Olantern
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Quote:In this case, I'm not disagreeing.Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
So why does it award things that would appeal to those people?
People who like to show off can show off to anyone who cares enough to click their info. Most people don't care enough to click your info, and they won't care if you're wearing the same glowy costume as everyone else who tagged along on a BAF. -
For those complaining about level 50 costumes (which I agree are a silly idea), remember that this content is not intended for costume mavens or story obsessers or original-story roleplayers.
Like the entire endgame system, it's intended for people think receiving randomly determined rewards and sitting around clicking buttons is somehow a test of skill, people who want to show off. This is a player market that this game has historically ignored. This is the attempt to capture it.
Now, why the devs think they can do so successfully when it still doesn't dominate gameplay (a good thing in my opinion), why they think adding it won't alienate the extremely touchy existing customer base, and, most troublingly to me, why they think this combative, ambition-driven kind of mentality is something that should be encouraged (in a leisure activity, no less!) at all are mysteries that I can't solve. But I can't really fault them from trying to grow the game's market, however wrongheaded I think the means of doing so may be.
Edit: Also, lots of nice things in this overview, too. The fact that we're getting an inter-issue addition is especially nice. -
I like both kinds of design. Regardless of whether it's one map or many, though, I do think that task forces and trials should feel "special," offering some kind of experience that you can't normally get elsewhere in the game.
I also think that things like the STF and LRSF, the ITF, the Incarnate Task Forces, and the i20 Task Forces are fairly good compromises between the two design styles, even if there's an occasional stumble here and there. -
Quote:Same.Originally Posted by Sapphic_Neko
Yea i did the same thing. Back when i started there was no button or anything you just clicked the "mission completed" text. Wasn't until later i was told you could exit
I was playing using the old Prima Guide (the bound one, before the binders came out), and it described the (old) Unyielding Stance power from Invulnerability, which rendered the user unable to move. I, however, started playing in i3, by which time Unyielding Stance had long been changed to allow the user to move. Still, I was leery of taking the power and put it off for a long time on my first character, an inv/fire tank.
So, my first character was a tanker with no mez protection until 44. I just assumed getting mezzed all the time was a part of every character's life. I carried a lot of break frees, tried to kill things fast, and got good at prioritizing targets. It was a pretty dumb way to play but great training. After that, every other AT and power combination has seemed easy by comparison. -
In addition to all the other ideas posted, one thing that's worked well for me on more than one character has been recoloring Fiery Aura a "dark" grey (using Bright Flames) or a "light" grey (using Dark Flames) to make it Steam/Soot Aura instead. The idea here is that the fire damage comes from superheated steam rather than actual fire. And particularly when using Bright Flames for the two "armor" powers, the flames spiraling upwards really do look close to wisps of steam.
I've also done the same thing with Energy Aura, though that looks a bit less like steam.
Honestly, though, like any other concept hook in the game, "steampunk" is a purely cosmetic thing. You can find a way to make anything fit.
Finally, don't forget that you might want to make use of the costume pack for ideas that aren't strictly "steampunk," whatever that term may mean to you. -
Quote:Back when I was making and trying to make CoH comics, I had some vague, conceptual plans for a one-off called Beyond That Doorway..., an homage to Marvel's What If ...? It was to have been "hosted" by Tina McIntyre, just as Marvel's series was "hosted" by the Watcher, and "... Statesman led Omega Team while Hero 1 led Alpha Team" was to be the story I produced. Never got around to it, though.Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
-An alternate timeline where Statesman lead Omega Team and Hero 1 was the one who stayed on Primal Earth.
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I remember a jeep trip from my adventurous youth (the year Return of the Jedi came out, in fact) in nearby Canyonlands National Park (Needles unit) that there's a rock that looks even more like him.
Presumably, it is hollow and contains his apartment used when he visits Earth for movie projects. -
TrueGentleman wins the thread, not only for getting the highest score, but also for providing a Cole Porter link.
This reminds me, having had to type "Shakespeare" a bunch of times on this thing, now I can understand how the man seemingly had so much trouble spelling his own name consistently.
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Neat. 23 of 30 correct.
Some thoughts:
Best point of the test: discovering the cleverest quote was, in fact, Shakespeare (from a pretty good play, too), not Batman, as I'd thought. As a Batman-loather, I would've been disappointed were it the other way around.
Wow, there was sure a lot of Titus Andronicus on there. In fact, I was surprised at how many obscure, rather than well-known, Shakespeare plays the creator used. Out of all the Shakespearean quotes, I only got about three or four right because I recognized them; the rest, I spotted by language.
