Who is dead?

you know, i have noticed that in the past people mentioned that he was somewhat sympathetic, different than competent, of course, but hear me out. then i actually took a loyalist responsibility arc character up...and i have to say be disappointed me, he was a whiny, self pitying little bitter husk of a man who endlessly nurses his grudge against the legitimately annoying neuron and makes you do all the work..exactly what he dislikes about neuron. I have to say,for whatever brilliance he may have, he wastes it by being a sad, bitter little whiner. no wonder he couldnt get dominatirx. my main is a ma/sr, they couldnt make marauder any more evil for me...cheating +to hit buff smashing damage resisting @#$%

A standard loyalist.

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Not one of them is the slightest bit redeemable. They're all war criminals with blood on their hands.

He's a SUPER POWERED war criminal. He's redeemable until irreversibly dead.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Out of the "Evil Freedom Phalanx," Anti-Matter seems to be the only one who's actually competent at his job and actually interested in getting things done practically, as opposed to subscribing to politics and subterfuge and the like. Marcus Cole might count as competent, as well, I'll give him that much, just because he does a decent job of managing what's essentially a ruling body of children, but let's look at who else there is to run Praetoria:

Michael White: Muscle-bound brutish idiot who may be charming if her weren't so dangerous. His view of protecting the people comes down to finding someone to punch. And he's actually one of the more effective of the lot.

Jessica Megan Duncan: A spoiled brat who doesn't seem to actually do anything productive, but goes out of her way to sabotage actually productive word being done, and is responsible for no end of trouble for both Anti-Matter and Marauder.

Justin Sinclair: A paranoid control freak solely focused on political problems, whose best student is nevertheless working for the resistance and whose best assassins trained to kill his best student also defect.

Diabolique: A spirit without a will of her own whose sole duty seems to be to patrol the Magistrarium at night. The moment she is given free will, she defects and causes a rather large catastrophe for Praetoria.

Shalice Tillman: A basket case nutjob whose only reason to be employed is her massive psychic power. She runs the seer network, but just barely, and she is essentially killing the people in the network, as well.

Siege: I don't know much about him, sorry.

Neuron: A habitual procrastinator and short attention span hack scientist whose greatest claim to fame is stealing Anti-Matter's inventions and passing them as his own. Considering Anti-Matter steals portal technology from Primal Earth, that's pretty sad. Creator of technology so unreliable and practitioner of work ethic so bad that "Neuron design" has become something of a term among the forum community.

Among Marcus Cole's elite, most are either incompetent, insane or fiercely disloyal. I'm not saying Anti-Matter is a peach, but at the very least the man has an eye towards doing something productive.

I'll grant you that, of course. Anti-Matter is not a good person, far from it. He's a whining obsessive child with a serious stalkerish crush on Duncan, but again - that still doesn't keep him from essentially doing everybody else's job. Yes, he does use the player character as an errand boy, but as I understand it, it's because he's been given too much work to do already. He's maintaining his own technology AND having to clean up after Neuron's shoddy technology, and he comes off as the guy keeping the whole city running without being appreciated for it.

Again, that doesn't make Anti-Matter a good guy or a good person, but it does make him the least openly evil, and it also makes him the most competent. That certainly seems like a stronger candidate for a heel-face turn than Dominatrix, the petulant lying manipulator.

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.

I wouldn't want to see any of them redeemed. Instead of having Anti Matter become important, or Dominatrix, why not invest that effort into Positron or Miss Liberty and keep our Primal Heroes relevant and show them as competent?

I'd say it's too late for that... the damage has been done... <see SSA1>

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too

And yet, he's the one that warns you that Cole intend to let Arachnos blow up Neuropolis, and defies a direct order from the Emperor to help you stop it. Sure, he might be motivated by the fact that it is his reactors they want to blow up, but he still does the right thing.

I never got a "raar raar evul!" vibe from him. Unlike most of his colleagues.

So, about two alignment missions.

She got locked up in the Eternal Prison along with Lamashtu.

Because it's stealing from Jack to pay Jill, essentially. I don't disagree that characterising the existing Primal Phalanx is a good idea, but no good story should come at the expense of chucking another potentially good story down the drain. In fact, that's the greatest tragedy of Praetoria - it had the potential to be a REALLY cool new entire world with its whole host of storylines. But no. The glut for death, destruction and misery saw that entire world tossed in the bin, making me wonder why we even bothered with it in the first place. Why, really, do we bother with any of the Loyalist and Resistance actions if the end result is everyone dies and nothing matters? Win lose or draw, it all ends in unmitigated disaster with all of the storylines essentially cut short.

When I say a story is a waste of time, what I mean is that none of what happens in it matters and everything is eventually rendered null and void. It may seem cool on the first play-through, but knowing where things are going to go, it's very hard to find motivation to bother, aware as I am that my choices will eventually be rendered moot. It's why I'd like to see as many of the Praetorian Phalanx survive and continue to have additional stories, either as villains or as anti-heroes.

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.

Well you've hit the nail on the head. Praetoria isn't a starting place like the Rogue Islands or Paragon it's a story arc on steroids. Which is too bad. Don't get me wrong. I like the arc I just think it would have made an interesting world on it's own.

