Megajoule

My personal notions of zone themes/architecture/eras:

Kings Row: The Great Depression, 20s and 30s. Brownstones, warehouses and Art Deco skyscrapers in High Park. Police HQ is a post-WW2 addition, the last attempt to make things better.

Perez Park: The surrounding buildings should be upscale apartment buildings and department stores, now visibly abandoned, gutted, and decayed since the first Rikti invasion.

Steel Canyon: Like it is now, but even more so. Replace some of the older-style skyscrapers with glass monoliths, while leaving some as historical landmarks (e.g. the Flatiron Building). A center of commerce for the last century and beyond.

Boomtown: Start rebuilding part of it, close to the gate. For the rest of the zone, apply the lessons learned in making First Ward.

Skyway: 70s urban decay. Not that people still wear bellbottoms there, but think of gritty city neighborhoods under the El tracks and the freeways. The sort of zone that vigilantes moving up from KR would prowl.

Talos: A hotspot of 80s development. As pretty and as shallow as Nova Praetoria or Imperial City. Lots of neon at night.

Astoria: It needs something, but I'm not sure what.

Founders Falls: First, I'd say that the architecture here should be more "colonial", though built up - more like Croatoa. Also, I would really like to see this zone lose most of its villain spawns. It's supposed to be one of the oldest and most upscale districts; why is crime tolerated there at this sort of level, other than to give players a chance to street hunt (which few ever do these days)? Clean it up.

That's all I have for now.

I finished the First Ward content this last week with one of my Praetorians. It was a great ride and/or story, but there's no way that this particular character could have done all of it IC.

Papa Lobo's whole concept, the reason he ended up joining the Resistance, is to rescue his daughter from the Seer Network. In-game, Katie Douglas makes an acceptable stand-in for most purposes. He did her arc (among others on the Warden side) back in the 1-20 game, freeing her and several other Seers; one of these was his own daughter, who he ended up taking to the relative safety of Primal Earth. So far so good.

Like most roleplayers, I fudge the missions I do in little ways as I go along, to fit my character better. But there's no room for that, for me and this character, with the tasks Vanessa gives. If I were to do those IC (rather than just to see the content; now I have, and I'm done), Papa Lobo would flat out refuse to proceed. He'd quit and storm out, try to find another option, suffer a Heroic BSOD and/or lose himself to Vengeance. Game over.

As things stand, the lack of a real resolution is annoying. If it were possible, and assuming that Vanessa got someone else to do the dirty deeds without consulting Lobo before hand, he would immediately charge down to the DUST HQ and unhook her again at the point where the content currently ends.

I happen to know Twoflower, and I can state with some authority that his arcs are written with the specific intent to address some of the limitations of official content in this area (among other goals). Even so, they can't cover every possibility. Also, the player doesn't really have any more freedom of choice than the official arcs; it's just better hidden, with the character addressed as a superior rather than a lackey and the initial assumption that the character has chosen to undertake this villainous plan, rather than having it foist upon them.

I'm not familiar with the other two (contacts? authors?) that you mentioned.

"I go my own way, I make my own path, I have complete freedom!"

You are correct that the game currently does not support this for villains. IMO, it has never supported this. It is uncertain whether it can support this, as it's an almost completely different style of MMO design ("sandbox" vs. "theme park", if one uses those terms).

I say again, it's always like this (all the way back to the design phase, where you would start out as a minion in one of a few existing villain groups, plus Arachnos). I'm not seeing any new complaints, really. Why did you expect different now?

I already responded in the official discussion thread.

There's no lore here.
This is a description of one NPC's encounter with the new Shivans, with some fine details not supported by the game engine. The only nod to actual lore is the acknowledgment that these are different - somehow - from the Shivans we've been fighting and sometimes using as debuffers since CoV went live, six years and fifteen issues ago. Notably absent, both from this description and the in-game models, is any indication that the new Shivans incorporate human remains.

How much of the original Shivan backstory is still canon?

Will there be any attempts to finally reconcile the events described therein - discovery of Shiva in 1989 and a UN-organized hero taskforce, variously known as "Operation Vishnu" and "the Preservers" - with the in-game description of the monsters (possibly left over from an earlier stage of CoV's development), which gives a date some 30-40 years earlier for Shiva's destruction ("the 1950s") and makes them the stuff of conspiracy theory? (I would think that the condition of Bloody Bay now and for the last 20 years makes that a rather open secret; but then again, time travel and the Malta Group are supposed to be similarly hush-hush, yet we have (tabloid?) newsies shouting about their existence on streetcorners.)

Do the Shivans still consist of alien protoplasm around a partial human skeleton, along with a meteor fragment? If not, are there any plausible theories in-game about why this has changed? (Out of game, is it at all connected to Chinese cultural issues regarding the depiction of human remains, and a desire to expand into that market?)

Having gone to all that trouble to take a "redundant" zone out of the game, I doubt the Devs are going to put it back in any time soon.

As a system becomes more complex, it becomes exponentially more difficult to fairly balance.

Maybe you want more options, but IMO this would simply result in a new set of cookie-cutter builds for each AT and (expanded) powerset, optimized for maximum DPS/resistance/recharge/all of the above as the "best" choices are quickly identified and codified.

People in my playgroup used to pass millions to their new alts. This was back when (1) a million was a big deal; (2) there was no global mail; and (3) you could only do it in chunks of 99k. Being the go-between in that transaction was something we did for each other. It required a certain amount of trust (see 1) and patience (see 3), but we did it. (Uphill, through the snow, both ways.)

We also have a lot of small, themed, near-vanity SGs. When someone makes a new alt they want to put in one of these SGs, someone with a character in that SG logs in, invites them, and logs out. (It's not uncommon for that character to be automatically handed the leader star as soon as they do log in; these are not exactly active SGs.) I personally do not believe it would be much more inconvenient to either leave a friend's alt in the SG specifically to do invites, or to have one's main invite a friend, promote them, have them invite the alt and then quit the SG.

If you don't know anyone in game that you trust to such a degree... that's unfortunate, and that's what I was referencing in my earlier post.

An SG made up entirely of one person's characters is not the Devs' design or intent. If you choose to make one anyway, you should be aware and accept that they are not likely to assist you by reducing the inconvenience of doing so.

I feel bad for people who don't have any friends.

Fantastic. You are, of course, willing to pay out-of-pocket so that Paragon can double their staff to give you all of this?

AE requires Dev action and attention to fix its problems.
That does not seem to be forthcoming.

Aside from the Confuse issues, as noted above, my experience as an SR scrapper was that massive autohit damage means all I get to do in the final encounter is die, over and over. On last night's attempt, it got to the point where I felt like I might as well just sit it out in the hospital.

As others have said, and I agree. AE desperately needs several problems addressed. (Not that they're likely to be, since it's now 7 issues past and this game's devs are all about the New Hotness, until it ceases to be that.)

I strongly suspect that things are the way they are now because it was more convenient, and/or the old way was much MUCH more inconvenient, to keep adding things.

(It depends on the degree of destruction. There's a chapter I really need to finish, about Overbrook - that spirit has continuity with the one before, but isn't entirely the same, which causes some issues with those expecting it to be just like before.

Zones as thoroughly smashed as Boomtown, Siren's Call and now Galaxy... anything built on those sites may go by the same name, but it will be something entirely new.)