Speaking of which, the fact that Shakespeare doesn't use many contractions, while the more naturalistic dialogue of Batman does, made it a lot easier.
Finally, needs more "'tis the pasture that lards the rother's sides." -
As an additional wrinkle for you, it looks to me like the real challenge (for a character of any power level) in either of your scenarios is the number of things going on at once. Unless a character is a tremendously fast speedster, a category normally limited to Synapse in CoH fiction, it's going to be difficult to solve all of the problems mentioned in either of your scenarios all at once, even for the very most powerful character.
For further wrinkles, consider that a gang/faction/what-have-you "causing trouble in the streets" means different things depending on the group involved. For instance, even though they appear at the same levels in the game, in a narrative structure, I'd think that if a group decides to destroy a neighborhood, the highly organized, focused Knives of Artemis or Council pose a much greater threat than an equivalent number of the crazily chaotic Carnival of Shadows or Freakshow.
For what it's worth, I consider the Freedom Phalanx and Arachnos inner circle members about equivalent in raw power to a high-level PC, with the Vindicators and second-string Arachnos types being closer to a character in the lower 40's or upper 30's. I'm not sure "raw power" is relevant for your purposes, though. And, of course, in a narrative structure, the raw power of, say, Manticore (a well-trained guy with some arrows) is on a different order from that of, say, Positron (a beyond-real-world genius with powers that affect the fundamental structure of matter). -
I broke down and laid out the money for this, since this is the Thor And Pals I remember from reading The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe as a kid in the '80's. Looking forward to the book's arrival.
Grey Pilgrim, I also commend the Marvel graphic novel The Raven Banner: a Tale of Asgard (1985) to your attention. It was illustrated by noted fantasy artist Charles Vess and, while ostensibly set in the same Asgard as the Thor comics, the characters and story stand alone. It's been a couple decades since I read it, but I remember it as having more or less the feel of your typical Norse saga. In a related point, I could see the Warriors Three fitting in pretty well in "The Tale of Thorstein Mansion-Might" or "Arrow-Odd" (both collected in Penguin's Seven Viking Romances). -
You are not alone. I'm convinced the vast majority of players aren't even aware that there is a story, while much of the remaining minority consists of roleplayers off doing their own thing. That's more or less fine with me.
I like the story as a general thing, but I don't sweat it. I don't expect it to be particularly brilliant, let alone perfect. The complaints I see about it just seem to me to be unfair, particularly since they come from the same contingent that has argued that "Nemesis is a terrible character because steam powered robots are unrealistic."
In a game where the characters fly around and shoot lasers out of their eyes for any reason, or no reason at all.
Yeah.
This ...
Quote:... also reminded me of two things. First, and for the umpteenth time, the devs are not story artists. This is not a book or a movie. The writing is there to support the gameplay, not the other way around. The devs got into this business (and, I'd wager, a lot of players got into the game) because they enjoyed using a joystick and a couple buttons to cause a plumber to run along straight lines and hop on enemies' heads to make rewards fly out of them, not because they wanted to tell a story, or even (primarily) to enable others to do so. Now, I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this, but it's something that doesn't get acknowledged enough.Originally Posted by Razia
And that is the excact reason, why it is so hard to write a story that actual makes sense for an MMO. People demanded powerset proliferation, we got that and now we complain about the story behind it? Great
That brings me to my second point. Normally, when I raise the argument that we're getting about as good a story as can be expected, someone counters that "[single player game X] had a brilliant story." That may be so, but I don't consider it realistic to expect the same of an MMO. In an MMO, unlike a single player game, a novel, or a film, the writer knows next to nothing about the protagonist.
It's much easier (I'd argue, essential, even) to tailor a story and a character to one another than to throw one creator's character into a prefabricated story. As E.M. Forester noted in Aspects of the Novel, character is the product of incident, and incident is the result of character. Put another way, it's easier to have a compelling story when you can do things like reveal halfway through that the dark knight the hero has been hunting down to avenge his father is actually the father himself. (Don't like my example? Think of any novel or movie you find very compelling, and imagine swapping out the protagonists for completely different characters. If the story is well-written, it probably doesn't make much sense unless you change the plot, too.)
Imagine trying to make this work in an MMO context, and you end up with something like the much-decried "your character has a connection with the thinly-veiled polemic of a transdimensional dictator he's never heard of because he has the power of the nebulous, cosmic thing the character wants" that's going on right now. Of course, this gets criticized as "hijacking the character," because it's a technique from media where the plot and the protagonist are controlled by the same creator ... the very same kinds of techniques that have been urged on the devs in the past to "make our characters feel like they matter." The writer can't win in such a situation.
