Eva Destruction

All the good dark names are already taken by heroes.

I either go with no skulls/spikes or a whole skulls/spikes motif. It would be nice if we could have some of the spiked shoulder pieces without the spikes....

As does having many catgirls, or having the FotM toon.

I have met many more people who thought having the uber FotM toon made them better than people who thought not having one made them better.

I have no catgirls, so I win. Or I would if this was a contest and I actually cared what you play. But I don't. I hope you enjoy your catgirl.

I have several characters who were FotM to some degree at some point, at least in their choice of powersets, if not their builds. I have no idea what the FotM builds look like.

I also have a DM/SD Scrapper with the Council Empire mission saved, although I run through it maybe once a month. I don't feel either proud or ashamed of this. It sure was convenient when I needed to collect two Incarnate Shards in less than an hour.

The drops/inf ratio is higher for soloists.

Hey! It's not our fault they took the good colors.

I tend to use black and red, black and purple, black and silver or black and blue quite a bit for both heroes and villains, so yeah, I have black and red villains. I am neither proud of the ones that aren't, or ashamed of the ones that are. It's just an aesthetic preference.

Yeah, once. I think I must have deliberately blanked that part out and just remembered it as "I stick my head inside a weird rock because a demon said it would be ok even though I had been told it had the potential to go very very wrong, nearly awaken a slumbering sea monster that could destroy us all and nearly get consumed by said monster just to go Rambo on the Legacy Chain for five minutes." Which was admittedly kinda fun, and better at simulating a power-up than the first mission of Ramiel's arc.

But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was related somehow. It did exist long before Statesman and Recluse found it.

Wait, what? Oy vey, that stupid Well infects yet another perfectly good piece of lore. I'm starting to think I should just stop reading mission text right now. What, we can't have a giant sea monster that is just a giant sea monster?

Well if you consider lore to be fluff then I guess I'm done responding to you on this topic.

Yes, and we all had a good laugh. Or a good facepalm, depending. It also had nothing to do with canon and didn't pretend to.

So if certain contacts suddenly refused to talk to any of your characters who were Mutant origin you'd be ok with it? It happened in a comic book.

Or if Sister Psyche was killed off in the Praetorian invasion, meaning you could never do her task force and never earn Task Force Commander again, you'd be ok with it? People get killed off in comic books all the time.

Or if someone's Tech Origin Energy Blaster in a power armor costume was inherently more powerful than your Natural Origin Assault Rifle Blaster in jeans and a t-shirt....you'd be cool with that? Because Iron Man is more powerful than the Punisher could ever hope to be.

Not everything that works in a comic book works in a video game based on comic books, and the things you mentioned don't often work particularly well in comic books either.

You can create whatever you want. You can create Baron Lord McDarkness the Supreme Overlord of the 17th Dimension if you want. What you do has nothing to do with what I do. What the devs do provides the context for what I do, so I'm holding them to higher standards than I hold other players.

Nope. I just happen to have fun in different ways than you do.

I totally had fun rolling a bunch of A-merits, getting an LotG and slotting it, getting some other good stuff and selling it, and logging in the next day to pick up my 200 mil. I'm sure there's someone who would take issue with this definition of fun.

More like I get to take down an automaton of myself while Miss Thystle and Frostfire blow up a Jaeger, go nuts from the exploding gas attack, aggro the rest of the room and kill a few lieutenants before they get themselves killed.

NPC "helpers" on Nemesis missions are the opposite of helpful.

Well of course, I want more arcs at the level 50 cap, because it's always nice to have more stuff to do, but more importantly is the sense of character progression being tied into the story. If my Natural origin Super Reflexes Scrapper isn't good enough to dodge Hro'dotz's sword, she can go "practice" until she's better. If my Traps Corruptor's gadgets aren't up the task of defeating Rikti and Nemesis ambushes, he can go back to the drawing board and improve on them. If my Assault Rifle Blaster isn't good enough to shoot Tyrant in the face, she has to go to the Well for help, because the game has told us that we can't improve our skills in any other way.

Hero-1 had Excalibur, so a source rooted in Arthurian legend wouldn't be inappropriate. It would certainly serve to diminish the omnipotent "source of all power, deal" nature of the Well, and show that there are other ways. But yeah, the second one. I don't like the villain PPP unlocks either.

The original means of unlocking the slot allowed the player to put their own spin on it. Maybe I paid a little bit closer attention when I beat up Romulus this time. Maybe I opened up the Orestes Rifle after I finished the SF and went back to my evil lair. Maybe I grabbed a blood sample from Mako, or Hero-1. Maybe there I was, on the Mothership, surrounded by Rikti, about to die, and was forced to call upon hereto untapped reserves of potential I never knew I had. But no. In the future, I sent a guy back into the past to ensure that I became involved with the Well to become sufficiently powerful in the future to avert said future and avoid having to send him back in time to....oh, and it's a Nemesis plot.

