InfamousBrad

You do have one more ancient Roman story arc to tell, and I'm surprised you didn't fit it into Cimerora for this issue: the flip side of Diviner Maros, "Cult of the Shaper" (Sharkkhead, level 25-30). After that, though? My vote would be to do something new: 3rd-world drug war, Banished Pantheon in the south Pacific, underwater city, orbiting space station, moonbase, Praetorian Earth, Nemesis Earth, Council Earth, or Rikti homeworld. Actually, no, my first choice would be a major revamp of all blue-side contacts other than the Hollows and Faultline from level 5-20; there's some really lame mission design and story arc design in there, and it's got to be costing you players. But if you're determined to spend your assets 100% on new content rather than fixing old content, then yeah, the new content should be new new content.

You've got a gazillion dangling plot threads. Don't spend several issues in a row on any one of them.

Wait a minute, the same guy did the audio for Tabula Rasa and for City of Heroes? Then why does Tabula Rasa sound 1000% better than City of Heroes? (Honestly, it's almost the only thing that TaRa did right.) Did he learn that much since CoH's launch? If so, can we get NCsoft to budget some time for him to come back and redo half of the sounds in this game from scratch to make them, well, less scratchy, less screechy, less annoying?

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Regarding the Devouring Earth... Are the various rocks, trees, fungus, etc., sentient creatures with independent thought (while following the teachings of Hamidon), or are they just puppets, controlled (and spoken through) by Hami?

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Oooh, mark me down as wanting an answer to that one, too, because the mission writers don't seem to have been consistent about it. In some missions, DE creatures don't make any vocalizations. In others, they grunt and howl. But in some missions, they seem to be able to talk -- and unless Dr. Pasilima's as crazy as the Clockwork King, it can't be all puppetry, because in some missions, they argue with each other. Given Dr. Pasilima's mission, I would assume that only the Devoured and Greater Devoured are capable of sentient thought, and maybe not even much of them. What does the story bible say, though?

Here's my top question, which should show what kind of a nerd I am.

The official website gives conflicting answers as to the question of what country, exactly, does the Nerva Archipelago belong to. Is it a US protectorate? A member of the British Commonwealth? An independent nation?

FWIW, having studied all the publicly available stuff, the least-contradictory answer would be for it to be a British Commonwealth nation, since we're told that the British took it over from the French, and then never told of anybody else taking it over. But there's nothing in the artwork to suggest that it's anything other than an off-shore US island, which seems to me to be a throwback to the earliest draft of the Rogue Isles overview, back when we were being told that the Rogue Isles were only 5 miles east of Rhode Island, just barely farther offshore than Peregrine Island.

Come to think of it, there's my second question: What is the current answer to the question, "how far is it from Paragon City to the Etoile Islands?" 5 miles? 50? 500?

(Fire up Google Earth and zoom in on the area off-shore of Rhode Island. Or here, here it is in Google Maps: http://preview.tinyurl.com/6nph8y. Notice that there's a collection of seamounts about 400 miles southeast of Providence, RI, just north of Bermuda. If you haven't made up your minds, that's my nomination.)

Third question: Is there any kind of a travel embargo making it illegal for American citizens to travel to the Arachnos-controlled Etoile Islands, like there is with Cuba? Are the American tourists I see in Cap au Diable and St. Martial traveling there by way of Canada or Mexico, or are there direct flights?

Fourth question: What part of the world is Striga Isle in? The Caribbean? The North Atlantic? The Mediterranean? Is it close to the Rogue Isles, or hundreds of miles away?

And now for one completely unrelated question:

According to the Carnival of Shadows story arcs in game, Vanessa de Vore is ardently anti-Rikti, and fought alongside the heroes in the First Rikti War. Why don't we see Carnies in the Rikti War Zone, allied to the players the way Longbow and the Vanguard are? Why don't we see Carnie NPCs in the Vanguard base? Given Vanguard's open-door policy for villains, is Vanessa de Vore a member of Vanguard now, and if not, why not?

There goes my theory that Lady Grey and the Dark Watcher were secretly incarnates from a prior cycle.

Artistic nit: the i12 page is the only one that has an artist's rendering for one of the two insets, the others use screenshots in both.

