If you don't like the writing...

Originally Posted by EarthWyrm But I do understand that there is an internet rule that any bad idea must be presented by someone at least twice a year to remind everyone who hasn't already read every previous thread on the topic precisely why the idea is bad.

Nope. Ascendants are supposed to be the new god-like beings that Incarnates originally were, or something like that. They had to dumb down what an Incarnate was once they let us be them, since we'd all be far more OP than we are now. So now an Incarnate can Ascend and become a Well themselves, or something. Honestly, if I'm wrong here someone fix it 'cause I tune in and out of any story involving the Well.

Slight Incarnate spoilers incoming, so read at your own initiative:

Ascenants are beings who have transformed into essentially Wells themselves, but unlike the Well of the Furies can actually use their own power without having to work through agents. These are creatures with essentially no cap to their power, who don't answer to destiny or the laws of physics, that sort of thing. It's essentially someone who has transcended the well and found a source of infinite power within himself. And it's what Incarnates should always have been.

This solves the horrible mess of a plot that is the Well of the Furies in pretty much all aspects. We're no longer forced to ally ourselves and seek the favour of a clearly malevolent, controlling, scheming entity, so we're not "servants" any more. We're not painted as stealing someone else's power and thus changing the origin of all our characters' powers to the same thing, since now it's our own infinite potential that's at play. And finally, the story FINALLY turns around to be about us, rather than we just being swap-names in someone else's story *coughdarrinwadecough* Sorry, my throat's kind of dry.

Basically, not only do I LOVE the concept of Ascendants, but knowing that this is where the Well of the Furies storyline is going makes me like that, too. This is a double victory since it introduces a great story and turns around a crappy one to where it's pretty good, too. This is an author's saving throw if ever I've seen one, and it's actually quite impressive.

Now we just have to actually see it play out, as opposed to just hearing about it, but hey - the idea alone is worth it.

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.

/smug I was a fan of Cracked BEFORE it went mainstream /smug
*wears a Scanners tshirt and glasses with no lenses for irony*

Yeah I love Cracked. Mostly due to Seanbaby (check out his stuff.comedic gold!!) I have a weird sense of humor.

As a magazine, Cracked sucked eggs. As a website/blog, it is comedy gold. I still have to shake my head in wonder at it, sometimes.

Q: How did the Hipster burn his tounge?

A: He was eating soup before it was cool.

I admit my grim memories of the magazine (second rate MAD ripoff) prejudiced me against the site for a while

Which just meant I had more funny stuff to read when I finally gave in.

I watch a fair amount of television. For most of the shows I watch, there are some episodes that are FANTASTIC. BEAUTIFUL. STUNNINGLY DONE. And every once in a while, there's an episode that doesn't work. Plot holes the size of a starship, characters acting completely inconsistently for them, etc. Madeline Weston going all in for undercover work including having Michael be abusive to her. Mrs. Suit going all Nancy Drew about some guys in the neighborhood. Shows that make me wonder what happened to the writers for that episode.

The quality of content will vary. The best hitters in baseball regularly strike out. And when it comes to updating lots of content, sometimes shortcuts lead to mistakes.

I think the new Yin TF is pretty good. It's (looks around, tries to believe I'm saying this about a CoH TF) perhaps too short, might benefit from another mission or two setting the stage for the reveal in the penultimate mission. There may not be anything inherently Yinnish about it, but it's good.

I've done my share of complaining about content, old and new, and I will continue to do so. There are times the writers get an idea and drive it through without realizing, no, it really doesn't work. More often, there's signs of shortcuts being taken, not as good as it could have been. But that's different from attacking the competence or intelligence of the writers. They're working stiffs, like the rest of us. They do some work that's great, some that's good, some not-so-good. A sense of perspective is called for, that above all, the goal is to create a fun game. Usually, good story is part of making it a fun game, but not the be-all and end-all.

