Ravenswing

There is an irritating tendency for heroic characters to be drowning in angst. If done well, this can be good.

Unfortunately, the majority of characters like this tend to be nasty little Mary Sue, cliche-ridden messes.

Well, we're less than a month away from Going Rogue coming out and we've had a bit more info on Praetoria City and its inhabitants. I'm happy to set this one free.

It's set prior to any actual in-game activities, after Windows of the Soul, but does set up some of the planned storyline for Gunny's progress from Praetoria to Paragon City.

Pain and Gain

FYI - link seems to be working again.

Fourteen Die in Drug Battle
Headline dated 2nd July 2010, appearing on page three of the Paragon Times

Fourteen people are dead and more than two dozen injured after violence errupted in a Mexican village near the US border in the late evening of June 30th. Police have kept the area isolated, citing the danger of still active gunmen and potential booby traps as an excuse for supressing knowledge of the massacre until this morning. After the area was finally declared clear by SWAT teams, the police discovered one of the largest hauls of cocaine to be uncovered so far this year.

Further investigation discovered thirty young women in a small sub-basement of one the villas in the village. It is believed that, along with being a major drug trafficing hub, the village may have acted as a stop off along a human trafficing route shipping women into the United States for distribution to prostitution rings in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Paragon City, and New York.

What caused the gun battle which preciptated the end of this town's illegal operations remains unclear.

Rather liking the winners of the artwork contest they did recently, I thought I'd use them for a short series.

Loyalist
Reistance


(My DA page in case the direct links don't work for you.)

The poster came out better than I thought it would from the preview. It's actually mapped onto a plane primitive and mounted over the wall. The grafetti was GIMPed directly onto the brickwork with the white base airbrushed in. Not made easy by the wall texture being in two parts.

I hope you like the results of the faffage.

Out of interest, aside from FPS games, can anyone give me an example of this kind of instanced 'mission' being implemented?

I mean, WoW hasn't done it, and WoW is a far more PvP-centric game.

Does Guild Wars do it?

This kind of suggestion, not surprisingly, comes up fairly often. There are two problems with it.

Farming. With that reward structure, you don't get a PvP task force, you get two teams running it to farm merits. 50 merits for a win? Five of these and you can buy anything you like! You'd destroy the economy, and I mean destroy it. 50 merits every 90 minutes? Even the losers get about as much as you'd normally expect (25 vs 29 expected).

I'm sure you'd say that the bonus is merited since there's PvP involved, but that's simply not true. There's no great threat in being allowed to win over and over again to gain merits. Especially since you're gaining a load of merits for losing too.

Drop those levels to a normal level, however, and you have the issue of coordination. Someone's mentioned disperate team sizes, but if you go for locking it at a minimum of 6 per side, you now need to have 12 players all wanting to do this at the same time. Easy if the rewards are so massively peruasive (read 'abusive'), not so easy when they aren't.

Likely, an unfarmable version of this would see relatively little use without some form of sophisticated team matching system (akin to the dungeon matching system in WoW). That's a tremendous amount of effort to go to for something that won't see much use.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be worth it, and the technology could be of benefit across the game, but I can't see it happening soon, and don't go expecting the reward levels you've proposed because if I can see how to use this to farm merits, anyone can.

Don't post stuff on a public board you don't wish to be read.

Seriously, your stuff wasn't terrible, but could live with improvement. Everyone's writing could do with improvement, up to and including published authors. It's a shame that you don't seem to want to improve.

What you post here is what people are going to think of you if they haven't met you. Misspelling a word which is on display in the game, constantly, gives the impression that you don't care. If you don't care that much, why bother?

Sides of the Coin

Nitoichi and Gunwitch. Interdimensional twins, sort of.

I got one, but to an old email address I haven't used in years. I basically assumed it was fake.

1. My main DP is kept on hold for GR, but I have played it, yes.

2. See http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=220418

The stories in that thread are based on the characterisation of that GR character. Not particularly Gun Kata, more applied high-technology to weapons design. You make of the animation what you wish.

Oh, the timescales are horrendous, but that's not really the issue.

I think 'illegal immigration' implies that you didn't talk to the DoHS people on the way in. So, Superman was an illegal immigrant, but someone arriving at the airport and then asking to claim asylum isn't.

Any lawyers out there? I assume you're playing red side? Good.

Now then, I've been digging around in American legal stuff on Wikipedia in order to try to work out what the status of a Praetorian arriving on Primal-Earth might be, and it looked kind of grim so I thought I'd prod some of you guys on the other side of the Pond and see what you thought.

I get the impression that the Resistance is feeding people into Paragon via some sort of Underground Railroad type operation and that the US autorities don't know about some or all of them entering the country. This would make them illegal immigrants.

Logically, they should have grounds for asylum, being as they can have Stateman and most of the Freedom Phalanx pop down and testify that Praetoria is a repressive regime.

However, and here's the Catch 22, illegal entry into the US appears to bar you from successfully applying for asylum.

* Am I right? (Legal-wise.)
* Is this something you think would have to be tweaked, or do you figure that there's enough precident with kheldians and such that the law would have been changed to handle 'illegally resident aliens' or some official sounding designation?

Thanks in advance for the replies.

Just for the record, that's as far as the progression will go for now. There may be some stories set in Praetoria to follow, but this last tale starts to push her into the mainstream Unionverse so we'll see how a few things pan out before I go further.