So no, I'm not impressed. GR really accomplishes nothing but to drive home the Praetorian threat so we know they're really really bad guys when it comes time for us to stop them.

I could have, yes. I chose to stop the second Rikti invasion, but more importantly, my character chose to stop the second Rikti invasion. I was directed through the story by people who asked for my help and spoke to me as, well, people. My progress was unrelated to the storyline. I got better at fighting because I fought Rikti, not because the Dark Watcher was kind enough to grant me more power for performing these tasks for him.

How could my Scrapper reveal the truth behind the Rikti War last week when my Blaster had already done it last year? Things like this do have to be handwaved in an MMO.

In Soviet Russia, story drives you.

They could have gone about it in a different way. There was no need to make the Well a necessary part of it. Statesman and Recluse drank from the Well, we know that, but what was stopping them from stating that Hero One had received his Incarnate powers from a different source? It would have been obvious and easily believable.

It's the nature of a video game, you know you will win, you just have to figure out how. Unless you're a villain of course.

No, I don't think you are. I think you remember very well how to have fun and therefore are annoyed when something unnecessarily spoils your suspension of disbelief, and therefore your fun.

I do think part of the problem is that players are hung up on mechanics more than they used to be. The mechanics are far more complicated than they were back in i1. You can make an entire game out of shopping for shinies. People redo their builds to squeeze out an extra 3 DPS. We have loads of different rewards to chase, and swarms of enemies to pwn in all kinds of new ways. Every time new content is released players flock to either complain about or praise the mechanics. I honestly can't blame the devs too much for thinking the majority of the playerbase just doesn't care about the story anymore. It still isn't a good reason for them not to care though.

I'll admit I'm not too familiar with the DC universe, but I'm sure there would have been ways they could have created this character without resorting to the "genetic memory" garbage. Do they not have telepaths in the DC universe? Do they not have hyper-advanced brainwashing facilities?

One is necessary in comic books, or we would have no Hulk. The other is not necessary in comic books, since there are no characters or memorable story lines that I can think of that necessitate it. Spider-Man's clone saga wasn't necessary. I never read it because I don't feel the need to read things that are bad just to laugh at them (I never understood b-movie fandom either), and I don't think I have any less of an understanding of the character of Spider-Man, or of any subsequent non-clone related storylines because I didn't read it.

Oh, I fully expect Nemesis to create an automaton of me. I've gunned down his soldiers by the thousands. I can't help it, they line up in those neat little rows and I have Full Auto. And to add insult to injury, I do it with one of his own guns. Which I earned by gunning down the elite soldiers he had so lovingly crafted to mirror his own glorious self.

No, I'm thinking more of the "so and so has actually been an automaton all along and the whole thing was another Nemesis Plot" potential. We got that with the RWZ, it made the alien invaders look like morons, it made the rest of us look like saps and I don't want to see it again.

There is a difference between fake science as a concept without which you'd have no story and really really fake science because you're trying to shove the square peg of your plot into the round hole of how the world you're writing for is supposed to work.

It's as simple as this: If someone got hit by gamma rays and turned pink, I'd be all like, "huh?" Because the fake made-up world's fake made-up science doesn't work that way. You can make stuff up, but you have to be consistent. When you do something that goes beyond what the established fake science can do, you have to explain how you're doing it, or people are going to tell you that you can't.

"We" is our characters. Those people we so lovingly crafted and assigned backstories and motivations and personalities to who are all now being reduced to playing second-fiddle to an overarching storyline in order to progress. It's like we all had our own comic book, but now it's being put on hold indefinitely for the huge company-wide crossover. It's not like the second Rikti War, where all our individual books acknowledged the major event and told how we reacted to it, this crossover is all there is.
It demonstrated the real and immediate risk of trying to gain power immediately. It didn't even acknowledge there is a risk in trying to gain power at all from an enigmatic entity with unclear motives and a sentience behind it.

They weren't all gems, back in i1. I didn't mind Praetoria for what it was: just another stop, albeit a long one, on the Portal Corp Dimensional Whirligig. You fought a bunch of AVs and got +5 HP and END for it. You freed Statesman and stood back while he PLd you. Out of all the dangling plot threads they could have picked, they picked one that probably could have been wrapped up fairly easily.

Yes, it ties into Incarnates, but only because Praetoria is run by evil Statesman. You truly want player characters to access godlike power that might turn them evil, megalomaniacal and insane? Tie it into some of the established godlike entities that players actually want to know more about, like Mot and Lughebu and Rularuu. Don't tie it into boring Mary Sues and their magical Well of New Powers as the Plot Demands.

