The problem with how Tyrant is defeated.
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2012-06-15 15:09 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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I have a demo file for that...
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Its not that hard to land on the Sun if you can get people to breathe plasma and not burst into flame.
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@TURGENEV - Freedom Server / IRON / B.A.N.E / HORDE
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That's pretty awesome, thanks for clearing that up.
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Originally Posted by Dr. Aeon
If you've done the moral choice where you kill Kang and he's still showing up, please send in a bug report. Thanks!
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Thought for the day:
"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment."
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Although it doesn't really solve the "problem" of failing to stop the broadcasting of the truth to the public in the TPN Trial, or ending up failing to stop the war, or failing to not end up working with the Resistance - everything the player tries to do when they choose the loyalist side at the end of the 1-20 responsibility path ends in total failure - Tyrant's secrets are still broadcast to the public, the war still starts, and the Resistance are still the only option against Tyrant.
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Originally Posted by Slaunyeh
That's pretty awesome, thanks for clearing that up.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Does GG even play redside? Does she know what it means to be a villain? Doing the right thing for (morally) wrong reasons is not evil enough to qualify as villainy, but I don't think she gets that. Arguing with her over the nature of redside content (or co-op content that fails to satisfy both hero and villain players) is pretty pointless when there is no common conceptual framework to ground the discussion.
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Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
Your reply doesn't address the issue of the Trials being heroic and that you yourself have shown the double standard of the current game writing.
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Which I've been saying since I ran the first iTrial. If you're not Warden Resistance, you don't matter. Same thing with all this co-op content. Any perspective but 'heroic' is ignored.|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Although it doesn't really solve the "problem" of failing to stop the broadcasting of the truth to the public in the TPN Trial, or ending up failing to stop the war, or failing to not end up working with the Resistance - everything the player tries to do when they choose the loyalist side at the end of the 1-20 responsibility path ends in total failure - Tyrant's secrets are still broadcast to the public, the war still starts, and the Resistance are still the only option against Tyrant.
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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader
Does GG even play redside? Does she know what it means to be a villain? Doing the right thing for (morally) wrong reasons is not evil enough to qualify as villainy, but I don't think she gets that. Arguing with her over the nature of redside content (or co-op content that fails to satisfy both hero and villain players) is pretty pointless when there is no common conceptual framework to ground the discussion.
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Just sayin'.
My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
If this ends up sounding harsh.. well.. we all have our opinions. Yours is going to be no more valid then mine. So take what you will from this. And yes, I play characters on both red and blue side, and also playing through gold-side as well, so while I claim to be an expert on nothing, I have experience with most of the playable factions in the game...
So basically, the general gist of the complaints I get from wanna-be villains is that you can't be villains.
There is nothing 'villain-y' about teaming up with wanna-be heroes to fight off a universal threat that would crush both sides if it could...
The problem becomes one of simple practicality, really.
If the villain(s) wins, then that means the hero(s) would have to lose. Villains rarely take prisoners, thus the heroes would be killed.
Something like what Reichsman did to anyone that threatened to gain any level of power, if I remember the lore correctly. That ended up coming back to haunt him when he tried to invade Primal Earth, because while he was powerful, he couldn't take on all the super-powered heroes that came to Earths defense... but I digress...
So just for the sake of argument... Your villain wins. Causes havoc and chaos. Sets themselves up as overlord. Watches the world burn. Whatever.
/MY/ hero wouldn't allow that to happen. And she would 'cross the line' if need be by killing your villain to make sure that it wouldn't. (And I'm ignoring the people who say their villain is unkillable/wouldn't die/is immortal/is a twink/whatever, because the game doesn't really allow that. We are all immortal thanks to the Medi-porter McGuffin Devices.)
But that's not fair, right? How so? As it is, the heroes don't always win either. Has anyone been able to save their doppelganger after the fight with Protean at the end of the Jenni Adair arc?
So, what it all boils down to is, your villain wouldn't be helping heroes fight against Cole /NO MATER WHAT!/
Narrow-minded thinking aside (because there are a lot of reasons why villains would fight against Cole and his regime, ranging from 'He's a threat to my future plans to rule the multiverse!' to 'That SOB owes me 10 bucks!' to simply 'Me no like you!') if you really, absolutely can not find any reason why your villain would dare to team up with heroes, all because of a line or two from some NPC... then don't. There is nobody to blame on that but yourself.
/You/ are the one that made your character so crazy/homicidal/anti-social/whatever that they can't play outside their little box. Nowhere does it say that CoX is supposed to be tailor-made to fit everyone's character fantasies.
