that NCSoft's lawyers are incompetent? Hell, that Cryptic's were? By putting the character in the game, Jack gave it to the game. If he hadn't, we would of had Statesman retconned into "Representative Man" or something the moment Paragon was formed.

It's something we can expect to see on a very regular basis, I think. Statesman dying didn't make WWD awesome. Letting the player step up and take the spotlight made WWD awesome. As long as Statesman was "the world's greatest superhero", it was difficult for that kind of thing to happen. As long as the Phalanx was the world's premier super-team, it was difficult for that kind of thing to happen. Now, the Phalanx is still an important part of the setting - they're deeply tied to its history, and have many connections to other characters - but they have problems and need help like any other group, making them more like a supergroup that happens to be populated by NPCs, rather than the group that solves all the important problems and deigns to let you be a "reserve member" if you handle the cleanup.

*would have

Add it to the list.

And I agree with the sentiment that the player has always been the focus of the game. That's pretty obvious -- you're the one doing the missions and moving the story forward. SSA #1 was in some respects a step backward, actually, putting the NPCs front and center while your character often simply watched, unable to affect events (this was largely remedied in the final episode).

But then you save the world from terrible evil in Dark Astoria and it's all good again.

This. I'm not losing sleep over Statesman's death.

I've been saying this for years...