Calendar nit: no Valentine's event in 2009?

Has anybody copied the dates from this to Google Calendar as a public, subscribable calendar? If not, I will.

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For those who go down the Wolf Spider route, they have the choice between Crab Spider and Bane Spider at level 24. "This is the first archetype that we've designed that halfway through their career they get to choose what path they're going to go down," Grubb told us. The Crab Spiders have some pet and stealth tools to go with their melee arsenal, while the Bane Spider takes the warrior thing to an even further degree.

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That has got to be backwards. Right?

OK, you've answered all of my questions. I'm satisfied that NCNC is trying to do the right thing here. I only have one concern left, and that's this: I don't think you know what you're going into.

You see, when Ms. magazine started taking advertising, they made the same deals with their advertisers that you're making, and for roughly the same reason. They knew that if they became just like the "seven sisters," the generic womens' magazines like Glamour and Cosmopolitan, that it would cost them more in subscribers (and just as importantly to them, impact) than it earned them in revenues. So they made a firm commitment not to compromise on what ads they would and wouldn't show, and that under no circumstances would they let advertisers dictate editorial.

It failed. Hideously. And when they shut down the magazine, and relaunched it as subscriber-funded only, editor Gloria Steinem wrote a very, very important essay on why it failed, and how it failed. I found a copy on the web: Gloria Steinem, "Sex, Lies and Advertising," New Ms., July 1990. And I would feel a lot more confident that you're not going to repeat Ms.'s mistakes if all of you who will have decision-making responsibilities with regard to the advertising program read it.

Just leaving a reminder to myself for a version 3 update: additional faction. Werewolves (Werewolf World), Arcane.

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What does the Real Numbers windoid show for minions and pets, out of curiousity?

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It shows what powers they have. If you click one of the powers in their list, it expands to show all of its detailed information too.

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*blink* *blink* *blink*

/em genuflect

We're not worthy! We're not worthy!

What does the Real Numbers windoid show for minions and pets, out of curiousity?

Boy, all this stuff happens the first weekend I get called out of town since last October. Anyway, I don't agree with the people who think that CoV has consistently gotten the short end of the stick. I could give you a very long list of ways in which CoV is just plainly the superior game to CoH. Brawler's recent post on the APP/PPP disparity even makes sense -- grudging, despairing sense, but sense nonetheless. (APPs are overpowered; do they give villains over-powered pools to be "fair" and break the game, or do they hold the line and some day nerf the overpowered APPs? They chose the latter, okay, I get it. Don't like it, but I get it.)

One of the issues raised so far hadn't been on my list, but I guess it should have been: mayhems. I love mayhems, think they're so much more fun and so much less aggravating than safeguards that it's not even comparable. But then, I always solo mayhems. Always. For just the reason raised above: because of the way the ambushes scale, it is flatly impossible to defeat the size of ambush a large team attracts in the amount of time that defeating that ambush gives back. Solo, ambushes add time. Teamed, they cost so much time that they render the mission almost impossible to complete.

But I noticed something that got changed on the other side, in the time since safeguards were introduced, and it may be the solution. Having only just recently gone back to the hero game for a while, I only just found out that the villains inside the bank do not scale up based on team size like normal spawns do. So if the triggered outside ambushes in Mayhem missions didn't scale up anywhere nearly as fast or as far as they do, if, say, the most you could possibly get with an 8 person team would be two lieutenants and six minions, then it'd be possible to wipe out an ambush fast enough to not lose time, or not lose so much time, on the timer.

And yes, yes, yes, expletive-deleted, villains need the strike force gaps filled in. And yes, it would be nice if the co-op missions didn't all start from the presumption that villains have to become temporary heroes. But my number one issue with the villain-side game still hasn't even been brought up yet, and that's this:

Villains desperately need another level 20-25 zone of some kind. In every five-level range other than 1-5 and 20-25, if you get tired of being in the zone you're in, there's another zone in the same level range you can go over to and do some missions for a while. But from level 20 to 25, the only place a villain can get missions is in Sharkhead.