You're kind of sweeping the problem under the rug by stating that it will always exist. Crime will always exist, but we don't stop trying to fight it, just to pull a random example out of a hat. You can never have complete consistency and so no-one should expect it, but that doesn't mean we should give up on trying to have a consistent story or a consistent tone. Even if it doesn't work all the time, it should still work at least some of the time.

The fact of the matter is a good story isn't good because every part in it is good. In fact, it isn't good even because most or half or even some of it is good. A good story is good because it makes us care about it enough that we're able to overlook the bad parts of it, and indeed accept them as part of what makes the story good. For instance, I HATED cave levels in old games, which means I pretty much hated the original Tomb Raider. I liked Tomb Raider 2, but hated the two Tibet levels initially. However, the game was so good that I ended up not minding Tibet so much, and eventually learned to appreciate the thematic I disliked as simply part of a good game, whether the part itself was good or bad.

This is why people like me can flip-flop about the entire game so easily, from really really liking it to wondering why I'm still subscribed. City of Heroes is not a game without its flaws, and the story is really on of the most flawed aspects of it. But the story is also made up of extraordinarily good ideas, even as part of newer content despite how much I've bashed it. Even if those ideas aren't exactly told very well, having them is still good enough for me to overlook the poor execution. The real problem with "consistency" arises when you create a new story which is not only bad, but actually ruins a story which was previously good. The Dr. Khan TF is a good example. It's a bad TF, it's one of the game's WORST stories by far, and it serves to utterly castrate any potential coolness Reichsman might have had when he was still just a concept. Before, when the 5th Column was still "gone," we had fun times imagining what it would be like if Reichsman woke up and took control of it. Seeing it in action ruined that plot, any potential future plots on the subject may have had and pretty much buried the 5th Column entirely since its one remaining named character isn't interesting.

Contrast this against the concept of Ascension as seen in Dark Astoria and explained by Papa Smurf. I HATE Prometheus both as a character and as a plot device, and I REALLY dislike the Well of the Furies as a concept, but Ascendants are such a powerful idea, such a strong story seed, that I'm really perfectly fine with the Well serving as the catalyst and Prometheus serving as the contact. Not only has the good idea that is Ascendants made me accept the bad ideas that were Prometheus and the Well, but it has made me actually see them in a positive light. As concepts, they're bad. As means to a much better end... They're actually pretty good. Not only that, but the concept of Ascendants also serve to humanize both of the others. The Well goes from an god-modding all-powerful entity that is the end-all be-all of power into just one source of power, thus putting its drive to empower and control into perspective. Prometheus goes from an always-right overpowered smug god into a very powerful being caught in a situation that's becoming bigger than he is. It's putting an arrogant person used to bossing people around in a situation where he's out of his depth, forcing him to balance between playing big dog and dealing with the reality of being in over his head. And I LOVE it!

Paragon Studios writers have historically had a tendency to write in a vacuum, considering only the context that's directly relevant to the story they're writing and rarely the way it impacts the broader world in general. I mean no disrespect when I say that that's tantamount to writing fanfiction, in the crucial aspect that fans don't control the fictional universe and their stories can't impact canon. Fans don't have to worry about continuity, and our writers are writing like fans by disregarding continuity and only focusing on the here and now. This is what tanked Reichsman and this is what's turned Praetoria into bipolar land. Is it a deep and complex latticework of interwoven grey moralities or a grotesque black-and-white goatee evil universe? It depends on which story you run, and that really ends up making neither angle work very well. In fact, at times I wonder if our writers even have the pedantic knowledge of lore some of our players enjoy and that they simply don't know they're trodding over established canon when they have the Malta Group try for "minimal involvement" in a situation best suited for a commando squad, just as an example.

Consistency can't be absolute, but it should still be a main objective.

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 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.

That problem boiled down to the fact the guy writing it and absolutely no freaking idea about any of the background lore whatsoever...like not even a passing glance. Do you know how many iterations on beta that taskforce went through?

Was about 5 or 6 before it got to the stage it finally got put into the game.