-The Devs make co-op content because it's simply the most cost effective content they can make, allowing the most number of players to do the largest number of things in the game.-
Would it be great to have villain-only content were you end up not getting screwed over, the bad guy wins and? Sure I guess. Would it be worth the time to implement it? Apparently, the Devs don't think so. I can suppose that if City of Villains had become as big a juggernaut (relatively speaking) as City of Heroes had been out of the gate, then who knows.. Maybe they would be plenty of story arcs where you can unload the stress of real life out by slaughtering innocents, bullying incompetent underlings, and be an all around ***-hole to your hearts content.
I suppose if thats /really/ what makes you happy, you can make your own personal arc in the AE... :P
"The part of me that is leaving... is going to miss the part of me that is staying..."
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That's the basic thing behind the whole loyalist invasion plan - they want to kill everyone with superpowers, plus any civilians whose thoughts show them to be potential "trouble makers" in the future - which leads to another neat little twist where we display our moral superitority over the loyalists by capturing Tyrant rather than killing him.
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Originally Posted by NaoGal
If the villain(s) wins, then that means the hero(s) would have to lose. Villains rarely take prisoners, thus the heroes would be killed.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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And you know what? I did pretend that my villains were making their own plans just by helping heroes.|
Originally Posted by NaoGal
if you really, absolutely can not find any reason why your villain would dare to team up with heroes, all because of a line or two from some NPC... then don't. There is nobody to blame on that but yourself.
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I did it in the RWZ.
Then I did it in Cimerora.
Then I did it in the holiday events.
Then I did it during Apex. And Tin Mage.
Then I did it in the SSA.
Then I did it in the BAF. And Lambda Sector. And on Keyes Island. And in the Underground. And in the Mother of Mercy hospital. And at the TPN campus. And in Mot's gullet. And in The Magisterium.
I don't care what you think my problem is. Why do I have to continuously shoehorn ALL of my villains, REGARDLESS of who they are and what they're like, into the notion of "I'm doing this for my own gain sometime later"? Why are my VILLAINS, who are NOT HEROES, continuously written in to high level content as de facto heroes to save the day?
My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
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Sure, and that's because "the most number of players" happen to be blueside. But it didn't have to be that way. I get the economics of it, but that's not going to placate the 1%-ers who want to be villains who initiate (their own) evil plans rather than just respond to someone else's (that's what heroes do, not villains).|
Originally Posted by NaoGal
-The Devs make co-op content because it's simply the most cost effective content they can make, allowing the most number of players to do the largest number of things in the game.-
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The co-op content only presents the crises from a heroic perspective, e.g., how to stop Tyrant. It never presents the crisis as an opportunity to achieve greater villainy (e.g., to supplant Tyrant with something "worse"--from a hero's perspective anyway--without it resulting in the End of Days). The writers of the Praetorian storyline created a closed narrative which forced only one possible outcome, which really happens to be the Heroic Imperative, and no amount of spin control changes the fact that villains are given no choice but to play along for no reward besides delayed gratification (a chance to be evil later after the current evil is defeated).
And keep in mind that this isn't just about co-op content. It is just as much about virtually all of the redside content. It is ultimately about the epic failure that is the implementation of "supervillainy" as a whole in CoV/CoX. The fact that the development team could not come up with a way for villain players to concoct their own evil schemes speaks volumes, to me anyway, about their creative blinders (the blame for which will most surely get brushed off onto the engine).
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Originally Posted by NaoGal
I can suppose that if City of Villains had become as big a juggernaut (relatively speaking) as City of Heroes had been out of the gate, then who knows..
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NOR-RAD - 50 Rad/Rad/Elec Defender - Nikki Stryker - 50 DM/SR/Weap Scrapper - Iron Marauder - 50 Eng/Eng/Pow Blaster
Lion of Might - 50 SS/Inv/Eng Tanker - Darling Nikkee - 50 (+3) StJ/WP/Eng Brute - Ice Giant Kurg - 36 Ice/Storm Controller
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The majority of players in DCUO play heroes, even though the content for both sides is basically the same - and CO didnt even bother with playable villains at all - because, as the CoH devs know too, the kind of people a comicbook game appeals to are way more likely to be interested in being a superhero than a supervillain.
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Originally Posted by Wing_Leader
Yeah, and whose fault is that? The reason CoV failed wasn't because the marketplace wasn't into the notion of playing villains; it was because when they got a taste of Paragon's idea of villainy, they turned away and said "No thanks." Perhaps if the Devs had delivered a City of Villains game worthy of the name, the results would have been profoundly different. In this sense I think the developers made their own bed and now we are all having to lay in it.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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They aren't. |
Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
Why are my VILLAINS, who are NOT HEROES, continuously written in to high level content as de facto heroes to save the day?
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/YOU/ are the one that is saying that.