I almost don't care what the alternative would be. A villain instance of Striga would be just fine with me. Five levels' worth of missions in a villain instance of Boomtown would be good enough for me. Getting black-helicoptered into the Arachnos base in Faultline to search unsuccessfully for the PCM in the tunnels under the dam would be good enough for me. What I'd really love the most to see would be a whole new villain level 15-25 or 20-30 Hazard Zone based on the West Libertalia story line, linked to the black helicopter at the Cap au Diable airport, but really, even a smaller 5-level half-size mini-zone where we go to some generic jungle 3rd world country on Family business or as some kind of an Arachnos covert operation would be almost as good, as far as I'm concerned.

(And of course, the other reason why a level 20-25 alternative is so badly needed is that no other 5-level range in the whole villain game has as many completely screwed up missions as there are in level 20-25 in Sharkhead. I wonder how many villain players we lose as soon as people get to level 22 or so and have all three of their story arc in progress slots jammed with virtually impossible missions.)

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Now I can't decide if I should get my hopes up for VEATs and risk disappointment, or set my expectations somewhere in the subbasement and hope to be pleasantly surprised.

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Blessed are they that expect the worst, for they can be pleasantly surprised.

(You think Earth Control is powerful, PVE? Huh. I started one, was really underwhelmed compared to fire, illusion, and plant.)

As mentioned in the other thread:

Enthused by: axe and mace brutes, psi/mental blasters, */storm corruptors and masterminds, plant controllers, */thermal controllers. (Ill/therm may be massively overpowered, in the late levels. And never mind plant/therm, plant/kin will be the really sick one, I suspect.)
Underwhelmed by: electric corruptors, earth dominators, super reflex brutes.
Baffled by: */electric dominators, cold/ice defenders, dark/dark tankers, fire/fire scrappers. No, really, who asked for any of these?
Disgusted by: electric/electric stalkers. I don't see how either powerset could not suck.

But to me, the more interesting observation is that in two separate places in the article, it looks like Dr. Brainstorm is hinting that this isn't the last round of Powerset Proliferation. Can we get confirmation on that, from a red name? Are future rounds of Powerset Proliferation being planned, being considered, or off the table? Maybe an annual event?

I'm looking on the bright side here. My money had been that this week's preview would be of the Midnight Squad content, and that they were going to roll out the powerset proliferation data in waves, not all at once. So, yeah, hey, would rather have had it today than tomorrow, but the good news is, by tomorrow I'm getting a lot more info than I'd expected to get. I call that a net-positive result.

Variety.

Level 2-5: Mercy Island. (Understandably.)
Level 5-10: Mercy Island, Port Oakes.
Level 10-15: Port Oakes, Cap au Diable.
Level 15-20: Cap au Diable, Mercy Island.
Level 20-25: Sharkhead Isle.
Level 25-30: Sharkhead Isle, Nerva Archipelago.
Level 30-40: Nerva Archipelago, St. Martial, Rikti War Zone
Level 40-50: St. Martial, Rikti War Zone

Two alternatives I'd suggest, both of which could be linked to the Black Helicopter line:

Cheap: Make a villain version of Boomtown. Scale the mobs in Boomtown up from 10-20 (now) to 20-30. Put two 20-25 and two 25-30 contacts there. Create a storyline explaining how Arachnos is digging into Boomtown trying to recover Nemesis artifacts from the original 3-way fight between Freedom Phalanx, Arachnos, and Nemesis back in the 1930s.

Better: Create a Hazard-like zone, level 20-30, of the island nation of West Libertalia. Create two 20-25 contacts, one from Ambassador Alawi's Arachnos-backed side, and one from the Sky Raiders' US-backed side, battling over West Libertalia's oil wealth. Create a 25-30 story arc, identical from both contacts except for the flavor text before and after the missions, in which players find out that the Banished Pantheon are sponsoring their own Superadine-fueled rebel army deep in the jungle, trying to secure West Libertalia because it's Adamastor's ancestral shrine. Final battle: player(s) with one boss-level (Family) Troll boss and one (boss-level) antique (Sky Raiders) Malta super-droid versus an Elite Boss level Avatar of Adamastor.

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On the other hand, when you're sent to a Security Chief and you finish that mission, you do get a "go back to the contact" in the Nav window.