The archvillains were changed several times (originally for some ungodly reason they used Arkarist as the CoT AV and it took players pointing out the Arkarist is a Circle of Thorns defector for them to change it), the dialogue was changed god knows how many times (people kept questioning why the hell would the assembled AVs even bother to help Reichsman).

Basically the Taskforce got such a huge slating that the guy who wrote it, never did anything else at Paragon Studios after that...he quietly just disappeared, it actually took players to discover that he had left Paragon Studios IIRC.

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.

There's a major bug in AE where text meant to be said when players get close to the NPCs instead gets said when the NPC spawns. I'm seeing some of it in the live game too - The tip mission with the 5th column nuclear triggers, for example, has a first goal of "defeat this one boss". It spawns a Vampire Commandant with an invisible Maelstrom held hostage (though the Commandant doesn't seem to realize it). All the text, including some clearly supposed to be on seeing the player character, spurts out as soon as the first boss is dead.

I'm really hoping this gets fixed in I24, both live and AE.

I remember that story, yes, and I do feel bad for the guy who made this and what he went though. However, at the same time, you really can't write for an established franchise without being at least moderately familiar with it, or otherwise having immediate access to someone who is so you can ask questions in real time. Again, that's why this is a professional job and not fanfiction - because you actually have the responsibility of maintaining a believable fictional universe. That's the product you're selling, in large part, so you can't just slap-dash random unaware ideas into it.

This is one of my big problems with the writing for this game - the writers seem to either be unaware of much of their own canon, or otherwise choose to simply ignore it. They create situations which contradict established characterisation and then simply ret-con existing characters into fitting them. They create situations where existing concepts would have been the logical fit, but instead create brand new ones and act like the old ones never existed. Why was SAM necessary, for instance, when they do the job of the FBSA, in practice? Or when I heard that someone was supplying the Hellions with magical artefacts, my first instinct was to yell "It's the Outcasts!" Because that's who's selling artefacts to the Hellions, as passed down from the Warriors. Turns out actually knowing the game's canon was a liability, because nope! It's Arachnos. I thought this was foreshadowing for the game's later revalations, but it turns out it was an on-the-spot plot point to "foreshadow" something fifteen minutes later in the plot.

I firmly believe that anyone - ANYONE - who wants to write for City of Heroes needs at least two of the following three things:

1. An intimate and intricate knowledge of at least most of the canon that's in the actual game good enough to quote plot points off memory.

2. Access to someone who's infinitely familiar with game canon at least up to the present day. ParagonWiki can suffice here, but only if referenced extensively.

3. The presence of mine to accept corrections from others regardless of their knowledge of content, or at the very least to verify corrections with either other more knowledgeable people or a static resource, again like ParagonWiki.

Obviously, talent is important, as is an editor *winkwinknudgenudge* but I'm talking purely in terms of making stories that fit with existing canon. Furthermore, there's no need to constantly invent new factions and characters when there are plenty of old ones that can be used, and that SHOULD be used. We really need to avoid this Neuron approach to writing where so many things are left unresolved by means of new writer abandoning old stories to tell his own. Working within an established fictional universe requires that you work WITH the established fictional universe, at least when you're trying to expand it.

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 doubt it. It's been happening for so long I doubt it's ever going to get looked at. But, hey, if I24 is "fix everything," then fixing a few of those irritating bugs would be nice. I already had an arc of mine kill Viking by spawning a Malta ambush on top of him, when you'd think ambushes should try to spawn away from players. Especially since I can't really control where the ambush spawns.

This isn't one of those instances, though. In this case, that's just how the script was written. The lines came one after the other with Serene gesturing, they just didn't linger on-screen for more than half a second. It felt like trying to read chat during a Ustream with fifty people talking over each other.

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 correct phrase would be "presence of mind".

I don't normally correct things like this, but given the content of the sentence involved, I couldn't resist.

I hate, hate, hate, HATE this bug.

Totally ruins the delivery of many of my NPC chat moments in my AE arcs.