You seem to insist that NPCs -must- acknowledge your villain as a villain, and not just one more super-powered being out of thousands in the middle of a crisis. And yes, an inter-dimensional war between two worlds (not to mention the looming threat of the Battalion) counts as a crisis.
"The part of me that is leaving... is going to miss the part of me that is staying..."
The 3 or 4 people who play red side should probably be aware that the Battalion devour whole worlds, species and Wells, so the only way of stopping them will be for everyone to unite agianst them.
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Really?|
Originally Posted by NaoGal
They aren't.
/YOU/ are the one that is saying that. |
That looks like my character saying that. My character who is a villain.
My character who is a villain is saying that to Scirocco.
Tell me again how I'M the only one saying villains are doing the greater good.
My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
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What tone of voice and facial expression did your character use when he said that bit of text?
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Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
Really?
That looks like my character saying that. My character who is a villain. My character who is a villain is saying that to Scirocco. Tell me again how I'M the only one saying villains are doing the greater good. |
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Funny enough, that character hides his face.|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
What tone of voice and facial expression did your character use when he said that bit of text?
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Let's look at that, though.
Why use:
"Alright, fine, for the 'greater good' as usual."
Instead of something more like:
"Very well, Scirocco. 'For the greater good.'"
If you really want to argue 'tone of voice' then it'd help if the response wasn't written it what can easily be called a defeatist tone.
My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
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Try it while nodding with a knowing smirk and making air quotes.
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Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
Funny enough, that character hides his face.
Let's look at that, though. Why use: "Alright, fine, for the 'greater good' as usual." Instead of something more like: "Very well, Scirocco. 'For the greater good.'" If you really want to argue 'tone of voice' then it'd help if the response wasn't written it what can easily be called a defeatist tone. |
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Look, I understand what you're driving at. Would it be a bad thing to give something like this a more neutral tone, so at the very least it doesn't feel like the rest of villain content?
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Try it while nodding with a knowing smirk and making air quotes.
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My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
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CoV failed? I would have to disagree with that. But thats just my uneducated opinion (much like yours or anyone elses...) |
Originally Posted by Wing_Leader
Yeah, and whose fault is that? The reason CoV failed wasn't because the marketplace wasn't into the notion of playing villains; it was because when they got a taste of Paragon's idea of villainy, they turned away and said "No thanks." Perhaps if the Devs had delivered a City of Villains game worthy of the name, the results would have been profoundly different. In this sense I think the developers made their own bed and now we are all having to lay in it.
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Perhaps it didn't do what they wanted it to do. Perhaps they figured players wouldn't want to play homicidal maniacs and instead wanted to play the more campy villains of the old gold and silver age comics.
Or maybe they had more plans down the road that never really came to fruition. Lets face it, this game as a whole has gone through more changes in direction then we may ever know. Doesn't change the fact that the Devs are still going to create content that the most number of people can play.
"The part of me that is leaving... is going to miss the part of me that is staying..."
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Well there is a reason the GTA games sell the way they do....|
Originally Posted by NaoGal
Perhaps they figured players wouldn't want to play homicidal maniacs and instead wanted to play the more campy villains of the old gold and silver age comics.
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Going that route, CoV then would have had to have an M rating, even with the toned down violence. (according to some)
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I think part of the problem, rather, is that most villains don't even get to do that. I'd qualify Dean/Leonard as "comic book villain", and as others have noted, they are both great arcs. There are a few others in similar ranges (Mortimer Kal, Vincent Ross, and even the first 3-4 SSAs), however, there's nothing in the endgame for that. It's always just "tag along with the heroes", which isn't very convincing, especially given that a self-serving villain can just hop a portal to another world if things got particularly bad, anyway, so the whole "save the world, to rule it" is pretty shaky, too.
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Originally Posted by NaoGal
Perhaps they figured players wouldn't want to play homicidal maniacs and instead wanted to play the more campy villains of the old gold and silver age comics.
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Which I would bet money on the company not wanting and going to great lengths to avoid... which in a way is kinda sad, but then again, there are kids that play this game. GTA, as near as I can tell, we never aimed at children (even if it often ended up in their hands... but that's a whole different topic...)|
Originally Posted by Nightphall
Well there is a reason the GTA games sell the way they do....
Going that route, CoV then would have had to have an M rating, even with the toned down violence. (according to some) |
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Originally Posted by Lazarillo
I think part of the problem, rather, is that most villains don't even get to do that. I'd qualify Dean/Leonard as "comic book villain", and as others have noted, they are both great arcs. There are a few others in similar ranges (Mortimer Kal, Vincent Ross, and even the first 3-4 SSAs), however, there's nothing in the endgame for that. It's always just "tag along with the heroes", which isn't very convincing, especially given that a self-serving villain can just hop a portal to another world if things got particularly bad, anyway, so the whole "save the world, to rule it" is pretty shaky, too.