As for arguments that the stories have gotten worse since the i0/i1 content, all I can do is scratch my head in puzzlement. With a couple of exceptions, as the recent War Witch interview noted, those were filler text, not things definite beginnings, middles, and ends. I think the real reasons we hear about how great content used to be are (1) nostalgia and (2) a preference on certain players' parts for certain kinds of enemies. For example, Crey and Malta seem to play to a lot of players' archetypal fears, so we see a lot of praise for stories about those factions, even ones that aren't really all that great in the abstract.
That's all, for now. -
Sam-
I've read a lot of your threads, not just this one, over the past several weeks. Based on what I've read, I think you're burned out. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to take a break from the games and the fora, taking some time to enjoy the anticipation of coming back, if nothing else. -
Perhaps if he were beaten up by a pony who is apparently empowered by something called a "cutie mark," Batman would finally learn some freakin' humility ...
You're right. This is an impossible scenario. -
Neato, Xenophage!
By the way, my advocacy of Nemesis Plot? (TM) should not be taken to suggest that I am an automaton of any kind. I am Sol Smeinder, a harmless pretzel magnate charged with protecting the timestream. -
Nemesis flavor next, please.
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Superhero.
I suspect a lot of those who've posted that they also have this sign were born in my year. I find this interesting, since fewer people were born in the United States in my year than in any other year since World War II (can't speak for birth rates in the rest of the world). Certainly, I haven't met many people born in my year since graduating from high school. Apparently, they're all here, playing a superhero MMO! -
My completely worthless predictions:
1) i21 will hit in either the first half of September or (more likely, in my view) early December. Based on years of experience, these are the times new issues are most likely to hit. It must have something to do with how the development cycle works, but I don't pretend to understand it.
2) i21 will have the same sorts of things that i20 contained- 2-4 new endgame slots unlocked, a couple of new endgame currencies, and 2 endgame trials. I think the trials have even been described already, though I don't recall the details.
3) i21 will contain either a new co-op task force or a task force and a strike force. If the devs take the second option, there's an even chance of the task force being completely new or a revision of an i0 task force.
4) Yes, it will be all about Praetoria/the Well. Expect all new story content to revolve around these two related storylines for at least another 24 months or until a Coming Storm/server shutdown event hits, whichever comes first.
Why do I make these predictions in this thread? Because you're unlikely to hear anything from the devs, so the most we can do is make educated (or even uneducated) guesses. Aside from all the points others have made, i21 is probably far enough along in development that no substantive changes will be made, but even with that caveat, the devs can't be absolutely sure what the issue will look like until fairly shortly before release. (And if development doesn't know, marketing doesn't, either.) -
Nice to see this again. Oddly, I was craving a Clockwork Pepsi right before scrolling down to see this thread.
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Quote:Based on my very limited sampling, this is definitely true for iXP. I ran three iterations of the BAF with a blaster, mostly fighting AV's and tagging runners, and made about 15% progress toward Judgement. Total.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
That's what I was thinking honestly. For example, handling the adds during the Nightstar/Siege fights might wind up being more rewarding.
I thought it was random too, and I still think that's likely, but that quote really has me curious.
The League leader then wanted to do a master run, which apparently has something to do with knocking out the reinforcements (I don't follow this stuff too closely this early in the release) and needed more control, so I switched to my plant/thorns dominator. He spent much of the trial helping a spines scrapper, an ice/ice blaster, and a couple of other control types wipe out the ambushes as they spawned. In the same three iterations that my blaster had run, he made 80-some percent of his Judgement bar (and went on to unlock it on a fourth run). Notably, a fair amount of the fighting this character did didn't involve dealing damage; instead, it was things like confusing the enemies, slowing them, or locking them down with non-damaging powers.
My scrapper, in a series of six to eight runs on Sunday, was between the two play styles. He mainly fought the AV's and escapees, as the blaster did, but he was tough enough to be able to take on the odd reinforcement straggler solo without dying. It took him about six to eight runs to unlock the same slot, which puts him between the blaster and the dominator in iXP.
The tables seem random. Well, to me, so far, not so much random as "senseless." I think I've succeeded on trials about 15 times, across various characters, and with two exceptions, the reward table has always been a choice of Uncommons. The other two were a Rare and a Common. For what it's worth, the dominator, who got the most iXP, is also the one who got the Rare table. -
This made me laugh-
Quote:If I ever play my quasi-Lovecraftian dominator from CoV beta, the Ghastly Priest (plant/psi), again, I am so doing this. Except his eldritch horror is named Fluffers, That Which Does Not Use The Litterbox.Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
- Sublime Razor, a Plant/Elec Dom, has her Plant powers colored blue-black to simulate the tentacles of her pet subterranean eldritch horror, Tickles. -
A couple of times now, I've recolored Fiery Aura the darkest possible grey in the "Bright Flames" version. This gives a pretty good approximation of steam. This works really, really well. Presumably, the enemies are getting scalded by the superheated steam rather than directly burned by fire. As an outgrowth, I've redone Burn as Steam Bath and Soot Patch (Bright and Dark Flames in grey, respectively). The first character on whom I did this is notable because, frequently, when I fire off his heal, I shout, "Healing Steam!" here at my desk. It's this sort of thing that keeps me away from voice chat.