I enjoyed that, ironically

The real problem is not that the task force was so very uncharacteristically and inconsistently (yeah, that word again) written as a Legion of Doom scenario - It's that someone in upper management thought it was a good idea and gave it the green light.

People point to Matt's statements about being not beholden to the existing lore, but before he ever made any such statements, this task force was the first really big example of those attitudes at the studio. It wasn't just that the writer either didn't know or didn't care or both - It's that the people above him also didn't know or didn't care.

I try my best to forget that it even exists.

I mistyped, and I clearly didn't proof-read my post.

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Here's something more I wanted to point out. I've mentioned before that a lot of I18-I20 content is intentionally over-dark and over-edgy and over-depressing, but this has less to do with the themes said content explores than it does with how it explores them. I remember discussing this with friends over the weekend, but you can't really create drama by just saying something is dramatic and making a plotline which has lots of downers in it. A plot doesn't become dramatic because it has a lot of death and torture in it, it becomes so when we care about the people involved in it and fear that they may be hurt. Why bring it up? Here's what Vanessa DeVore just told me:

Why First Ward's drama fails is because it's delivered through lines like that. Beating me over the head with repeated statements that everything is dark and depressing and gritty is missing the point, because it's touting the payoff without going through the setup of it. If you recall, "all payoff, no setup" was the running problem of SSA1 all throughout. Furthermore, when you have characters throw around death, despair and sacrifice so casually, you end up turning your audience into cynics who then regard these dramatic elements with the same kind of disconnect.

Oh, no, I'm sending Noble Savage to his death. Please, no, don't make me do this. I care about him so much. He is such a well-developed character, what with him losing all character progression and personality between Neutropolis and First Ward and his contribution consisting of bipolar flipping between all-caps frothing rage and self-doubt. Oh, and what's this? All these other people whom I've never met, seen or even heard of who are going with him will also die? Oh, no, such tragedy.

Here's a mental exercise: Take any great story whatsoever, sum up the final climax in a couple of sentences, then retell those sentences to someone who doesn't know the story. See if you get any reaction out of this person. Because that's essentially what we're seeing here - a story which is too focused on ramming it into our heads that it's edgy and gritty by plain-text telling us it is that it has no room to set up the scene and imply this. And that's a problem, because a good story doesn't hinge on a good idea so much as it hinges on good execution. You can take a HORRIBLE idea and turn it into a good story if your execution is good enough. Hell, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a concept intentionally made to be a parody of over-gritty action comics - they're intended to an obviously horrible idea - and yet they work because of how their stories have been told in comic, cartoon and film.

And again: This is where recent writing has improved dramatically. Take Dark Astoria, for example. It has a similar theme of death, despair and pain, yet it handles those themes in a much more restrained way. Crucially, it never pulls me aside to tell me "Hey, you're sending people to their deaths. Would you please be a sport feel guilty about it?" For all the horror that zone exudes, it ultimately gives a story about COPING with despair, as well as the ways in which it affects the others who, too, struggle to cope with it. Some, like Madame Bellarose, clearly fail, but others, like Scirocco, pretty much succeed. By giving "the people" a name and a face, Dark Astoria's story becomes grounded in concepts we can sympathise with, making us both care about the story and feel for its plot twists. First Ward, by contrast, mostly relies on what must be my favourite line from Spy Dogs: Things are happening in places all over the world! This just in - my arm fell off.

A lot of I18-I20 stories have this nasty habit of relying on vague causes and having vague effects. Master Midnight just finished telling me how people tell myths of the Furies to make people be nice to people and have people make laws for people and people people people. Also, people. What people? When? Give me examples, give me hypothetical situations, give me some grounding in fictional reality so I know this isn't just general "it's bad because it's bad" talk. Any plot point becomes better when it's clear who has done what to whom for what reason. It makes it easier for us to care when we can put a face and a name to said plot. Abstract stories are just hard to follow and hard to take seriously, and for the most part they feel like the writer is just stalling for text size.

"Specifics" is one of the things I've been very happy to see in newer content, and I'll be looking for it in stories going forward.

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.