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Oh, wait. I think I got that wrong in my post. You get a "go back to contact" message on the other ones only after the hunt mission. Wincott doesn't count because the initial mission is really a roundabout contact introduction disguised as a mission.

Is there anything else like that in the game? I can't recall...

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Jim Tremblor, Stephanie Peebles, and Gordon Bower. I was actually faintly surprised that Levantera doesn't get one.

Speaking of Eastgate Bay and the Seaview project, am I the only one who's bothered by the fact that you can't see the Atlantic Ocean from the far east side of the Hollows?

I'm one of those people who always hated The Hollows. I know that there are a few people who like the forced teaming in Hazard Zones, and who appreciate the fast leveling you can get from street sweeping them in teams. But almost nobody does that, it's almost impossible to put together a street sweeping team since the mission reward boost back in i4 or i5, so I feel like I could make a pretty good case that the whole Hazard Zone notion should just go away. Adding a hospital to the zone, toning down the spawn sizes, sorting the mission doors by level range: these are much-needed changes if you ask me; heck, for all of me, they should remove the door into the zone and the ID-checking cops, too.

I'll stop belaboring this point once I make it one more time, now that there's an official thread related to the Hollows revamp to make it in, but I really do wish that the rest of the level 5-15 contacts, the ones in KR and Steel and SkyC, had gotten rewitten before the Hollows got remodeled, because they need it more. As it is, with this revamp it looks to me like you're going out of your way to make it practically mandatory that players skip all the rest of the level 5-15 content in the blue-side game, by giving players major incentives to just stay in the Hollows and farm it to that level.

To that end, Zombie_Man has (not for the first time) hit the nail on the head when he suggests that after the last mission in Officer Wincott's story arc, he should give out a PPD Jetpack, or at least a Raptor Pack. If you're going to make players even less likely to do the Atlas Park and King's Row safeguards, please don't cheat them out of their temp travel power by doing so. They're already going to regret it later when they find out they needed those exploration badges for an accolade, but don't add insult to injury.

There's an even more important reason to do so, too. Changing the spawn distribution in Grendel's Gulch fixes only one of the two big problems with Grendel's Gulch. The other one, the one you can't afford to fix in this issue, is that the geometry of The Hole itself is really, really painful to navigate. A timed jetpack is needed, not just so you can avoid coming around a corner and stumbling into a pack of level 15 Igneous at melee range, but so that if you fall into The Hole by accident the rest of your team doesn't kick you rather than wait forever for you to find a way out.

I also feel like there's way too much "fruit salad" in this zone revamp, way too many factions added just to have them there. I do count it as a big favorable that there are more Hellions in the zone, and some Skulls; the nature of the Superadine Connection and Talos Island Conspiracy plot lines strongly suggest that Eastgate should be where both conspiracies are making their connections. I'm absolutely delighted to see that the Legacy Chain are responding to the Circle of Thorns' attempts to find the Cavern of Transcendence, that absolutely makes story-telling sense. I'll grudgingly go along with having there be some Tsoo in the neighborhood, by way of explaining where the Tsoo found out about all the conspiracies they're trying to disrupt in The Tsoo Shenanigans and The Tsoo Coup.

But I can only just barely stretch my imagination far enough to justify a tiny Vahzilok presence, although really, I don't think they make any sense. It'd be easier to justify having Clockwork scavenging the buildings around the edge of Grendel's Gulch and inside the Gulch than to explain why Dr. V's minions would risk everything it takes to get no-better-quality parts than they can get in any cemetery in the city. But all that being said, I don't think it makes any sense to add either Lost or Hydra or Coralax to this zone. None. It feels gratuitous to me, like you're making excuses to add them just to show off the character models.

One thing I hope, by the way, is that at least half of Meg Mason's early missions are against the Hellions, if for no other reason than to put a dent in the incredible shortage of magic invention salvage missions in the pre-level-15 range. (I also wish that Positron would re-consider my suggestion that the Outcasts drop half-and-half tech and magic invention salvage, for the same reason. Come on, they're the go-betweens in the Talos Island Conspiracy, shouldn't players find some evidence of this in their pockets?)

After some thought, I'm a little disturbed by one thing about this, one way in which the Hollows re-vamp is taking the hero game in the wrong direction, and it's the contact with the repeatable missions.