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Sure, that sounds great on paper, or in a character Bio, but unfortunately, the reality is you have a choice between Primal Earth, Praetoria, and the Shadow Shard.
That's it. Outside of a few instances where you go through Portal Corps. Unless you add the fact that some people RP their SG base as a different dimension...
Your villains, regardless of their self-assessed levels of power, can not just leave, outside of logging out of the game and never logging back in.
Once you realize that unfortunate bit of reality (that is enforced by the limits of the game itself) you might see why it would often better benefit said villains to 'tag along with the heroes'.
"The part of me that is leaving... is going to miss the part of me that is staying..."
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Even assuming raiding Portal Corps wouldn't be easy (and hey, it's something that's done pretty frequently...made easier by the fact that you don't have to worry about what happens when you come back), Arachnos has portal technology as well. And gaining access to do with it more or less as you please is as easy as buying couple tickets to the Johnny Sonata concert at the Giza this Saturday. Technician Naylor is a mighty easy bribe.|
Originally Posted by NaoGal
That's it. Outside of a few instances where you go through Portal Corps. Unless you add the fact that some people RP their SG base as a different dimension...
Your villains, regardless of their self-assessed levels of power, can not just leave, outside of logging out of the game and never logging back in. Once you realize that unfortunate bit of reality (that is enforced by the limits of the game itself) you might see why it would often better benefit said villains to 'tag along with the heroes'. |
Then there's access to Ouroboros...
And even if we want to argue they're stuck on Primal Earth...still, so what? Okay, Tyrant invades, and decides to go after all the villains...which the heroes of Paragon have already been doing, unsuccessfully, for years.
So, yeah, there are plenty of potential ways for people who don't care to up and leave if things get shady.
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Hm...|
Originally Posted by NaoGal
The only problem I have with this line of thinking is your assertion that any 'self-serving villain can just hope a portal to another world'.
Sure, that sounds great on paper, or in a character Bio, but unfortunately, the reality is you have a choice between Primal Earth, Praetoria, and the Shadow Shard. That's it. Outside of a few instances where you go through Portal Corps. Unless you add the fact that some people RP their SG base as a different dimension... Your villains, regardless of their self-assessed levels of power, can not just leave, outside of logging out of the game and never logging back in. Once you realize that unfortunate bit of reality (that is enforced by the limits of the game itself) you might see why it would often better benefit said villains to 'tag along with the heroes'. |
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Originally Posted by NaoGal
If the villain(s) wins, then that means the hero(s) would have to lose. Villains rarely take prisoners, thus the heroes would be killed.
Something like what Reichsman did to anyone that threatened to gain any level of power, if I remember the lore correctly. That ended up coming back to haunt him when he tried to invade Primal Earth, because while he was powerful, he couldn't take on all the super-powered heroes that came to Earths defense... but I digress... So just for the sake of argument... Your villain wins. Causes havoc and chaos. Sets themselves up as overlord. Watches the world burn. Whatever. /MY/ hero wouldn't allow that to happen. And she would 'cross the line' if need be by killing your villain to make sure that it wouldn't. (And I'm ignoring the people who say their villain is unkillable/wouldn't die/is immortal/is a twink/whatever, because the game doesn't really allow that. We are all immortal thanks to the Medi-porter McGuffin Devices.) But that's not fair, right? How so? As it is, the heroes don't always win either. Has anyone been able to save their doppelganger after the fight with Protean at the end of the Jenni Adair arc? |
I mean, you can either say "you can't actually go to another dimension because the game doesn't let you", or you can say "I'll stop and possibly kill your villain permanently even though player heroes can't attack nor do anything to interfere with player villains outside of pvp zones and there is no perma-death", but trying to use both arguments just makes no sense.
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My Stalker happened to straddle the line between Responsibility and Warden, and picked resistance as his beginning choice, and he became a Hero (who crossed redside briefly for Patron access). I don't think it's a problem.|
Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
If you played Responsibility Loyalist (a path that has been liberally crapped on since GR ended) you have to kill Kang to keep him from exposing Cole to Praetoria and causing mass riot. I wonder how Responsibility Loyalist characters would react when they found out that Kang somehow wasn't dead.
"I got better." |
Also my Defender did an undercover Crusader run - I prefer undercover because of the extra options. Still need to do Power clean through and Warden (my stalker completed Responsibility and hit 21 during Yin's Storyarc - he also got out of Praetoria with 4/5 Moral High Ground progress...).
I'll probably do Warden, then First Ward, then Night Ward.
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Originally Posted by Shubbie
Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.
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My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."