No, I want the content to be written in such a way that my actions seem to matter. If I'd spent the first 20 levels of my career knowing the Rikti were going to invade again and trying to stop it, only to have the Rikti invade again anyway, and only being able to stop it at level 45, it would have been just as bad. But I didn't. At level 20 I put an end to Dr. Vahzilok and the Clockwork King. Those things mattered. Praetoria doesn't, because Tyrant invades primal earth anyway, and we're eventually going to beat him anyway, Resistance or no Resistance.

I think part of the problem too is that with all the focus being on Praetoria the storyline is being advanced too fast. The status quo is changing before it has a chance to become status quo.
Yes. They got it from the Doctor.

Cause you know, if it's good, you'll remember it and won't have to read it again.

It would be nice if I didn't have to go to Paragonwiki after the fact to figure out exactly what I was doing and why.

The in-mission dialogue and, as much as I hate to admit it, cutscenes, are somewhat useful for this, since everyone can see it.
Ah, yes, I had forgotten about that. Obviously he took the Pack Rat fatal flaw at character creation.

Ok, I'll give you that Crey can replicate the original's memories.

However, we don't break into an industrial manufacturing facility in Dean and Leonard's arcs. We break into a cloning facility, where, incidentally, we run into defective clones with the wrong powers.

I prefer to think of them as fancy automatons that are difficult and expensive to build, which explains both why he kept them after they'd outlived their usefulness and why Nemesis doesn't use automatons to replace powered people. Because if he can churn out powered automatons on some kind of steam-powered assembly line that opens up whole new possibilities for Nemesis Plots, and I. Am. Sick. Of. Nemesis. Plots.

Prove it.

Well 95% of everything is crap, so I guess everyone should stick to producing crap, since nearly everything is based on crap.

Or, you know, base your game on the GOOD parts of comic books...since those are the parts people like and remember fondly instead of trying to forget and pretend they didn't happen.

Thousands of people play this game for a myriad of reasons that don't include Masterminds. The AT is more trouble than it's worth, let's remove it. Thousands of people play this game and never PvP. Let's remove it. Let's remove supergroups because you can play the game without being in one. Let's remove power customization, since it's possible to play without it.

Or even better, let's remove the bio screen, and the costume creator, and encourage everyone to name themselves InvulTank33 and xXxFarmFireKinxXx. It's all needless fluff that detracts from the real game of mindlessly punching bad guys in the face.

Ok, well instead of coming up with unique and interesting new villain groups the devs should save time and just make variously-powered groups named "stuff."
Yeah, that in-mission text? Great when you're solo. Not so much on a team, when everyone wants to read it, clicks it and finishes talking to the contact before you can click. And then you can't talk to them.

I also like how you assume that people who click past everything will actually pay attention to new game mechanics instead of clicking past them like they usually do. If the text contains important gameplay hints they'll click past it then ask in broadcast for someone to explain what to do. People who don't want to read won't. People who do want to read don't have to be forced, cajoled, or in any other way encouraged to pay attention, besides giving them something worth paying attention to.
A well-written story gives the illusion that you're driving. A player's thoughts should never be assumed, a player's motivations should never be assumed beyond the very general (I'm a hero, I want to save people. I'm a mercenary, pay me. I'm a villain, and I'm very hard to write for in the maximum appeal context of MMO storylines because my motives are so different from the next villain's) and a player's behaviors must progress logically from these motivations.

Let me repeat this one more time: Just because other people produce crap doesn't mean you should aspire to produce crap, or shrug off the mediocre as "good enough" because at least it's better than the other guy's crap.

Or perhaps your character and his/her contact is being forced to act like an idiot so the devs don't have to give you, the player, sufficient information to figure it out.

It still isn't, and now we're being railroaded. Players demanded an "epic story" but the devs didn't seem up to the task, so they used a gimmick to "make us feel powerful" (it didn't work), gave us every reason to NOT affiliate ourselves with the Well then forced us to affiliate ourselves with the Well anyway. In an effort to make the missions "interesting" they made them look haphazard. Running the ITF for the 20th time would have been more epic.

The whole point of this thread is that there are already lots of existing storylines that could serve as a foundation for something big. They happened to pick up one that is inherently cheesy (evil-goatee alternate universe; no matter how you dress it up with shades of grey it's still an evil-goatee alternate universe.) and one that is inextricably tied to signature NPCs that most players hate and resent for constantly reminding us that we're just supporting characters in our own story.

It isn't zany, but it isn't particularly important either. If it mattered, we wouldn't be sent to Primal Earth, and Cole's invasion wouldn't be happening as planned 30 levels later.

No, it isn't. Not to say it isn't important at all, but if your foundation sucks, slapping a fancy coat of paint and expensive accessories on it means you have a beautiful house that is going to fall down.

I don't think it should be a debate anyway. Nobody has yet explained to me why we can't have a solid story with engaging, fun gameplay.