For the whole two-plus years from issue 2, back in September of '04, until issue 8, in November of '06, heroes got into the habit of literally never leaving the Hollows from level 5 all the way to level 15 or 20. Sure, they ran out of content and were reduced to farming the same missions over and over again. And in fact, because of much hatred for Julius the Troll's story arc, mostly what they did was re-run Flux the Outcast's arc over and over and over and over again, basically doing nothing but farming Frostfire's lair, from around level 7 all the way to level 15 or more. If you were playing heroes, and wanted to do anything else and not solo it, good luck to you; all the teams were in The Hollows, farming Frostfire.

(It's one of the most cool custom maps in the whole game. And I am so sick of it, even a year and a half later, that it's not even funny.)

And the main reason that everybody did that is that there is very nearly 100% universal consensus among the players, hero side, that the non-Hollows contacts from level 5 to 15 really, really suck, and half of the 15-20 ones are no great shakes. So the great thing about adding newspaper missions was that it gave people a really viable alternative to grinding Frostfire; they could grind newspaper missions.

So if what we're doing here is making it less necessary that you go to King's Row to get your temp travel power mission by making it less painful to travel around the Hollows? And adding repeatable missions so that if you solo your way through Officer Wincott's arc at level 5 and finish Flux at level 9? Now you won't have to leave the Hollows to get more missions of your own to get to level 10 and unlock Julius the Friendly Troll? Then doesn't it look like what they're really trying to get all new players to do is to completely ignore all of the content from before issue 2? To lock all of the players into two and only two zones per 5-level range? 5-10 Hollows. 10-15 Hollows and Midnight Club. 15-20 Midnight Club and Faultline. 20-25 Faultline and Striga. 25-30 Striga and Croatoa. 30-35 Croatoa and ... what? 35-50 RWZ and Cimerora. All those other 75% of the contacts and their story lines, it feels to me like they're trying to steer everybody away from.

And I get that, in one regard, because especially prior to level 25, those arcs really aren't all that well designed. Much of the writing is lame, and the mission door placements and many of the maps all kind of suck, giving the game the nickname City of Commuters, and leaving people completely in the dark about most of the actual plot until they're in their 20s. So is the Hollows revamp really just happening because it's cheaper to revise one zone and add some grind-able content to it than to do what they really need to do (and yes, I know I sound like a broken record here), which is rewrite all original and issue 1 level 5 to 15 story arcs?

I've been spending a good chunk of this year going back through the "classic" CoH story arcs, and here's what I don't get about them creating another Lost story arc in the 10-20 range, hero-side: that's not the main level range where there's a shortage of Lost/Rikti story arcs. OK, there's no actual arc from level 10-15. But almost every contact (outside of The Hollows) from level 5-10 puts you through missions that give clues about the Lost, who then reappear en masse in Faultline in the 15-20 range. No, what I noticed is that both the Lost, and the Rikti then drop completely out of the story line except for entirely random police radio missions all the way to level 35. Once I noticed it, it felt really weird. At the very least, it left me feeling that Steven Sheridan's missions should be moved down 5 levels, to the 30-35 range, to partially fill the gap, not least of which because now they really ought to be run before you get to Levantera's two arcs at 35. Now they can be run in either order, and if you run them in the other order, as I did, it undermines the whole mystery of Sheridan's longest story arc. But even if they moved Sheridan down by 5, there'd still be a total absence of the Lost from levels 20 to 30, a much wider gap than the one between levels 10 and 15.

(Please skip the too-obvious joke about those story arcs being "lost.")

On the other hand, the villains really do need some Lost/Rikti story arcs in the 10-20 range ... except for one tiny problem. Level 10-20 is almost the only level range in the whole game where villains already have too much content. Sure, none of the existing story arcs in the 5-25 range explain why the Lost are in villains' newspaper missions, but who'll have time for them prior to level 20? Not for the first time, I remind you that the real content gap, the real crushing need for another zone to visit for missions, is in the 20-25 range.

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So it looks like the secret to getting heavies is, beat down those bosses and LTs quickly and mercilessly, and you are more likely to get heavies as the Human Threat rapidly outpaces the Rikti Threat.

