Captain-Electric

It takes practice. I mean look at me, I wasn't always this much of an expert, but now? Everybody laughs at my jokes. Hey, did you hear about that new form of tick they found that can survive prolonged experience in space? They're called LUNARTICKS!!! HAHAHA!!!

HAHAHAHAHA!!!

*Crickets chirping.*

*Drives away in a windowless van full of Superadine cookies.*

Okay at first I was like, "I'm IN." Then I watched the mini-docu-trailer. And I realized...this looks TOTALLY AWESOME...but it doesn't fit my roster of characters. Still, I'll be watching. The premise is extremely original and interesting.

Dude scroll up, you actually had a couple of us (at least) in tin foil hats, wondering about your motives and if you work for someone else. It's not that your posts are antagonistic (they are generally polite), it's the voluminous...voluminousness...well the word attrition comes to mind. Is that the right word? Anyway, come to the bright side. We have cookies. And I don't mean the kind that track your Internet behavior. I mean tastey, gooey, scrumptious, steaming fresh from the oven Superadine-laced cookies.

Some of this depends, too, on how far-reaching and pervasive the threat of the Battalion is. If it is a single strike-fleet or force of some kind that plans to attack a single target or a handful of multiple strategic targets, then your original premise in the OP makes perfect sense.

However, as we have seen during limited circumstances, there are occasionally exceptions to the game world's space and security level equals time mechanic. This is most often the case when something so large and devastating happens as to make an impact on the entire city or world. Such large events pierce right through the normal space/time mechanic and are perceived by our characters as happening in every zone presently.

From what we've seen of the Shivan threat, and certainly from what the Arcosians saw of it, I feel reasonably suspicious that the Battalion will target, well, everything. If that turns out to be the case, then I think it would be cool if there were a variety of enemies to fight, of a variety of difficulty levels. We don't know what to expect when an alien species invades, after all. Perhaps, like the Tyranids of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, there will be enemies that only Incarnates could hope to face, accompanied by countless waves upon waves of smaller enemies that would be just as capable on their own of overwhelming the world if it weren't for all the other heroes up and down the security level spectrum.

I guess what I'm talking about is the difference between a war between superior forces and an actual world wide war. The Praetorian war has mostly been an example of the former, although story arcs like Roy Cooling's and the revamped introductory Portal Corps arc illustrate how even in that case, the other heroes out there still come into play for important tasks.

But in the latter case of a large-scale conflict, every able-bodied person's participation would count (which means mission and event devs would need to give non-incarnates stuff to accomplish within their level ranges). We haven't ever seen an example of an actual world wide war outside of the first Rikti war, which was basically over by the time the game officially launched. Signs of that war still exist all around us. Devastated zones, war walls, Vanguard, the assimilation of advanced Rikti technology into Primal Earth's everyday life. Game events that were over within a few days (and did not impact mission arc storylines at all) don't count. We've certainly had some epic battles over the years, but those weren't wars.

Paragon Studios may not have the resources to produce a conflict on that scale, or maybe they do. That's none of my business. So, without speculating on details I have no access to, I'm really just indulging out loud in a bit of daydreaming. I wouldn't mind seeing a conflict of epic scale. It's been ten years in real time, after all, and that's a long time for a comic book universe not to have one.

That picture I posted above is of J. Jonah Jameson about to call Zwillinger, BY THE WAY.

It's Monday and this thread is still here???

Also the ghost pirate, please!!!

If I view this thread with a microscope, argument by argument, I see a lot of positions on either side of the fence that I think beg for consideration. But when I consider the thread in whole, I only see a great big pile of repeated arguments phrased in slightly different ways. Either ya'll aren't listening to each other, or you're just hoping for miracles in understanding. And the latter doesn't happen around here.

If you want something to change, all you need to do is make a list of points and suggestions. Use paragraphs. Use emboldened letters to mark off new subsections. Do this, and then stop. Stop arguing. Make your point with confidence the first time, and then call it quits. Make it as much about helping their business model to be more profitable as it is about your disagreeableness about spending money on entertainment. The devs already know you don't want to spend money on things. Offer to meet them somewhere in the middle so that everyone comes out on top.

I'm pretty sure the people who need to follow this advice the most won't read this far. But you can't blame me for trying. The fact is, headbutting your fellow forumites won't get you what you need (we're just like you, full of useless opinions), and the more headbutting you do, the more repeated arguments there are, and the less likely it becomes that any developer with a schedule and responsibilities is going to slog through this come Monday.

Comic book super heroes have 'em. Comic book super villains have 'em. Thumbs up. Good idea.

I love the official history pages on the website!!!

I just have to say that, because I never hear anyone else bring them up. But I gobbled all of it up before I ever even started playing, while I was waiting for the game to download. I didn't log in until I'd finished reading everything. Let me tell you forumites something. I didn't click the download button until I had read a couple of decades worth of in-game history. Those history pages were what sold me on this game. They are THE reason I logged in the first time. They are what made me a customer. They're what opened my wallet. Have I made my point? I've gone back and reread it all two more times. The whole world was just so fleshed out, and it made this new universe and city feel so immersive. So engrossed was I with Paragon City that I ended three years of Eve Online that day (a universe I was in love with for its storylines, contrary to what lures most players there).

I only bring this up because the last decade of official event-based history is very obviously missing on the official website, and I do believe Paragon Studios has a team of writers on its payroll.

I won't delve too deeply into specific reasons, because they might not be totally engrossing to read about and I have a lot of characters with different motivations. A couple of my characters exemplar simply because they'll always feel the greatest sense of loyalty to the neighborhoods they grew up in, no matter how small the crime is in relation to their growing capabilities. I have truly powerful characters who would rather respond to gang warfare in a small neighborhood than an interdimensional crisis, if, say, it was the neighborhood where their parents lived.

Instead I'll be more general.

One of the greatest and most backwards things you learn as a writer is that goals, limitations, rules, and boundaries are all things that can set you free. But this wisdom is old hat to me. Great writers have been repeating this mantra to me in books and interviews ever since I picked up my first issue of Writer's Digest at age 10.

Of course, when I want to write something just to get the juices flowing, to heck with goals. But when it's time to get serious, goals and rules are just as important to me as characters and plots. Sometimes they're one in the same. A believable science fiction story generally has an author who imposed certain limitations on the capabilities of the science of his imaginary world, lest his malfunctioning nano assembler array try something truly unwelcome, like spitting out cream puff goblins from some dimension that really doesn't belong in his grim, dystopian fictional universe. Every single fiction writer I've ever personally known has talked about characters who seemed to take on lives of their own, despite the author's original intentions for them. I have always believed this partly to be a consequence of the emergence of the framework of goals and limitations that surround the author's work and give it true life, and the way the characters bounce around inside that framework--a situation of unintended consequences.

This is why I love wrapping game mechanics around my characters lives. Because I have approached every character on my roster as a comic book nerd and as a creator. I have lots of video games to turn to when I just want to play video games. But I realized a couple of years ago during my trial period that City of Heroes was not simply a video game for me. I waited too long for an adventure construction set like this. I created my first comic book super hero when I was 7 or 8 years old--Captain-Electric.

Game mechanics are physical laws. They are the gravity and space and time of my characters universe. Most often not in any way they'd be directly aware of, but that's how physics works. Much in the way the real world feels so real because it shapes one's life into one giant compromise, I have made all sorts of conceptual compromises with the game's mechanics that have helped shape my characters in various ways.

Probably in all sorts of ways that I'm not even aware of. Unintended consequences. The stuff of life.