And that, really, is a problem. It had the potential to be an amazing, wide-spanning world. It was being built as one in the 1-20 story arcs, with intrigue, politics, world history and ideology. Sure, it was a SMALL world consisting of one city, about five factions and a handful of plot points, but it was a start with ambitions. Then nothing. Sure, we got First Ward, but that more or less disregarded Praetoria proper, just like the iTrials did. At the end, it turned out exactly like you describe it - a story arc on steroids, that ends in permanent destruction and abandonment.

This kind of makes sense of a problem I noticed even going through Praetoria a couple of times - it has exactly enough "canon" to support the actual stories in there and not a smidgen more. See, City of Heroes proper isn't like this. When Rick Dakan and crew wrote the original City of Heroes canon, they created a LOT of backstory, indeed many times more than could fit in the game, or in any game at all. You have a history of the city spanning back to the 18th century, you have numerous historical events that shape the city but don't have stories made after them, you have villain groups with long histories and hero groups who went underground, you have politics, social questions, ethical questions, many zones and many people of history. You have, in a sense, an entire world that the actual game highlights only a small part of. It really does feel like we're only seeing one part of one city out of a whole world.

Not so with Praetoria. There have been people arguing if there even ARE other cities on Praetorian Earth, and the place has only the storylines needed to explain the missions. It really does feel like a larger version of something like Croatoa or Cimerora... And it really shouldn't have been. That's not what was promised, nor indeed what it looked like we were getting. If it was just going to be a few zones and a few story arcs... Why let people start there? Why let people be FROM Praetoria? Well, I guess the answer is "Yeah, why DID we do that?" in the form of the Freedom tutorial. It honestly feels like Praetoria is being abandoned as a fictional world. We'll likely get enough content to get missions there from 1 to 50 and that'll be the end of it, but I don't expect the actual world to ever be expanded into, you know, an actual world.

But at the very least, we can save those characters who are salvageable, can't we? Marauder is a blockhead and a bully, but he feels like he could be good-natured if he was given some better direction. Like a watchdog, he's fierce and dangerous, but can still be pointed at the right bad guys and he'd be an asset. Anti-Matter maybe a whiny *****, but he's an unmitigated genius, a hard worker and a responsible person, at least as far as his work goes. Manage his rotten personality and his science can be directed towards a greater end. The man pretty much thrives on positive reinforcement, so he might actually be a worthwhile asset.

Or don't make them heroes. Turn them into Requiem style villains who hide out in Paragon City and work on their own secret agendas. If rotting man Dr. Vahz can stay hidden, why can't loudmouth Marauder?

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.

The murder and insanity that GR attached to his character made him worse than the more generic character he originally was.
All the Praetorian AVs in their original form were pretty generic because they were only ever presented via their bios and a few text bubbles - for example, Chimera in his original form was only really identified as a villain by his bio saying that he was happy to agree to be trained as an assassin by the man who killed his parents - apart from that, he was just a guy who hung out with ninjas in a graveyard - it wasn't until GR that he was shown to be a sinister and sadistic control freak who ran the Praetorian secret police.
The original Neuron never had the human experimentation atatched to him, and the original Mother Mayhem is nowhere near the level of insanity and evil she was given in GR.
The setting also made them all more evil - the original Praetorian Earth was shown to be some kind of post-apocalytic wasteland, with very few signs of civilization or organization - apart fromt he clockwork, most of their fighters seemed to be gangs of street thugs, and we never saw any civilians or signs of anything close to a normal world - so the degenerate nature of the ogirinal AVs suited the setting.
But in GR, they added a non-wasteland setting, shifted the original ruined world setting into the bakground, and filled the new area with civilians and normal people, as well as signs of civilization - but at the same time, they also made the original AVs more evil, which helped to highlight how false the "utopia" really was - even though the new Praetoria looked like a better place, they added slavery, mass-murder, and a drugged population which were all missing from the original Praetoria, as well as a much more frequent and systematic use of torture - so while the outer world seemed to be getting better, the inner world was getting worse and worse.

To be more exact, it's the Maria Jenkin's arc on steroids - only instead of fighting our way through the AVs to rescue one person, we fight our way through the AVs to rescue the whole population - Tyrant even thoughfully makes sure we get to fight him in a suitably hellish landscape, just in case we were missing his original lava lair.

That's because its purpose is to lead into the dimensional war and the Incarnate system - GR launched with the Trial locations already built into the struture of the zones, so the destruction of the loyalist dictatorship was already in place before GR even went into beta - it was a doomed world right from the start.

Which, in and of itself, doesn't make him much worse than say, Blue Steel.

Isn't that for a tribunal to decide? Particularly when it was Primal Earth who fired the first shot over the bow.

And we're still waiting to learn exactly who was responsible for that debacle. (Though my money's on Malta.)

Ultimatum.

There's an article written from his perspective that heralded one of the in-game events (can't find it right now) that, as I recall, seemed to portray him in a somewhat benevolent "conspiring against Tyrant" light.

In retrospect, that may have stemmed more from proddings by Dominatrix, but I can't say for sure without rereading it. And I can't find it.

Quite possibly, yes, but who or what is Ultimatum? Who backs them? What is their goal? And it seems clear that Ultimatum knew about Praetoria before ever sending Maelstrom in. Where did they get that info? Why would they want to attack Praetoria?

There's still a lot there that hasn't been told, particularly as we reach the aftermath of the Primal-Praetorian War. Someone should be held accountable.

Well, if Tyrant's been captured, that's a good start.