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Thanks. Until I read your explanation, I couldn't make any sense of that. Too many moving pieces.

Do I have this right? Let me construct a hypothetical example. It's the middle of the night on a nearly empty server, so only 3 people respond to an attack, and all 3 are within 30ft of each other. They have an accumulated threat level of 3.0.

So when the bombing phase ends, they'll draw up to 3.0 points' worth of Rikti. 9 minions. 2 lieutenants and 4 minions. 3 lieutenants and 2 minions. Or 4 lieutenants. But for this example, let's say that it's not that last one. So if they kill everything that spawns in their area except for one minion, and they get it done in 5 seconds, then at the end of the 6th second, they'll still have a threat level of 3.0, the Rikti will have a threat level of 0.5 or 1/6th as much, and so it'll spawn a Heavy Assault Suit? Did I get that right?

Okay, speculation:

It will not be co-op.

It will be smaller than you're thinking, on the order of the existing Ouroboros story arcs. I strongly suspect that this will, in fact, turn out to be what the new developers were using as a classroom exercise. It will turn out to be two, count 'em, two Ouroboros 1-person-minimum task forces of about four to six missions each, one for heroes and one for villains. We're told minimum level 35, which means probably capped at level 39. All they mean when they say "35 to 50" is that people 35 to 50 can do it, they're not promising you'll get to use your level 41+ powers.

I noticed when Ouroboros opened that each side had one contact that gives no missions, Twilight's Son (for villains) and Mender Tesseract (for heroes). This will be those two story arc/TFs.

Now I'll go out on a limb. There are two plot threads in the game that make mention of ancient Rome. "Path of the Dark," hero side, hints at the original arrival of the Nictus on Earth back during ancient Roman times. And "Cult of the Shaper," villain side, refers back to an attempt by the Coralax to conquer ancient Rome. So here's my prediction. Mender Tesseract will send heroes back to ancient Rome to fight Calystix the Shaper and a Roman Coralax hybrid cult. And Twilight's Son will send villains back to ancient Rome to fight the Nictus.

And yes, this means only two story arcs, period. Which explains why they were originally playing down expectations for issue 12. We were just told that they originally thought they couldn't afford to finish VEATs in time for i12. And when they made the original statements about how i12 was going to be disappointing, and saw our reaction, that's what originally persuaded them to add Power Proliferation, as something cheap they could do to increase interest in i12. These two story arcs will turn out to have been the whole original plan for issue 12.

That's my guess, anyway.

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So, was I reading it right that each AT will get one primary and secondary power from its corresponding AT? If so that's awesome!

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Every AT gains at least 1 powerset -- Masterminds only get a Secondary, no new Primary. Brutes get 2 new Primaries, and 1 secondary. Everyone else gets 1 Primary and 1 Secondary.

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Primary Secondary
Blasters Psi Blast ?
Controllers Plant Control ?
Defenders ? ?
Scrappers ? ?
Tankers ? ?

Brutes Axe, War Mace ?
Corruptors ? Storm Summoning
Dominators ? ?
Masterminds none ?
Stalkers ? ?</pre><hr />
Can we please get those question marks filled in, for the 75% of the slots that don't have anything to go on yet?

Nice. I laughed with glee over the level-up effect. I feel like making a keybind or a macro for when all those inspirations go off at once that yells, "I feel pretty! Oh so pretty!"

*cough*

Eight power trays feels a little like overkill, and like begging for the screen to be completely taken over. I mean seriously, does anybody actually need 80 power/macro icons on their screen at once? Will the 4th-8th power trays have key-equivalents? shift-ctrl, shift-alt, alt-ctrl, alt-shift-ctrl, and something else?

Hey, you know what would be a nice, and relatively easy, QoL feature to add, especially with all those additional trays? A tooltip that hovers over the tray number explaining what keys to hit to activate the powers on this particular tray.

Wouldn't have been my first choice for the part of the level 5-15 game that most needed overhaul, to put it mildly. There are things about the Hollows that suck, but it's still better than all ten other story arcs in the 5-15 range combined. But yeah, the Hollows did need a little bit of touch up, so I'm glad to see it. I'm just disappointed, a little, because I think the developer time would have been better spent on revamping the other level 5-15 blue-side contacts instead.