Praetoria drips with misery and suffering and grim and gritty much like the '90s did. It's a crapsack world for the sake of being a crapsack world, and ultimately serves little purpose except to show us just how terrible a person Cole is so we'll want to fight him.

Continuity snarls, character derailment and Rob Leifeld are also standard comic book stuff. I don't want those in the game either.

Spider-Man and Wolverine can be cloned because their powers come from being different on a genetic level. Iron Man can't be cloned, unless you also have the facilities to build a multi-billion dollar suit of power armor. The Punisher can't be cloned unless you have years to train him, can somehow recreate the Vietnam War, give him a family and have them killed. Doctor Strange can't be cloned unless....I admit I'm not too familiar with his origin but I'm guessing you'd have to know a lot of magic. Since we can create Iron Man, The Punisher or Doctor Strange, as well as Spider-Man and Wolverine, any story we play through has to be applicable to them too.

Besides, isn't the clone saga considered one of the worst Spider-Man storylines ever?

But at the same time we could also be looking at a variation of CoV's vicious spiral: people get bored in the 30s because the content is boring, so they make a new alt, so there are fewer people playing in the 30s, so the devs make less content for the 30s because there are fewer people playing there....

I guess it depends whether you're an altoholic or not. I'm not, and I know I'm not the only person who would like to "finish" their characters rather than constantly make new ones. Altoholics just got an entire expansion mostly catering to them (whether you like the execution or not, and I don't, it was a huge infusion of lowbie content), characters who are "done" are getting more stuff, but what about the characters that aren't quite there yet?

And then nobody would see it because they'd level past it too fast.

I think they should start with 30-50 heroside. Those are the levels with the least new content considering how much time you spend there, and those are the levels where arcs drag on for 15 missions.

After that they should look at 25-50 villainside.

Like the RWZ?

Actually, there is some evidence that they do. The guy who wrote the Reichsman TFs obviously didn't and he's gone now. The problem is they have no trouble picking and choosing, incorporating what they like, ignoring what they don't, and shoehorning aspects where they really don't belong.

That would require non-human skeletons. It's easier to crank Bobcat's damage up to 11 and re-appropriate Malta from a super-sekrit anti-super global conspiracy to mercenaries with sapper guns.

You do realize that many of us want better spawn placement so we can place a blinky in Oranbega without worrying about it spawning in the stupidest part of the map, right?

There's also Salvo redside, although you kill him before he's turned. I totally agree with you though.

[Insert standard Twilight rant here]

On a more positive note, you can also point to the Shadow Shard threads that pop up regularly, player excitement regarding the Rikti War and the return of the 5th Column, and in fact this very thread as evidence that at some point they got it right. They created storylines that were engaging on a level beyond "oooh, I get to fight evil me" that players have remained interested in long after the initial shiny has faded.
As overly fond as Venture is of the phrase "just a bunch of stuff that happened," most of the newer arcs are exactly that. The rest of them, the ones that deal directly with the theme of "morality" that has been such a huge focus of Going Rogue, are extremely inconsistent and often extremely contrived. Too often villains are portrayed as wantonly destructive morons and vigilantes are portrayed as trigger-happy lunatics from the '90s (gratuitous pouches and oversized weapons not included.)

The Tips content is probably the worst place to introduce a running storyline. People are unlikely to do all of them. They are meant to serve a specific mechanical purpose and to act as filler. They are by their very nature non-linear, and yet are being used as a vehicle for linear character development. I do like the inclusion of Frostfire, since he's a character we're familiar with and who already has an established backstory that makes seeking redemption a logical step for him. I really don't care about the rest of them. I certainly don't care about Maelstrom, and while it's fun to flip off Desdemona by setting a bunch of stuff on fire it would be just as fun to flip off any generic hero and way more fun and make way more sense to flip off War Witch (the character, not the dev.)

They can however assume that if, out of five possible origins, only one and a half will result in successful powered clones, an arc where the player character is cloned will not suit characters who use one of the other three and half origins.

And didn't the heroic doppelganger arc initially involve your Praetorian double before players complained and it was changed to "you from a generic alternate dimension?" I would think that, given the opportunity to create characters in Praetoria the logical and immediate assumption would be that many players would choose to create Praetorian versions of their characters. You shouldn't need the players to tell you this.
This kind of "clever plot" requires an extremely clever writer. Unfortunately no matter how clever you are there is always someone else clever enough to figure it out before the end, but the nature of the game forces you to keep going through the motions even if you've figured out how to skip to the end. Don't try to fool the players. Just don't. And don't try to fool the characters with obvious things like Mender Silos. It isn't clever and it isn't cute.

It also forces a greater focus on the story, since people won't bother with an unappealing story if there's no shiny. We've already seen that people will happily ignore a sub-par story and praise its shinies.

Don't believe me? How many people praised Mercedes Sheldon's arcs when they were released? Now how many people praised the doppelganger arcs?