The Lava setting for Earth powers has a lot of potential. My swamp-themed earth/earth dominator has it set to brown rock and green "magma," which makes for a nice mud-and-tainted-water look. The green and brown also give a great "swamp gas" look to Mud Pots and Volcanic Gases.
Stenchor, my skunk-like dp/rad corruptor, has his Radiation Emission recolored to a yellow-orangish Dark Radiation. It looks just like the Stink Waves emitted by, say, Pigpen in the cartoons.
I recently saw a fire/dark scrapper with the Dark Armor recolored to look like flames. It looked really good!
A while back, I made a plant/thorns dominator who's a plant faerie with different seasonal outfits. His Plant powers always look the same (a pretty standard dark green), but his Thorns are green and brown with his spring/summer outfit, red-brown for his fall one, and replaced with icy white Crystal Spines for his winter one.
And, to bring this up to date, I unlocked Judgement on the dominator the other night. Since none of the options really fit the themes of plants or thorns, I considered the spiky Cyronic, but it looked gross when recolored. Instead, I went with Pyronic and played up the "faerie" angle. The fall outfit has more or less ordinary flames, but the spring/summer one has pale yellow ones meant to suggest a will o' the wisp, and the winter one has blue-white flames that I find oddly appealing. -
Quote:This seems to be the direction the devs are taking. You have to think of the endgame system as a completely separate game, one designed to appeal to people who thrive on getting special loot to complete special encounters to get special loot to complete special encounters ... etc. It's very different from the regular system and is meant to capture a different player market. The "optional" nature of the content means that you don't have to do endgame trials if you're not interested in the endgame system, not that you don't need the rewards from that system to complete the trials effectively. Having run a few now, it seems pretty obvious to me that the trials were designed with the application of their own rewards in mind.Originally Posted by UberGuy
For those of you considering Incarnate stuff "optional," I don't think that means what it sounds like you think it means. I don't think there's any promise on the table that you aren't going to need some existing Incarnate progress to be useful (if granted access at all) for future Incarnate content. It's "optional" in the sense that other, non-Incarnate content exists and will continue to be created, but I don't think it's safe to assume it will be optional internal to the Incarnate content itself.
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As I recall, the Praetorian Duray clone is not an AV, either, just a boss.
For you story people, the Sutter TF is definitely Praetorian-related. The story pretty much boils down to, "We're at war with Praetoria, so fight off some of their attacks," but "simple" doesn't necessarily mean "bad." Personally, I found it refreshing.
The Kal SF deals with the Flames of Prometheus, from the CoH comic. Since Prometheus has been grandfathered into the endgame story (you can talk to the pompous windbag in Ouroboros), it could be said to be incarnate-related. Plus, the "temporary" (it lasts until you get rid of it) power you get from completing it can be converted into a Notice of the Well once you hit 50.
Other things I like (minor spoilers)-
Sutter:
- Making fun of Duray's hats.
- Trying to figure out who Harbinger is supposed to be the counterpart of.
- On a character with confusion powers, causing the ghouls to blow each other up.
- The fact that Paragon City authorities decide to hide the populace in the sewers. So THAT's why the sewer system is so elaborate.
Kal:
- It features lots of Blade Princes, one of my favorite enemies, in the first mission. Notably, they are all bosses rather than EB's.
- Finding out a lot more about Odysseus, another favorite character of mine.
- That the ranks of the three AV-class enemies in one mission are "Hero," "Rogue," and "Vigilante."
- Speculating on who the heck this Exorcist guy is. Best answer wins a prize.
- Being jealous of all the weird stuff in Odysseus's warehouse.
- Pointing out that sticking your fists inside the severed limbs of a god is, to use an internetism, pretty hardcore.
- A pie joke, which everyone loves. -
Quote:"Fun?" Most of what I see are the usual rants and whining.Originally Posted by Dollhouse
Lots of great stuff already cited in this fun thread!
And another of my favorite pieces of writing, though it may be accidental, is Black Scorpion's answering his phone with "FEAR ME!" I'm going to make that the message on my answering machine, in fact.